Lost Arts: The New Doctor Who Will be on Saturday!

On Saturday evening, the BBC in America will be showing the first special of the new season of Doctor Who, The Next Doctor! That was the Christmas special for the series this past year. I was hoping that there would be some information on their website about the future schedule of the Doctor, but all they're giving away is the schedule for Saturday (and Sunday morning). I eventually did find out that the next episode of the Doctor will be on July 26th. These will be separate stories, and they appear to be spreading them out more.

Instead of doing a whole season, the budget crunch prompted the BBC to do several specials rather than a whole season for both Doctor Who and Torchwood this year. The Torchwood specials will be in the form of a mini-series, called Children of Earth, and will be coming up in July, starting on the 20th. They'll be shown on five consecutive nights and form one whole story.

After all the nothing we've been experiencing on TV for the last month, the summer season will be starting real soon, now. Burn Notice is back, and Leverage is back in reruns, with the new season starting on the 15th of July. Neither of those is science fiction, but they both have brilliant concepts for this bleak economy. Each week, somebody with a lot of money and power gets his/her comeuppance due to the brilliance and hard work of someone who makes things as right as they can be after the bad guy messes things up. Action/adventure shows off it's best!

We have a bit more to look forward to, though. On the 7th of July, the SciFi Channel will cease to be, and it will emerge under it's new name, SyFy. They seem to think that the concept of science fiction is too confining, and want to introduce a broader concept. I think there is a lot of SF and fantasy that they could be showing on their network, but they're not doing it. Instead, they seem to be dedicated to showing Chupacabra, Dark Seas, Grendel and Beowulf a mind-numbing number of times. Actually, the first time was too much for these clunkers. No, I'm being too kind. They are some of the worst movies ever made!

I got off the subject, which was stuff to look forward to on TV. SyFy will be kicking off their new name with Warehouse 13.

Remember at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, when the crate holding the Ark is wheeled into a warehouse and stored? Well, the place it would have been stored is Warehouse 13. I sense that the name of this show will slide into American slang as almost a synonym for The Twilight Zone. Unless SyFy has managed to mess this up, too. But the concept is great, and I have high hopes for it.

And the following Friday (the 10th), Eureka will be back with more of the same, if we're lucky.

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Yesterday, I went to the library, and thought you'd like to see the work they're doing on the small bridge that I usually cross to get there. It's closed at this point, and this was taken a few days ago, but I was unloading photos from my small camera and thought you'd enjoy it.

You may notice that although they are making it safe, it still sags in the middle. It's still very pretty, though.

Yesterday, on my walk, I saw something that looked just a little like a stork. But not quite. It was some kind of wading bird, and I wanted to take a photo, and even still had my camera out, but before I could get it up in position, the bird took off. It was beautiful, and I enjoyed it, though.

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Earlier today, I finished mitt part of the Ravenclaw "Wristwarmers" I'm knitting for the Harry Potter House Cup KAL/CAL. There are three because the mitts work fine on either hand, so I make an extra so I'll still have a pair when I lose one.

When I knit, I usually put my yarn in a large plastic bowl that I got at the dollar store. It keeps the yarn from rolling away, picking up lint from the floor, and generally getting dirty. But after knitting these three mitts, the bowl had lots of navy blue lint in the bottom of it. I plan to be adding silver stars to the mitts, and all that lint got me thinking that I might want to wash the mitts themselves before attaching the stars to see if the color is going to run. So, these are finished and ready to wash.

Here's a photo of the yarn I bought on Saturday. It's the new brand of yarn that Michaels is carrying.

I love the colors in it, and I originally thought I'd make a scarf out of it, but while I was at the library, I checked out a copy of Sally Melville's third book in the Knitting Experience Series. This one is the color book.

She has a beautiful sweater made in tweed stitch out of variegated yarn like this and a solid. It's beautiful, and I've been thinking that I need a new vest. I've been wearing my navy one (which I love) for more than ten years. The best thing about the vest is it's pockets! I really love pockets!

I can't recommend the books in The Knitting Experience series enough. I'm a very experienced knitter, and I found lots of really neat ideas, techniques, and tips in all of the books. This third one includes instructions for grafting in garter stitch, and it's the only place I've found real instructions for knitting back backwards, and purling back backwards. Those last two are techniques I've wanted to learn for a while. I think I'm going to have to buy a copy of this for myself!

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While I was taking photos yesterday, the camera told me the memory card is full, so I was going through all the photos while unloading it today to either archive or trash them, and I found this photo of John and Holly and I from a couple of years ago, when John was out here to work on Fade Out (which eventually got in the middle of a power struggle because everyone wanted it, and then everyone just seemed to forget it existed, and it faded out).