Sweater Project

I got the most amazing merino/yak blend at Churchmouse Yarn and Tea a few weeks ago, along with some sweet Lantern Moon ebony circs. I’m planning to make an entrelac scarf out of the yarn – I have some dark brown and some cream-colored. I want to do some kind of a graduated color change, like a disintegrating chessboard kind of look. Not quite sure how I’m going to implement that yet. And I need to find better entrelac instructions because the first set I grabbed off the web are not working out for my brain.

I finally completed the kilt hose which were supposed to be my Knitting Olympics project, just in time to get them to their person before he hopped on a plain for Edinburgh. Which reminds me, the bastard still hasn’t sent me any pictures of him wearing them. Granted, I haven’t posted any pictures of them myself yet, but I’m going to blame him. Yeah. That works.

I would not have finished the hose had it not been for the Herculean efforts of my girlfriend. She not only knit most of the leg of one of the hose, but she designed new cuffs and knit them both AND grafted the cuffs on to the garters. I was using the John Anderson pattern, but instead of doing cabled cuffs, she came up with a thistle pattern which really rocked. I have photos somewhere, but not yet on Flickr.

Update:

My buddy sent me a picture featuring the hose! He’s the one on the right.

He told me that at the ceilidh after the ceremony, the hose got several comments. Squee.

Just, wow.

A while back, some crackers broke in to the e-mail accounts of climatologists at the University of East Anglia and published a bunch of them. New stories started breaking that basically said “THE SCIENTISTS ARE LYING!!!!” and the press began to refer to the issue as Climategate.

The stories spread quickly and pretty soon everyone in the world knew that the scientists who are warning the world about global warming were all operating under a hidden agenda and that it’s all a big hoax.

Climategate is, however, complete bullshit. That hackers got a hold of scientists’ e-mails is true. That the scientists were talking about global warming is true. That the scientists were operating under a hidden agenda and making up data? Not so true. There was nothing nefarious going on.

I suspect that most news organizations aren’t going to follow the example of The Sunday Times and print retractions. Because “SCIENTISTS ARE DOING SCIENCE” isn’t nearly as eye-grabbing a headline as “THE SCIENTISTS ARE LYING!!!!”.

I don’t live here anymore.

I mean, of course I live ‘here’. ‘Here’ is where you are when you access that word. But my ‘here’ is no longer where it was when I used to say ‘here’. That ‘here’ is way over there.

My new ‘here’ is thousands of miles away from there, and it is much cooler. Cool enough that I’ve been thinking about picking up my needles and grabbing a ball out of my stash to make myself a new hat.

All of which is my circuitous way of saying, “I live in Seattle now.”

I always wanted to be an alchemist when I was a kid. I read stories about how they would create tinctures and compounds to induce profound chemical changes and I just thought that was the coolest thing ever.

Then I grew older and discovered that no, you really can’t cause base metals to turn in to gold by exposing them to other compounds; you’d have to be doing some kind of hardcore nuclear chemistry to pull that off. And so my enchantment with alchemy waned.

And then I discovered cooking and whoah baby, did that bring it all rushing back.

I can’t turn lead in to gold, but I can turn a mixture of plant products into something that makes your mouth really, really happy.

Here are a couple of the first steps.

I woke up this morning and heard the following voicemail on my phone from my dad.

On CBS Sunday morning there's a whole section on there about knitting. There's a nuclear physicist on there and that's how she relaxes, is by knitting.
Hmm . . . could it be you're not so strange?


I’ve been telling him for years – I’m not strange. I’m the most normal person I know.

Last Thanksgiving, I took my girl Rosa up to my folks’ place to hang out with the family. The holiday was wonderful, a steady stream of rosy lights, family I had not seen in far too long, and never-ending food and drink. I was so transported by the atmosphere that it wasn’t until Rosa and I were driving back home in my tiny Mazda Miata that I noticed something very important.

Rosa is not a Miata-sized dog.

She’s no Mastiff, to be sure. But she is a 40 lb. dog, and the tiny seats in the Miata just are not built for a pup like her. So in December, I shopped around until I found a vehicle that was more comfortable for her to travel in.

Having obtained that vehicle, I can finally present . . . Rosa, in her Element.

Here’s my latest kitchen experiment – Shepherd’s Pie.

I made this up as I went along, so all measurements are approximate.

2 lb. ground lamb
1 medium onion
4 medium carrots
2 T. minced garlic
Olive oil
2 T. tomato paste
1/4 c. red wine
1 c. chicken stock
2 large Russet potatoes
1 T. fresh thyme
1 T. fresh rosemary
4 T. butter
1/4 c. shredded Parmesan cheese
3 egg yolks
salt and black pepper to taste

Heat the oven to 350 degrees.

Grate the onion and carrots and mix together.

Heat a couple tablespoons olive oil in a large pan and brown the lamb. Drain the excess fat and salt and pepper to taste. Add the garlic, thyme, rosemary, onions and carrots and heat through. Add the wine, tomato paste, and chicken stock and allow the mixture to cook until the liquid is reduced.

Peel the potatoes and cut into chunks. Boil in generously salted water until tender. Using a ricer or hand mixer, mash the potatoes and mix in butter, sour cream, and parmesan cheese. Add salt and pepper to taste. Mix in egg yolks. Transfer the potatoes to a large zip lock bag and cut off one of the lower corners.

Pour the meat mixture into a greased casserole. Use the bag to dollop the mashed potatoes on top of the meat. Bake for about 30 minutes or until the potatoes are browned and the filling is bubbling.

Om nom nom nom until satiated.

Update
Thanks to KarenJ for pointing out that the egg yolks do indeed get added to the potato mixture.

Anyone seen the movie Whip It? It’s about roller derby and it’s set in Austin. I think more than a few Austinites have, or else they did an especially good job promoting the current derby season – I went up on Sunday and the place was mobbed. I just barely got a spot to take pictures.

But take pictures I did.

I’m just wondering how long it takes for roller derby to make it as an Olympic sport. The women certainly work hard enough at it.

So I did not make it to the podium in the Knitting Olympics. Which is perfectly fine by me – I did manage to churn out more stitches than I have in a very long time. It felt good to get my knitting groove on again.

I want to thank everyone who signed up and I especially want to thank everyone who found the tip jar at the bottom of the sign up page and contributed. I promised Stephanie that if she mentioned the tip jar on her blog, I would send her half of the proceeds to be donated to Knitters Without Borders. The other half is going to defray my bandwidth costs – you’d be amazed at how much traffic came through the last two weeks.

I’m going to update the Knitting Olympics sign-up page at ko2010.sweaterproject.org with a page where you can submit your e-mail address (if you supplied one when you first signed up) to indicate that you completed your project. Those who completed will get Franklin’s spiffy medal icon next to their names.

I’ll update again when I have the podium page finished.

Citius, Altius, Fortius, y’all.

UPDATE

There is now a podium page at ko2010.sweaterproject.org/podium.php. Please feel free to mark yourself as having finished if, you know, you finished.