Something To Remember

Tuesday Project Roundup: Getting Things Done During Long Weekends

This weekend made me realize that maybe I haven't lost my crafty mojo; maybe I just need four-day stretches of time to make things. (Hm, how can I work that?)

I finished a tunic dress that has been cut out for a couple of weeks:
It's the same pattern as this one from June (adapted from the Built By Wendy Dresses book), with longer sleeves to make it more cold-weather appropriate.

And the owl sweater for Skyler is just waiting to dry so I can sew on all 32 little button eyes:
Hoot hoot!

Space Therapy

Let's distract ourselves from the first workday after a long weekend by thinking about space. Did you hear the Mars Curiosity rover launched successfully on Saturday? We shot something into space, will guide it along the 350 million mile trip, and will be able to use it to study another planet remotely--incredible! A thousand years ago humanity didn't even know about basic sanitation, and now we're going to study Mars.

Here's the New York Times coverage; the Bad Astronomy blog has a collection of launch videos and a NASA-produced overview of how exactly they plan to land the thing (parachutes and rockets, oh my!). Read up on it and get lots of perspective on your life here on this planet.

Giving Thanks While Seated

I'm not hosting Thanksgiving this year, but I could:
I finally have chairs to go with that table--and for the first time in my adult life, I can entertain more than a total of two for dinner!

So I'm thankful for furniture, and that I have family and friends that I want to fill the chairs, and for what's been a really good year, overall.

Meanwhile, Toby remains thankful for his space heater:


Enjoy the long weekend! I'll be back Monday.

Tuesday Project Roundup: Mid-Hoot

Owls are underway; repeat, owls are underway!

Skyler's owl sweater isn't done but there are only about two more inches (and sewing on all 32 owl eyes). Fortunately, I was able to check the fit during his visit so he should be able to wear this for another six weeks or so, at least. (Stop growing so fast, kid!)

A Visit From Skyler

Look who came over to his auntie's house on Saturday! There was lots of kitty chasing--because someone can crawl now:

There was also a moment when I had to tell Toby that the little creature wanting to touch him was not for pouncing on. (Toby had a look in his eye; I wanted to head that off.)

There was also some delicious paper to be had:


Kitties and paper and Skyler, oh my!

Friday Unrelated Information

1. Happy birthday to Sir William Gilbert, half of Gilbert and Sullivan and the librettist responsible for "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General."

2. Science may be inching ever closer to giving us lab-grown meat. It reminds me of all sorts of science fiction.

3. Here's something to ponder from Ed Abbey, whom I always thought of as curmudgeonly. But maybe he wasn't as hard as I thought:
Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless.

All I Want Is Another Vacation

The last two weeks being back from Moab have just run me over. Work isn't particularly tough right now, but I'm feeling pretty worn out by it.

Let's think back to a happier time a couple weekends ago, when my inner hippie was set free in the morning in Arches:

Doesn't she look happy?

3+1 Things Project: The Last Poem

I'm a little late posting the November/December poem in my 3+1 Things project, probably because memorizing anything for September/October didn't happen. (The Neruda didn't fit, I couldn't get behind the Frost, and there were just too many other things to think about.)

But this poem--I will memorize this poem because it's fantastic. Mary Oliver does it again. (Watch something like this video before you read it and you'll really be able to see it in your head.)


Starlings in Winter

Chunky and noisy,
but with stars in their black feathers,
they spring from the telephone wire
and instantly

they are acrobats
in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
they swing over buildings,

dipping and rising;
they float like one stippled star
that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented,

then closes again;
and you watch
and you try
but you simply can't imagine

how they do it
with no articulated instruction, no pause,
only the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,

this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life.
Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,

even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;

I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard, I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.

Tuesday Project Roundup: Knit Faster

I'm working on an owl sweater for Skyler, but I think I'd better really commit to finishing it in the next week. He's growing so fast (and just started crawling!). This will definitely not fit him for very long.
Almost to the owls!

Still Celebrating Carl Sagan Day

Apparently, I am not the only person with a little crush on him:




More "Sexy Sagan" right here.

Friday Unrelated Information

1. The Armistice ending WWI was signed 93 years ago today; today we tell veterans "thank you" and then go shop pre-holiday sales. I liked this poem from W.S. Merwin, which I assume is satirical:

When the War is Over

When the war is over
We will be proud of course the air will be
Good for breathing at last
The water will have been improved the salmon
And the silence of heaven will migrate more perfectly
The dead will think the living are worth it we will know
Who we are
And we will all enlist again

2. And one more Carl Sagan-inspired post to finish the week: I found this clip looking for the one I posted on Wednesday, and it's a pretty great 29 seconds.

Well Done, Science Writers

Last night I was able to catch the second episode of the latest NOVA series, The Fabric of the Cosmos. (Have you figured out by now that if you put "cosmos" in the title of something, there's a 99.9% chance I will like it?)

I am as average a layperson as it gets when it comes to science, so I had to admire how the show's team explained concepts such as the past, present, and future all existing at once, or why time appears to only flow in one direction, in the simplest way possible.

Check it out--the last two epsiodes are on the next two Wednesdays, and you can get caught up on the first two online. (And I dare you not to think of Dr. Who while the show talks about the nature of time. Sorry, physicists.)

I Declare It Carl Sagan Day

Happy birthday to Carl Sagan today! To celebrate Carl Sagan Day, you could watch the introduction to the Cosmos series, which is still the most popular science program ever produced for television*:



Or you could read this from Ann Druyan, which is simultaneously heartbreaking and joyful:

Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again...But the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is...We knew we were beneficiaries of chance. That pure chance could be so generous and so kind; that we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, "in the vastness of space and the immensity of time"; that we could be together for twenty years; that is something which sustains me...That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don’t think I’ll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.

Happy birthday, Carl. I like to picture you somewhere in that "ship of the imagination" from Cosmos.

*You've all heard that a sequel to Cosmos is in the works for 2013, right? Ann Druyan is helping to write/produce and Neil DeGrasse Tyson will host. I can't wait.

Tuesday Project Roundup: Another Active Copy

I am on a roll with my knit dress knockoffs. First there was the "mustard active dress," and now I give you the "turquoise fleece active dress":

This one is a loose interpretation of this dress (in boring gray, for $90):
As you can see, the pockets and front seams are similar, but instead of figuring out how to draft a hood I just added a cowl neck like before. My starting pattern was the same one I used for the "orange sack dress" in September, and I used an organic sweatshirt fleece that is warm and soft and pretty much feels like pajamas.

The active dress: For when you can't wear yoga pants.

"It Is Clean"

That's why T.E. Lawrence reportedly liked the desert; I could add, "It is indifferent." And this weekend, it was also cold:
Fortunately, Mom and I were prepared with winter gear.

Also fortunately, we escaped the enormous mesa-top lizards this sign showed us:
Lizards not to scale? Or do they come as big as bighorn sheep now?

Friday Unrelated Information

1. I don't know why someone didn't think of this earlier, but it is brilliant: Anthroparodie, photos from the Anthropologie catalog with new (awesome) captions.

2. And another parody: If you've read any Cormac McCarthy, you'll get a kick out of Yelping with Cormac, reviews of local places as if they were written by him. From the "review" of Taco Bell:

The man asked could God make a taco so terrible even He could not eat it. The priest considered this and said no this was not possible and to think so was a sin. The man was silent for some time. Then he said that he had eaten such a taco and that it tasted of bootblack and horsefeed. That if this taco was under God’s dominion then surely all other great evils must be as well. And then the man took the halfeaten and greaseblackened taco from his coatpocket and thrust it at the priest like a broken sword. Eat it, he said. Eat it or be damned.

To The Desert

I'm headed to the desert by Moab soon to make my inner hippie happy and get some perspective. Here's Paul Bowles' feelings about it (even though his desert was the Sahara):

Here, in this wholly mineral landscape lighted by stars like flares, even memory disappears; nothing is left but your own breathing and the sound of your heart beating...Once [someone] has been under the spell of the vast, luminous, silent country, no other place is quite strong enough for him, no other surroundings can provide the supremely satisfying sensation of existing in the midst of something that is absolute. He will go back, whatever the cost in comfort or money, for the absolute has no price.

"Science: What's It Up To?"

Have you been trying to ignore the gearing up of the presidential race, too? From what I've been unable to ignore, it seems every potential candidate so far is trying to win by being anti-science--anti-vaccine, anti-evolution, anti-global warming, etc. Thank god for satire:

The Daily Show
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"Luxurious palace of science"--I love it. Found via one of my favorite science blogs.

Tuesday Project Roundup: Warm, Yet Dull

I have three knitting projects in different stages of completion, so because I don't have any sewing finished this week, let's talk about the most complete one:

I started this last winter to use up leftover yarn. (God only knows how I ended up with so many earth tones.) It's coming along slowly; I'm sure I'd like working on it more if it were made of, say, leftover orange yarn. But it will be warm. I'm planning on using it as a layer for winter hiking--hopefully this winter, but if not, the next one.