This and That

What is going on with curling in the Olympics?

The other day, Holly sent me a text message saying that she was surprised that I hadn't commented on the US Olympic uniforms with all their blue with white stars. Well, I would have, if I'd seen any.

First of all, you have to understand my viewpoint of sports. They're great fun to play, and boring as watching paint dry to watch. And this is as it should be, I think.

I'm not completely disinterested in the Olympics, but I've been recording parts of it and fast forwarding through the boring bits, which is most of it. So far, I haven't seen any blue with stars in the uniforms.

So, I tried looking up "US Olympic uniforms" on the internet, and there were dozens of uniforms for every kind of sport you could think of. I saw one uniform with a dark blue top and three tiny (almost invisible from more than a foot away) stars on each shoulder, and I'm still trying to figure out what she's talking about.

But back to curling. I wrote a blog post the other day, and had the TV tuned in to the Olympics. In the middle of the post, I dropped everything and turned to the TV in a panic.

There was a man on TV who was screaming! Not a yell of surprise or disappointment. This was a high pitched, sustained scream such as you would expect to hear from the teenage girl who has just discovered the mauled dead body covered in blood in a horror movie!

I thought that someone else had died in a horrible freak accident!

No. They were curling, and this is apparently a normal part of curling.

From what I can tell, if a man wants to be a curler, he has to be neutered in his early teens, and practice high-pitched, hysterical screaming, or he won't make it.

So, from now on, when the curling starts, I'm turning the TV to something else. I'm tired of thinking that somebody must've gotten run over by the Zamboni!

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I'm feeling a lot better after my fall on Friday, but my shoulder and knee still feel really unhappy about it, plus the bones somewhere in my left foot/ankle feel like they've gotten yanked into a position they shouldn't be in, and it hurts every time I take a step.

I'm still taking it easy.

The long period of under-medication for my thyroid has finally slowed my thinking to a crawl, and I'm really not feeling capable of doing much at all. I want to start knitting that vest, but I just can't make up my mind what I want. I am starting to figure out why nobody has designed a knitted Triquetra Celtic knot, though. I thought it would be easy, but with my mind seizing up like it is, I just can't figure it out.

I'm still waiting to wake up from this daze now that I'm getting the right amount of medicine.

I hadn't planned to do anything at all today, but I read about McCain's horrible bill to outlaw nutritional supplements, and I just have to write something about it, but not in this post.

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NASA has published at least one photo, and information about some brand new galaxies that have been found by the Hubble Telescope.

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The newest Dresden Files book, Changes will be out on the sixth of April! I'm really looking forward to it.

The newest Dresden Files book that's already out, Turn Coat, will be available in paperback on the second of March! This is my all-time favorite series of books!

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Tonight on TV, we have reruns only! They include The Big Bang Theory, Castle and four back-to-back episodes of Ghost Whisperer.

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Here's what seems to be the latest information about Andrew Koenig. He still seems to be missing, and I'm really upset about it. I wish him and his family the best of luck and hope that they will be reunited soon.

Have a great day!

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Addition:

Holly sent me this photo. At first glance, it looks blue, but if you look closely, you can see some lighter spots which I'm guessing might be stars? If so, this is the clearest photo I've seen of them.

It looks nice (probably much better if you see it nearby and in person), but I think I like Coraline's sweater better.

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.