A vignette

I work at a public secondary school here in New Orleans that is almost entirely black. I help out in an 8th grade English class, working one-on-one or just generically helping kids with questions.

I went in today and the kids were just so happy and in that moment it didn't matter that I had missed out on the victory party with the local staff because these 8th grade kids are going to grow up in an America that has closed Guantánamo and maybe they will see that they (and me and all of us) are the ones to do what needs doing.

(They asked me if I voted & who I voted for & I showed them my bag with an Obama sticker and Obama buttons and they all cheered. Except for the two Vietnamese kids. If we end up with a Republican congressman he will be Vietnamese.)

A post a day keeps the doctor away?

Maybe?

Anyhow, I spent most of today at the Obama office making calls.

Yes we can!

If the polls in your state have not closed, and you have not voted, please vote. That's what makes democracy work. If you are in line before the polls close, you will be able to vote. Do not leave without voting. Consider programming an election protection number into your phone.

Yes, I know this should have been last night's post.

Anyhow, I'm off to the land of election coverage. Haven't been paying attention to the news all day . . . Actually I think Morning Edition this morning was my only news exposure since Sunday. I'm so ready for this thing to be over . . .

This one's just about me

and contains absolutely no knitting content whatsoever.

. . . So last night I overheard my roommate talking to one of her friends over, like, video chat or something that she wanted to transfer from Tulane to Indiana, because she doesn't like that the party scene is too bar-centered and not enough party-based. Or something.

And here's me, thinking about transferring either home, which has myriad disadvantages but is where one of my best friends going to school and would be in-state public school tuition, or else to Santa Cruz because I am a grown-up now and can start thinking about decisions that will affect my entire future, and there is this boy in Santa Cruz.

I guess it's that I've always been a little emotionally fragile, and don't make new friends (and I mean true forever friends, not oh-hey-how's-it-going-I-don't-see-you-enough friends) very easily, and basically I'm such a mess right now and I know that you're not supposed to make this sort of decision lightly, and I do love New Orleans and I do have some friends, but the thing is the bar scene is also hurting me--almost every friend I've made here drinks enough that I don't bother hanging out with them, and I'm just such a fucking mess. And if I don't get out of bed I might be dropped from Italian but I can't make myself care. Also I can't get a psychiatrist appointment to save my life because apparently everyone here is as fucked up as me.

What I've been knitting . . . the yarn, by the way, is an alpaca/linen/silk blend. It is the best. Thing. Ever. For reals.

And now I must away.

Halloween drive-by post

I would have liked to make this longer but, well, it's NaBloPoMo and I'm spending the afternoon in the Obama office and the night in Baton Rouge so I really don't have time to linger. Just a little Halloween teaser:



I was supposed to be the fairy of Hope and Change, but it's kind of hard to tell.



But I did end the night with a lot of beads . . .



As well as a cute little kitty cat!

If you can correctly guess anything about my Halloween, you win . . . well, my lasting admiration. Or something. If you want to see a full post of what I did, with a few pictures by me & not of me, say that in the comments too!

Can I post every day? Do I want to?

OK, first off, I just realized that I was really stupid to not realize that the reply-to for my comment e-mails would go to the commenter. So it's totally possible for me to have little conversations with my readers and actually, you know, make friends. So if you want to make friends, and not just be absorbed by my wit, please comment! For reals. Because making friends is totally awesome.

Also, in a fit of crazy, I have signed up for NaBloPoMo. What I'm going to try to do is build up a "cushion" of posts and set them to post in the future. So this is like an experiment post, to see if I know how to get that feature to work.

Also, expect my posts to become more pithy in future. If you ask me a question in the comments about my projects/etc, there is a good probability the answer will turn into a post.

Anyhow, I need to get back to my homework, so this post will not be a long one.



You all may remember my Obama t-shirt--it's been a pretty frequent subject of my blog posts. Well, it was kind of dying. As I posted on its Ravelry description:

10/27: Oh, my god. Absolutely everything about this sweater is wrong. Everything. I might salvage the intarsia and make a “HOPE” cowl, or something, but … yeah. This is not going to be a sweater. Cockiness is not a good thing in garment-making, apparently. Who know? :P

So I have decided to remove the intarsia from the sweater back, and make a cowl. Since I took that picture, with its odd gaping maw, I have completely removed the top of the sweater back from the intarsia's bottom, and done an I-cord bind-off in the dark blue yarn. I plan to make something resembling a wearable cowl out of this thing on Friday, and wear it for the remainder of my phonebanking shifts.

Speaking of intarisa, look at this close-up:



Do you see the loose stitches at the "corners" of the letters? (They didn't show up any better in any of the pictures I got taken before sunset; you can see bigger versions if you click through to Flickr.) And do you see how there are a lot more in the "P", and relatively few in the "O"? Those stitches generally are right near a tail of yarn.

And as you can see, I've woven in most of the ends on the "O" . . .



It's like a puzzle, figuring out where all those fiddly little ends should go.

Some more knitting

Unfortunately, I did not think to take pictures before sunset, so I won't have any pictures in this post. However, if there is anything I mention you'd specifically like to see a picture of, I'll totally take one tomorrow if I have time.

Speaking of responses to comments, I'm thinking about migrating my blog over to a platform like Wordpress where instead of a "web identity" an e-mail address is required--I really like it when people respond to my comments on their blogs, but with this setup, I can't just reply to the comment e-mails and start having a conversation, and I feel a little awkward commenting on someone else's blog just to have a little conversation about finishing socks, or whatever. I generally do click through to commenters' blogs, I don't always have anything to say about their more recent posts, especially if (say) they've posted twice in the past two weeks and their posts are about church and school. I'm such a lurker . . .

Speaking of finishing socks, though, that purple pair I posted about a while ago is 100% finished, ends woven in, gone through the wash. I think they shrank up a bit in the wash, but unfortunately they still bunch up pretty severely in my silver pumps. :( I'm definitely bringing them along next time I go shoe shopping, so I can get something really nice to show them off with. (The only shoes they fit under now are brown ballet flats of an overly similar value, and sneakers, which defeats the purpose and in this climate could possibly lead to overheating. Also it'll munch up the heels. I don't really like the short-row heels; it might be due to the fact that they don't really fit so well, but the corner migrates all over the place. I think I may do a flap heel next time around. Also, the toe is really hard to modify--it was obvious maybe an inch from the toe that the circumference would be a problem, but I had already had had to restart the toes twice. So I think next time I do toe-ups I will not use this pattern.

A break from knitting:



My new favorite singer, Time Minchin--I actually got linked to one of his songs from an atheist blog I frequent last night. And, well, he is my new favorite. I really like this song, a lot--it reminds me of this guy. We talked on Skype last night, and we both really like this song. We have an on-again-off-again romantic entanglement, and, well, if we lived in the same state we'd be dating but as it is we just have long-distance drama. But we totally talk about what if we hadn't met and what if we'd met under different circumstances and in some ways we work but in others we don't and we're eighteen and we live thousands of miles apart, we don't talk about what could make a future. for all sorts of reasons. I was going to send him a warshrag (in coordinating colors to one I've been using) for his birthday in September, but then we had some weirdness and I never sent it. But now we are waxing more positive, and I have a great desire to send him the thing. (He wants to be a farmer when he grows up. I want to convince him to grow sheep on it. I could make value-added products of the wool.)

As far as the Obama shirt--it's not going to fit well, which I thought was due to the gauge, but I suspect I may have made a mistake in the shaping somewhere. So I'm just going to have to make the front identical to the back. I'm well into the armscyes for the back--I had to buy more yarn, and it took me a bit to get to the store. I suppose I could have started the front last night--I did have the yarn for that--but instead I did some weaving-in of ends and worked a few inches on Versatility--I'm going to have to go to the other LYS to get the extra yarn I had them set aside for me in case I'll need it. Which I will. Because they don't accept returns of wound yarn . . .

I'm really worried about these set-in sleeves, though. Wishing I'd gone with a raglan pattern. But it's intarsia, I've got to do it in pieces, and a raglan in pieces could still have serious shoulder alignment problems. Goddammit. I should have paid better attention. Used row counters. Taken notes. Printed out the pattern. But no, I was in too much of a hurry . . .

Also I'm not sure I'll be able to block it before election day--I ended up just sticking a wool wash in a recent Knit Picks order (needle tips to replace ones I sat on, yarn for two pairs of socks and a sweater, and an EZ book because books are on sale in the month of October.

. . . A lot of my friends here don't hesitate to drop a couple hundred bucks on tickets for concerts. I haven't been to a non-free show yet, and I rarely eat off-meal plan, so my job supports my knitting. Good stuff, good stuff . . .