Happy Earth Day, Good Friday and Jelly Bean Day!

Wow! I can't believe they could squeeze all that into one day!

Read more about Earth Day! I can't believe that they're even asking if we can afford to protect the environment! How much is it worth to you to continue breathing? Tear down enough trees, and this huge spaceship we're on won't be able to continue to produce enough oxygen for the people on it!

I don't really have to say much of anything about Good Friday. Everybody who hasn't been hiding under a rock knows about it. I used to love all the great biblical movies that were on at this time of year, but they almost don't exist on TV anymore.

There are a lot of things on the channels about learning, discovery and science about biblical stories and the possibility that they could be historical fact, though.

I didn't even know that it was Jelly Bean Day until I saw it online in a newspaper! And right before Easter, too! I'll bet the diabetes doctors will be having a lot of patients next week!

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And some of the best news today is that the new season premier of Doctor Who will be on BBC in America tomorrow evening! They're having a Doctor Who marathon during the day to build up to the premier. I can't wait!

In fact, it seems to be starting right now!

The photo above seems to be one from the first episode, which will be on tomorrow evening. Not having seen it, I don't know.

Neat, huh?

If you didn't know, Neil Gaiman has written a script which will air later in the season. I love his work so much, and can't believe I have such good luck that he's writing for Doctor Who! I'm so excited!

I'm going to be pretty much stuck on BBC in America as my main channel for the next week because of the new season of Doctor Who and all the hoopla about the Royal Wedding. If my TV lasts for the coming week, that is!

I have to run, now.

Have a fabulous weekend!

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Happy Day-After-Earthday (and a contest)

Nothing special is happening today. The most memorable thing about today (so far) is that Earth Day was yesterday. Therefore, I had no snappy title for today's post.

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Vicki Howell is running another contest for one of her new books! Get on over there and enter! She's also got some interesting projects pictured from the book. I Googled the answer, but you don't have to. All of the people who answered so far are right, so read the first one, and you'll know the correct answer. Read down a bit and you'll find the reason for the answer.

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I intended to have all the lace yarn wound into balls today and have a photo to show you, but decided that I should really vacuum, dust mop, and wet mop all the hard floors in the apartment, so I wanted to do that early, while I still had some energy. I'll recuperate in a bit and go on to wind the yarn. At about a mile of yarn, it'll be time-consuming, if nothing else. I'm really glad I have a ball winder! Otherwise, I'd go crazy. I want to get it all wound first because it's kind of a big chore, and I don't want to have to stop knitting to wind another ball of yarn. I expect to finish this later in the day, and have a photo tomorrow.

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There's a brand new Supernatural on tonight!

It's not brand new, but the SciFi Channel will be rerunning four episodes of Eureka tonight and next week, starting at 7:00 pm here. There are a lot of episodes that will be rerun by them in the near future, so keep an eye out for them. I'm hoping that it portends a new year of episodes starting soon.

Oh, and don't forget that there will be another Doctor Who episode on late tonight (early tomorrow morning). This week, it's Partners in Crime, the first episode of the fourth season!

Have a great evening!

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Addition:

I found an interesting website that teaches how to do Nalbinding. The instructions are confusing to me, but then I've always been confused by  Nalbinding, even though I've made several stabs at doing it.

For those of you who are interested in fiberarts by the Vikings or in the Middle Ages, this could be a good site to learn a new fiber craft.

Good luck!

Happy Earth Day!

Happy Earth Day!

Vicki Howell has a great post up on her blog today about recycling for Earth Day.

I found a very entertaining post from Franklin on his blog today, too. It's not about Earth Day, but it is about lace, which I'm about to begin.

Here's a photo of the lace yarn that I got yesterday, along with the beads that I plan to use with it.

This is Knit Picks Gloss lace yarn in Pinot, It's actually a little darker and a slightly warmer color than it appears here. As you can see, my first task will be to  wind all of this into balls so it's useable rather than a big tangle. There's a total of 1,760 yards there, so just winding it all will be time consuming. That's nearly a yard, folks!

It's going to be pretty, though. Or it will be frogged and reknit.

Not being the kind that looks ahead too much, I've discovered that I need to get a very small container that will sit steadily on a flat surface, and that I can put a lid on. In other words, I should have bought some of those screw-together containers at the craft store while I was there. Those long tubes of beads are fine until you need to set the open tube somewhere so that the beads will be available to scoop one up when you get to the point in the knitting that needs it.

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It's Wednesday, which means a new episode of Lost will be on tonight! It will be preceded by a brand new Better Off Ted.

Have a great evening, and check out this link that my sister sent me to reminisce about the '60s! It's worth it for the music alone.

Earth Day Is Tomorrow!

Earth Day will be celebrated tomorrow, and I thought you might want to know about it ahead of time so that you could pull together some way of celebrating it, even in a very small way.

Here's a picture of the Earth Day flag. You can find out lots more at the above link.

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I haven't been ignoring you. The weather has been changing around here, and it has consequently been very warm in my apartment. It cooled off Friday night, so it was a reasonable temperature here on Saturday morning, but when I got home on Saturday, it was over 90 degrees and rising.

And I've been neglecting to take enough medicine, so I've been feeling bad enough that between the heat and the discomfort, and the tree pollen that comes in the windows because I have them open to try to cool off, I haven't been sleeping well.

The medicine is very long-acting. I can back off quite a bit and not feel the effects for a couple of months, so it's easy to lose track.

Tree pollen doesn't usually cause allergic symptoms for me (unless I do something to irritate my eyes), but I am allergic to it, and what happens is that I build up lots of histamine in my system. Which makes me sleepy. Histamine is a big cause of tiredness and sleepiness. A healthy person usually has some histamine circulating in their system. It assists in wound healing (which is why a scratch or cut itches during part of the healing process). That's why people love caffeine so much. It's a histamine blocker, and wakes you up in with your morning coffee.

I found out about the heat in this place. It turns out that during the construction of the building, they ran water pipes through the cement, and the place is heated by a boiler that pumps hot water throughout the building. So, even with the heat turned off, the heat is still turned on in the building. The floor in the kitchen was quite warm yesterday and it's not warm today, so maybe they've decided to turn off the heat today. I'm told it takes about 8 hours to turn it on or off, so it's not something they want to do on a daily basis. I can't wait until they turn the air conditioning on!

So, I haven't been doing much. Anything that I can do makes me feel warmer and more uncomfortable. So, there hasn't been much to write about.

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One big thing that I did yesterday was to do some more art for John. I put together a poster for the Steve Canyon series of DVDs. I did a smaller one for him to take to the Reel Stuff Film Festival, and he said it was very popular and there was spirited bidding on it. I'll let you know when it's available.

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On Saturday, Holly and I went to Occoquan and walked around a bit. We went mainly to see Off the Beading Path, which is a wonderful store full of beads there. I bought some number beads to make a counting device for knitting, a beautiful goldstone bead that's black with lavender sparkles, and another pewter charm, the latter two for stitch markers.

Holly bought me a tiny pewter "pocket piece" that says "Wishes Come True" on one side and "A Wish for Success" on the other side.

I'm really tickled with it.

Later Saturday, before the heat got to me really badly, I pulled some fingering weight yarn out of my stash and did a practice piece for the shawl I plan to knit. This will look much more open in the lace yarn I plan to use.

This is my own design, not the design from Knit.1 magazine, so I want to test it first. I knitted more than this, but didn't take a photo of it, and it's already been unraveled (to scavenge the beads).

The shawl in the magazine had two panels, and I thought that it wouldn't have a straight edge across the wide side if done that way. As you can see from my sample, two panels produce a slight point in the long edge. I know that they relied on blocking to make it straight, but I thought I might like three panels better.

When I got this far, I realized that the long edge would be close enough to straight that it could be blocked straight without much of a problem. But then, when I went to unravel it, I like the handkerchief hem it'll have with three panels.

So the design process favored three panels, then I changed my mind to two panels, then back to three.

I learned several things from the sample: I will have to run a lifeline every so often, I have to do another sample of the stitch I invented for the border, and I want to design an edging for the bottom, which will need another sample. So, there's still a batch of work on this before I even start knitting. I think I also want to cast on more stitches to start and graft the long edge border together.

The yarn for this is probably sitting downstairs waiting for me. I didn't check mail yesterday. I was too busy (or unbusy)  trying to cool off (and doing the poster). The first batch of yarn was shipped on a Wednesday and arrived on the Monday of last week. This batch shipped on Wednesday, and so I think that there's a good chance that it arrived yesterday, or maybe today. I have to pull myself together and go check.

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While trying to cool off, the "activity" I've found that generates the least heat is lying down reading, so I've been doing lots of that.

I'm currently reading New Moon, the second book in the Twilight series. I got mixed up. I don't know if it was Amazon or me, but I thought it was the third book, so I've already read Twilight and Eclipse (which is the third book), and now I'm back to the second. I have Breaking Dawn requested at the library. I was number 30 on the list to get it when I requested it on Sunday, and number 24 yesterday and I'm 23 on the list today. Even though that sounds like a long wait, they have 35 copies of the book, so it will not take too long.

I finished Turn Coat, and loved it. It's a typical Dresden Files story, so how could I not love it? If I say anything else, I'll start into a description of the plot and dump a lot of spoilers on you.

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There's a new Reaper and Fringe on tonight!

I have to get going and do something to cool down.