Quick Thursday update

I almost wrote "Wednesday" up there before I realized what day it was. Yesterday was a Puerto Rican holiday so unexpectedly I did not have to work. I read some papers and then spent the rest of the day playing with yarn. I plied some more lovelies and my wheel is all cleared off and ready for more fresh spinning but I'm not sure what to do next.

Knitting has caught my attention again anyway, so I pulled out the yarn I'm planning to use in my next project. I was going to do either a Stripe Study Shawl or a Celadon Shawl with this gray gradient and the glorious Madtosh Twist in Nassau. The more I think about it, the more likely I am to just take a stab at Quaker Lines using this instead, since it's a pattern I already own, but perhaps I should buy Celadon. We'll see what I feel like when the moment comes. I started hand winding the little mini skeins in the gradient kit and then I gave the madtosh twist a wash. It was already in a ball so that was probably a mistake, doing it without reskeining. I've left it in front of a fan and I hope it'll be recoverable and dry in a day or two. I also swatched for Myliu Lino which is what I'm turning my silver dk cotton into soon, but I think I should probably wash it before I measure the gauge, so it's waiting for that.

I'm deep into a slew of novels. I wanted to be a bit careful after my holiday and not lose myself for a week like I sometimes do. Before the family arrived for their vacation with me, I read a bunch of books, most notably finishing The Silent Tower, the first in one of Barbara Hambly's trilogies. Fortunately I was careful not to get into the next two otherwise I probably wouldn't have talked to the family at all while they were here! I did read The Last One, a short novel by Alexandra Oliva that my sister brought with her. It's a good read, and an interesting and human take on the end-of-the-world/epidemic sort of story; I liked it far more than I did Stephen King's the Stand, for example. But since then I've been sort of grazing through books. I re-read Chalice by Robin McKinley in an evening (it's a delight); picked up Tangled Up In Blue by Joan Vinge that I half read in late November and went through another chunk of it before putting it down again; read Terry Pratchett's Witches Abroad and then started Lords and Ladies and promptly put it down to try Robin McKinley's Pegasus; then had to put that down before I got too lost in the interesting story. I finally seem to have settled on Pratchett's The Last Continent so maybe I'll finish that, but this morning I found the two other books in the Silent Tower trilogy and they are calling to me.

The problem is if I read too many books I stop paying attention to the real world and live only on whatever food I can scrounge from the fridge and don't go to work. so I have to balance things carefully.

I've made excellent progress on my current paper. All I need now is to churn through some IDL programming to get some numbers out of my data--particularly, absorption depth. this, theoretically, isn't too hard, but I have to sit down and really tune into it to get the program working because IDL has a tendency to stop running and quit if you walk away from it. Maybe I'll piece together a script to get me as far as I normally get before I get distracted, so I can run that all in one go whenever it quits and I don't have to start over from scratch. Yes, that's a good plan.

Oh and I spontaneously bought some seeds. I guess I'll take a stab at a windowbox of catnip, rosemary, and lemon balm again, though my perennial Thumb Of Doom is notorious in the plant underworld.

Spinnin'

I had a lovely vacation with my family recently and then I promptly had to lock myself in a room for four days and be by myself. with cats. and yarn.

As a result, spinning happened. Lots of it.

okay. it doesn't look like a lot. but it was. I do love me some spinning