hI haven’t posted much recently because very little that’s been happening in my life has been good news. For one thing, I rear ended someone with my car two weeks back, and I’m only just now getting my car back this week (I hope). That’s depressing enough, but then I got a message from my insurance company letting me know that the other people in the car were injured and are now represented by attorney. If they’re really injured, fine, but they were the first to leave the scene and they were the ones to tell me not to call the cops. I try to think positive things about other people, but the entire situation feels off, like they’re trying to pull a fast one. It has me very worn down and out of sorts.

There were bright spots along the way, though. After fighting with Knitty’s Yosemite for far too long (my original attempt came out three sizes too big), I finally finished it this morning. Finding the right buttons was tricky, but I found some orange ones that seemed to work. I’ll try to get photographic evidence that this one, at least, actually fits me. (It may be tricky to get the color accuracy right, since it’s a very vibrant yellowy orange.) I ended up following the cast on instructions for the XS size, but substituting the average of the Small and Medium lengths. That’s because by measurements in the pattern alone, I should be a Medium, and by my gauge swatch, I was off in width, but not in height.

Now that Yosemite is complete, and the replacement needle for Maude has arrived (it was nibbled on by small kittens), it’s back to Maude I go. I had finished the lace bodice already, so today I started in on the ribbing that makes up the bulk of the piece. On size US 2 needles (2.75mm). I’ll be at this for a little while, I think. At least it’ll be good practice for Morrigan, which I set aside for some summer knitting.

Next on my list (for the summer at least) is a tank top (probably White Lie’s Shapely Tank/Tee or Deborah Newton’s Confectionary Tank). I may give in and add sleeves though. I also went ahead and got some yarn and the pattern to make Barbara Gregory’s Delft Tiles Tee (Elann’s Coto Canapone! Huzzah for hemp!). And as if that still weren’t enough, I even bought some yarn to make either Melissa Burt’s Arbor or Knitting Pure and Simple’s Neck Down V-Neck Tshirt.

*phew* That was a lot of hyperlinking.

For someone that can barely wear wool, this is the perfect season to make (and wear!) a slew of summer weight delights.

I’m still reeling from the hit I took to my credit card this past weekend. True, I’d been carefully stocking away money for a while now, and it helped that the economic stimulus payment showed up on time, but I’m still not accustomed to spending so much in such a short period of time.

First things first, my current computer is inches away from biting the dust. It’s not its fault. The crappy Nforce 3 chipset on board has been wrecking havoc with things from day one. Let me list the ways…

1. I should have realized what I was in for when I wasted the first two weeks of its life getting the stupid thing to boot reliably.
2. Then the onboard network card started flaking out on me (more Nforce), to the point where it actually froze up every few days, occasionally taking my entire machine with it. (I may be one of the few people outside of the corporate world to own a PCI express network card because of that!)
3. After that, the onboard USB headers started flaking out, occasionally keeping the machine from booting if anything was plugged into them.
4. Then the video card began to have trouble remembering whether or not I was using the DVI output or the VGA output. Every time the DVI stopped working, I’d switch to the VGA only to have that stop working within a few days and be forced to switch back
5. And then, just a month ago, the computer decided that to stop me at every boot to let me know that the failsafe defaults were loaded into the BIOS, forcing me to change the settings (which didn’t stay set after another reboot) or press F1 to continue. Yes, I’m sure this last one is just the BIOS battery going, but I’m sick to death of this stupid machine already.

*sigh*

So, my current machine, which was very nice when I put it together, is crap. And this past weekend, my bank account flush with anticipation, I splurged on all new parts for a new machine. And I do mean all new parts. I don’t trust anything that’s in my old machine. It’s cursed, I tell you, CURSED!

So, as of yesterday, I’m now in possession of a new case (Cooler Master Centurion 5, oldie but a goodie), a new power supply (Antec, of course), a new motherboard (a recent Gigabyte model with an X48 northbridge), a new processor (Intel Core Duo e8400, a 3Ghz chip with the new 45nm, more power efficient), a new heatsink (one of them crazy Zalman monstrosities), some new memory, and a new dvd burner. All I’m missing is a hard drive and I’m ready to go. I’m waiting to see if there’s any good sales for memorial day before I buy anything online. Hard drives are one of those things that have better sales in stores most days, even if they otherwise cost more.

I was in Best Buy on Saturday with Isaac because he was in the mood to buy a new computer case (the one I had provided him with was too narrow to accommodate the newer and crazier heatsinks). I, of course, hit the video game section and was picking out a few games when one of the salespeople came over to ask if there was anything he could help me with. Completely out of the blue, I jokingly ask if he has any Wii consoles in stock. To my surprise, in a low voice, he tells me that they’re getting a shipment in the very next day.

Isaac and I discuss it, and I decide it’s worth a try. So I get up earlier than usual for a Sunday, about an hour before I’d normally leave my house to go to church, and I drive to the Best Buy, arriving about 20 minutes before they open. There are about 4 or 5 cars sitting in the parking lot, and as I walk up to the door to sit down and wait, one of the guys standing by his car calls out and asks me if I’m there for a Wii. When I said yes, he told me (and I kid you not), to ring a buzzer by the boarded up front door and ask the salesperson that shows up for a voucher. It’s all very hush-hush. Well, the guy comes to the door and hands me a slip of paper with a really big number 8 written across the top, and he tells me that I have until 11:30 (a half hour after opening) to turn it in for a Wii. When the store finally opens, there’s this chain of people, all tightly clenching their vouchers, moving straight to the back of the store and the video game section. The saleswoman back there starts bringing them out one by one and reading out the numbers and before you know it, I’m in line with a Wii and a copy of Smash Bros.

It’s surreal to realize that even over a year after the Wii’s release, it’s still this hard to find them in stores.

If anyone wants to give me a copy of Mario Kart, please send it my way. I’m a little tapped out right now!

Double the photos, double the fun! Without even meaning to, I’ve managed to post two pictures for every project in this post. Go me!

First, a small status update.

I finally finished my Herringbone Gloves, thanks to a week long computer conference in a very, very warm auditorium, and I’ve started work on a t-shirt pattern, Yosemite from Knitty. I even managed to join the last few squares from Cathy’s Baby Blanket and add a border, but I still haven’t woven in all the ends. I have to sew them in, you see, because the blanket is cotton and cotton yarn likes to pull itself loose and try to escape. Blah.

Here’s one of the gloves, front and back:

And…here’s the baby blanket so far, with a closeup of the border as seen from the back of said blanket. Please note the ends sticking out every which way. These will be fixed soon, I hope.

Now, for the rest.

In other news, I’ve spent a busy two weeks test knitting and test crocheting a few patterns. There’s a group called The Testing Pool on Ravelry that is full of people like myself that think we’re up for the challenge of following potentially buggy patterns. Much like computer code, both knitting and crochet patterns tend to come in cryptic forms, full of abbreviations (like sts) and acronyms (like CO, BO, ktbl and many others) and all sorts of special instructions that take a few readings to understand (my favorite show stopper is “reverse all shapings”). The original consideration was almost certainly to conserve space and save paper when published (useful, I’m sure), but it makes it hard for designers to catch errors in their “code.”

In the past two weeks, I’ve made two hats (both crocheted), half of one scarf thing (still in progress), and one lonely little mitten. Isn’t it a cutie? The pattern is called Baske, and you can buy it on Ravelry.

I’ll post pictures of the rest once the respective patterns have been published. I haven’t checked yet this week to see if they have, and I’m planning to do one more run through on one of the patterns, just to be sure.

Now, in case you’re wondering, I didn’t get paid for any of this, but I did get free copies of the patterns each time. (And sometimes, the pattern is going to be free anyhow, so your payment is getting first crack at it before everyone else.) Getting the free pattern was nice, but I pretty much just got a kick out of testing my ability to proofread a different sort of code. After all, I’m more accustomed to following code of a different sort, the kind you compile and run on your computer.

The weather hasn’t decided what it wants to do just yet, and I wish it would hurry up and make up its mind. Just last friday, it hit 78 degrees around here, right before plummeting back into the 50’s. The weather’s been playing similar tricks all this month. No wonder so many people are getting sick. Personally, my allergies have been going crazy. Yesterday, I felt like death warmed over, and it’s been much the same today. At least it’s not the flu. Again.

I’m still at work on my Herringbone gloves, but I’m much closer to completion (only three fingers to go on the second glove). The procrastination bug hit hard now that it’s too warm to actually wear them until next winter, so I’ve been casting on for other projects in between my previously regular nightly sessions. In fact, I even went so far as to make my second pair of the Mahayana Flying Gloves (also on Ravelry). I don’t think I posted my first pair either, so here they both are, for ease of comparison. First, let me introduce you to the pair I made out of an Alpaca/Wool blend, itchy as all get out and completely unwearable against my (regrettably) tender skin:

My second pair, made out of some mystery yarn (a kind of recycled silk, I believe), was completed just two weeks ago. It’s not the softest thing I own, but very wearable and surprisingly warm.

In other news, I’ve been making steady progress on the baby blanket for Cathy’s baby. After some careful thought, I’ve decided on using a single crochet stitch to join the squares together. It’s not invisible on both sides, but then again, neither is the mattress stitch. I decided against using the mattress stitch because I didn’t want an actual seam. I haven’t decided yet whether or not to do the single crochet stitch on both sides or only one.

Yes, there are a lot of loose ends to weave in already, and since it’s cotton, I’ll be stopping at Jo-Ann’s later on to get some matching sewing thread to tack them down. (If you have ever tried weaving in ends with cotton yarn, I’m sure you’ve noticed that it loves to wiggle free. Best to weave it in and use a little bit of whipstitching to keep those ends from making a break for it.) As always, you can track my progress on Ravelry.

I have two projects lined up for my mother, but just to keep on the safe side, I’ll reserve any further comments on those just yet. She does occasionally read this site, you know.

Last week was fun. I got my car back, finally. The total bill was somewhere around $4700. Thank you, Erie Insurance, for paying the bill! Unfortunately, I had to pay $500 of it, not $250 since it was designated as a collision. I mean, yeah, I collided with a boxspring, but I was hoping to get it filed under an Act of God, like it would be if I had hit a deer. I’ll have to wait and see if my rates go up. The actual police report listed the accident as Debris in Road. After I looked it up later, I found it listed under Non Driver Error. Of course, my rates probably will go up anyway. If nothing else, Erie Insurance now has new reasons to fear that Maryland drivers are potentially dropping boxsprings and mattresses all over the place. I wonder if they track boxspring and mattress incidents separately, or if they lump them together with bed frames and trundle beds?

My tax rebate came at a good time. I was able to pay the $500 for the car, pay money to both my parents (parental loans, you know how it goes), and still have a little left over for yarn.

Such as my newly acquired Knit Picks Shine Worsted in a lovely shade of Sunflower (19 skeins, destined for a tee with a lacey flower motif?):

Or my newly acquired Suss Cotton (6 skeins of each, enough for three t-shirts!):

I finished one half of my Herringbone Gloves (Ravelry Link Warning) and sewed in all the ends. I can’t start the second one until I find out how the first glove is going to fit after blocking. I was afraid that the Alpaca would stretch horribly out of shape, so I knit it very tight. Now I can’t get it to stretch fast enough to fit properly! It was a little tight right after making it, and the fingers weren’t quiiiite long enough right after I cast off on the last finger. They itch a teeny bit, but nothing that would stop me from wearing them. I’ll abuse them some more, see if they’ll fit better, and start glove two. I can always redo the fingers (the only tight part of the glove, yes my fingers are chubby) with size 4’s if absolutely necessary. Just snip, snip, snip across the top.

I also knit one more row on Morrigan (Yes, only one, but I swear the pattern is making more sense now! There’s less counting necessary now that I have a few rows to look at, and I’m actually starting to remember what most of the symbols are.).

You can totally tell I’m almost done, right? Yes, that’s the first sleeve. I haven’t even looked at the instructions for the body yet. Many post-its will be sacrificed for this endeavor. As will most of my remaining eyesight. No, I don’t know why the knitter on the book cover isn’t wearing any clothes. The book is awesome, by the way. I might not have an actual allergy to woolly things, but my sensitivity is high enough that it’s almost the same thing. Bacardi is on my list for later…

After fighting it with Morrigan for a bit, I churned out two squares for a baby blanket, knit a few inches on the Alchemist’s Jacket, got bored, and went off to play my Nintendo DS.

If you haven’t already and you own a DS, look for Professor Layton and the Curious Village. My friend Isaac bought it for me. (Thanks Isaac! It’s awesome! And cute! Also clever!) It’s a mystery style game in which the character must find and solve “puzzles” that different characters in the game use to try and stump you. If you ever bought those puzzle books as a kid, the ones where they show you a diagram and ask you to use it to answer a question (usually a trick question or a logic problem), or if you bought table top 3D logic puzzles like Rush Hour or one of those Soma cubes, you will probably enjoy this game. There are other types, too, and even after you beat the game, you can download a weekly puzzle from Nintendo using the wireless capabilities in the DS. Even better, after you beat the game, an option appears for entering a code from the sequel. More puzzles please! I, uh, beat it rather quickly at 12 hours (why yes, I do love puzzles), and I beat every puzzle in the game except two, but that was only because I missed finding them (characters have more than one puzzle to give you and get new ones over the course of the game, and some puzzles are hidden in each screen). I went back later and beat those two so that the only puzzles I have left to solve are the bonus puzzles that you get for completing certain objectives in the game. After that, well, uh, I guess I’ll just need to wait for the sequel and download my weekly puzzles.

In a fit of insanity, I cast on for Morrigan today, from No Sheep For You. Last week, I cast on for The Alchemist’s Jacket, by Alchemy Yarns. And I’m working on a pair of Herringbone Gloves. Yes, that last pattern was in Japanese. Oh, and there’s a mistake in one of the charts, just so you know.

Morrigan is a cotton aran style sweater, knit with Rowan’s Calmer. I picked up the yarn while I was at Stitches East last year. I’m using Mission Falls 1824 Cotton for the Alchemist’s Jacket pattern, and Elann.com’s Peruvian Pure Alpaca Fina for the gloves. With the exception of Morrigan, none of the other knitting I’ve been doing lately has used the yarn called for in the pattern. No pictures of Morrigan or the Alchemist’s Jacket yet, but here’s a shot of where I am on the right glove of the Herringbone Gloves:

Since I took this picture, I managed to finish the pinkie and the ring finger. We are now onto the middle finger. I’ve been knitting them as tightly as possible on size US 3’s in the hope that when they start to stretch, they’ll still remain fitted.

Oh, and just in case you were wondering about the last sweater I was working on, here are two especially crappy pictures of the Storyteller sweater, also courtesy of Alchemy Yarns. I took them at night using the timer function of my camera. If I manage to subvert someone into taking photos for me, I’ll post those instead.

I go to a knitting group every Wednesday night at the Columbia Borders, and we stay there until late. Last week, I left at my usual time, just before the store closed and headed home. However, shortly after I got on I-695 (the beltway around Baltimore and a trafficy nightmare of doom, for those not from the area), I encountered a strange obstacle obscuring most of the rightmost lane. It looked like one of those salt patches or maybe a pile of snow. I started to hit the brakes, thinking I’d just change lanes, but there wasn’t room to get over.

That’s about the time I realized that I was about to hit a boxspring. Unfortunately, there’s only so much that antilock brakes can do, so I hit it square on, still going something over 40 MPH. The boxspring exploded right before I ran over it, and I began to drag the boxspring with me.

My car began to shimmy back and forth in the lane. Attempts to steer were not going so great. Then the car fishtailed so that I was facing the wrong way, skidding sideways at the same time. At this point, I was smack in the center of 695, facing four lanes of oncoming traffic, and my car was stalled out (I drive a manual). I got my car started and safely moved into the right hand shoulder, and I got out to inspect the damage. Sure enough, the boxspring was still under my car.

A young woman, maybe my age, had pulled over to see if I was all right, and after fighting with the boxspring for a few moments, we both realized that it wasn’t going anywhere. I called up roadside assistance, but while I was waiting to be connected, it dawned on both of us that the car was putting out a lot of smoke. The woman called 911 on her cell phone to ask for the fire department while I stayed on hold with Toyota, and sure enough, my car started putting out sparks. Moments later, just as the fire department arrived, flames were shooting out from underneath my car. They got it out quickly enough, thank God, but there was a tense half hour or so while they tried to get the boxspring out from under my car to make sure it wouldn’t catch fire again.

At this point, a police car had also arrived, so I told the woman that I was fine, thanked her, and watched her drive off. I really wish I had thought to ask for her name. Her quick thinking saved my ass.

After that, it was a waiting game. The police officer called for a tow truck himself, and after the fire department got the car off the boxspring (I still don’t know how they managed, as it was seriously wedged in there), he let me wait in his car. The tow truck arrived, the police officer gave me a ride home, and I spent the next hour and a half calling my insurance company and my parents (who were probably a little unglued to be hearing from me at 1AM).

I really don’t know how I survived this. I walked away without a scratch, just a dent in my wallet.

I want to thank the woman that stopped to help me, the fire department for saving my car, and the police officer for driving me home. I also want to thank my auto insurance company (Erie Insurance) for not totaling my car. I will be out a $500 deductible, not the $4500 estimate that the body shop gave the insurance adjuster.

It took me a week to find the words to write this down. Let’s hope this is my last near-death experience for a while.

Three weeks after I first got sick, and now I’ve gotten a cold to match. I haven’t been sick this much since I was a kid, and I really did come down with the weirdest stuff as a kid, like Fifth Disease, measles, and a whole slew of viruses in a row that our doctor decided to call bronchitis (this is apparently a code word for “virus that makes the patient cough a lot”). Not to mention, five years in a row of strep throat, and anything else that my brother managed to catch. My brother and I were all about sharing when it came to bacteria and viruses. Of course, my brother, in a fit of sibling rivalry, later came down with HSP in grade school, a form of vasculitis most frequently found in young children.

Did I mention that I also have allergies year round?

I really hope I get better by this weekend, since I intend to visit Katsucon, even if it is only for one day.

I was struck down by the flu this week, rather unexpectedly. It started Monday night with some coughing. No problem, I thought. Just a cold. I took some Nyquil, went to bed, woke up. Hmm, still coughing. I didn’t want to miss my class (I’ve had a class at work the past two weeks), so I went anyway. Sometime around lunchtime, the chills and joint pain set in. Not something I associate with colds. I made it until around 2pm before giving up. I get home, take my temperature, and low and behold, it’s 101 degrees F. Yuck.

I climbed into bed, where I remained the rest of the week. It’s Friday now, and I’m feeling well enough to sit up without getting dizzy, a major accomplishment. No signs that pneumonia is setting in, so I think I’m on the road to recovery. If only I could stop this blasted hacking cough. *grrr* I’ve mostly been sleeping. I haven’t been able to play any video games or even knit, so it’s been pretty boring, and I’m nearly out of food. (The Jello, the baby carrots, and the crackers were the first to go!) Thank God Safeway delivers groceries. I’m expecting a delivery tonight that should get me through the weekend.

We won’t go into how close I came this morning to mailing my mortgage and homeowner association checks with 11/31/2008 penciled in on top instead of 1/31/2008. Let’s just say that I made a frantic dash to the mailbox in my PJs early this morning to correct that.

I came home this evening to find my W-2 waiting patiently for me, along with form 1099G. (For those playing along at home, I also got form 1099-INT and three of those coveted form 1098s. Ooh, baby.) I went the TurboTax online route, like I did last year, and it was totally worth it. Sadly, they’ve dropped support for Linux. They never had any official support, but they let you in “at your own risk” with unsupported operating systems in the past and it worked just fine. If you enjoy living dangerously, you could play around with your browser strings. I just switched over to the Powerbook and went through Firefox (a supported setup) and completed the entire thing in about an hour.

And since I opted for eFile, I should be expecting a nice deposit in my bank account sometime in the next two weeks. With any luck, I’ll be able to write my parents some long overdue checks very soon.

As an aside, my mortgage interest was double what I would have owed, so that I came out an equal amount on the positive side as I would have on the negative side. (If you aren’t deducting mortgage interest and you live in the U.S., you are crazy.) My original W-4 didn’t account for this back in 2006, and I only remembered to make the appropriate changes halfway through last year. It looks like I picked the right number, and I expect I’ll be coming out close to even by the end of this year. As tantalizing as the big refunds may be, I much prefer having the money upfront for the other debts in my life (car payments, parents, mortgages).

I’m nearly done my basketweave pullover sweater. With any luck, I’ll be done this week and post some pictures. If I’m very clever, I’ll con someone into taking pictures for me, so that you can see how it fits me.