My most recent hobby fad has been knitting, and in the past few months, I’ve knit up a few things - some are more useful than others. This all started when I was part of a project with Utata, a group I found on Flickr. This project was to have a little stuffed animal travel from one person to the other, and go on grand adventures. Each person would get to host the traveler for a little while, take pictures of him in your area, and then send him on. Kind of like the traveling gnome. Anyway, the person who was supposed to send the guy to me disappeared, and our traveler was lost. So, it fell to me to make a new creature to send on. My sewing abilities aren’t so good, so I didn’t make the standard sock monkey, and I decided to knit something. And thus, Charles was born:

He’s a colorful little octopus, with a mischievous little grin. I had a blast making him (although I did get a little sick of the legs after doing 8 of them…) He’s got pipe cleaners in his legs to make him pseudo-posable, and he was sent off on his travels after a brief stay here with me.

After finishing up with Charles, I had a fair bit of yarn leftover, and I wanted to try my hand at something a little more complicated. So, since I always have a need for new socks, I thought I’d try my hand at a pair of those. The first time I tried, I got to the heel, was convinced I was doing it wrong when I got to the part about short rows. (I’d never done them before, the pattern didn’t explicitly say that you didn’t knit all the stitches on the needle, just gave a count, and I had no clue what I was doing!) So, I ripped the whole thing out. Then, of course, I found a Sock 101 page (which now seems to be broken), and realized I was doing it correctly all along. Ah well - I tried again, and made these:

They’re fun, and colorful, washable, etc, but unfortunately, I made them just a tad small, and the fabric isn’t the most comfortable for walking around all day. I’ll probably still wear them around the house a little - they’re extra thick, designed to be slipper socks, so they’ll stick around. I think I’ll try socks again, but not with this yarn, and I’ll err on the side of too big next time.

When I worked on the socks, I ran out of yarn just before finishing, so I had to buy another large skein, which meant, of course, I had to knit something else with it, too. Deciding to continue with the increasing complexity trend, I decided to try my hand at some fingerless gloves with a mitten cap. (Glittens!) I was afraid of the pattern at first, but I didn’t really need to be. It’s not as hard as you might think. I’m really happy with these. My glittens don’t quite match, as I changed my mind about how far up I wanted the finger part to go after finishing the first one, but I still wear them all the time now. So, these definitely qualify for my “knit something useful” goal. Check! I’m still pondering about lining with mitten cap with a soft, fuzzy fabric for added warmth, but I haven’t yet.
It’s a mitten!


No, wait! It’s a glove!

Now that I’ve started knitting again, I’ve been doing a lot of it. I’ve got a number of projects and some dreams. This morning I put the finishing touches on a hat for my friend Peter, I’ve got a scarf in the works for Logan, and a super-secret project too. I’m getting the urge to start a sweater, but we’ll see. I’m in love with this pattern, but I think it’ll be awhile before I get there. I’m finding I’m getting better though - I wasn’t sure the hat would work out at all, but by the time it was all done, lo and behold, it did, even with me modifying all the stitch counts to match my gauge! Do you like it?

Happy New Year everyone! By now, it’s 2009 throughout the world, and I sincerely hope it will be a good year. There are certainly a lot of big things to look forward to - including the birth of my future nephew, and my trip to Austria with the Glee Club. No doubt the year will bring change for many, not least of which will be end of the George W. Bush era. What will Obama bring to 2009? What will Bush leave behind? Should be exciting to find out. I know I’m looking forward to it.

Logan and I had a good Christmas back with our family. Our original plans got derailed from some heavy snow, but the travel days actually worked out better for our sanity this way. Logan was expecting almost everything to be closed on Christmas Day, but all the major travel centers were up and running as usual, and semi traffic was lighter, so it was a great day to drive, especially with the only day of beautiful weather in a week. When we left Ann Arbor, we had about a foot of snow. When we came back less than a week later, all that remained were remnants from huge snow shoveling piles. Rain came through and washed most of it away. Odd weather this year, but at least I can keep my feet warm here at my desk. Over Christmas we also got to meet our new nephew on Logan’s. Born on the 20th, he’s a beautiful baby. Quiet, too, though that’s partially due to some bilirubin-induced lethargy. He’s got one of the bili-blankets, and they’re watching him closely, so I’m sure he’ll be back to normal levels in no time.

Our New Year’s celebration was a relatively quiet one - Logan and I stayed in and made brinner (that’s breakfast for dinner, if you didn’t know.) I’m a big fan of breakfast. We had pancakes, turkey sausage, orange juice, and mint hot chocolate with mint chocolate Bailey’s! Yum! We saw the ball drop on hulu and thus arrived 2009. I hope you all are enjoying the start of the new year. I’ll still be here, with my sporadic updates. Lots of posts that are long overdue for my 101 in 1001 days list, but I know better than to make promises about when you’ll see them.

I’m pretty much always cold. My hands, feet, nose - always cold. Even in summer. Gerhard used to joke that I didn’t obey the second law of thermodynamics, since I was colder than my surroundings. At work, I moved my desk so I could practically sit on the heater. Plus, I never sit like normal people sit. My legs/feet are almost always curled up under me somehow, and I don’t sit still. Clearly, a heated footrest would help both of these problems, and so I asked for one for Christmas. Logan, being excited about it, and knowing that I would derive great utility from it in the few weeks yet before then, got me one, and I got an early Christmas present yesterday. Seriously, this thing is great. On the footrest setting, it uses about 50W of power, and my feet are so much more comfortable. I have toasty toes! Now, if only they had heated keyboards and mice, we’d be getting somewhere.

In other news. I finally finished Anna Karenina last night. Oof. Now I can start reading something else!

I know it’s been awhile, folks, but I do still exist. It’s been a busy month: there’s been an election, family visits, a family holiday, plenty to do at work, and I’ve had two concerts. Forgive me if I’ve been remiss in posting. In order to keep my sanity, I won’t try to fill you in on the past month, but if you want to hear about anything in particular, let me know.

In the meantime, I wish to discuss breakfast foods. For awhile now, I’d been trying to find a cereal I remember from my childhood - a shredded wheat-type cereal that had chewy, strawberry centers. I had great hopes when I saw Kellogg’s Strawberry Oat Bites, but they were nothing like what I’d been looking for. Instead of a good, strawberry center, it just had tiny bits mixed in with the oats, and it made your milk turn pink. Then I saw some “Strawberry-filled Cereal Bites” at Trader Joe’s. I knew from the picture they weren’t going to be the same, but I was willing to try them. They’re… odd. The outside is sort of crispy, and has little bits of sugar on it, and it didn’t really seem to me much like a cereal - it didn’t blend with milk really. I tried it as a snack, and it was okay, but the texture is just a little too bizarre for me. I’ll finish the box, but won’t buy another.

At this point, I turn to the internet. Does the cereal (of which I only have a vague recollection) still exist? What was it called? Will I ever find it again? It appears I’m not the only one who misses this cereal. It didn’t take me long to figure out that the cereal I wanted was called “Fruit Wheats.” There are a number of people like me who miss this cereal, and I hope something like it comes out again soon. Let me know if you see anything, okay?

In the meantime, you can see one of their old commercials (sadly, no embedding). Gotta love the 80s.

We interrupt your irregularly scheduled blogging to bring you the following public service announcement:

Vote!

(Assuming you haven’t already, that is…)

Life continues. Nothing too exciting. I spent the weekend doing some work, making sure everything from my old laptop was backed up, and relaxing a bit, etc. Walked a bit through the park on Sunday with my dog:

Yesterday, I found two more example’s of “Duck’s” graffiti:


I still don’t get it.

And today. Today I went and picked up a cheesecake from Old World Bakery. They make Ann Arbor-style cheesecakes. Awhile ago I won a gift certificate from my favorite radio station, but since the bakery isn’t open all that much, it took me awhile to make it there. It’s quite tasty though. We’ll have to see how well it freezes, because it’s an awfully big cheesecake for Logan and me.

Ugh. Last night I was editing some photos in Aperture. They looked bright and vibrant. I uploaded a couple to Flickr with FlickrExport Lite for Aperture and thought all was well. When I went and looked at them in Firefox, however, the images were flat - a lot less colorful and bright than they had been in Aperture. This screenshot shows what it looked like in Firefox (on the left) and in Aperture (well, the screenshot is from Safari, but it looked the same):

Not really having seen this before, I didn’t know where to look for the problem. Was it an issue with Aperture and the way it exports color? Or maybe the FlickrExport program did something before uploading? Maybe it was Flickr itself! After a bunch of googling, I came across some discussions on Flickr’s Aperture Users group with many of them having the same issue. It was all very confusing, and everything is complicated by uncalibrated monitors, different gamma settings between macs and PCs, and embedded color profiles in the images themselves. Ugh. I’d never dealt with any of this before, and it’s a lot to take in, so I’m still not entirely sure of myself when talking about this. At any rate, here are the conclusions I’ve drawn and how I fixed the problem on my computer. Please correct me if I’m wrong on any of this.

• Images for the web should contain an embedded color profile of sRGB for maximum compatibility between browsers and things.
• Therefore I ensured that Aperture was exporting with sRGB (and also was using sRGB for on-screen proofing - i.e. what it was showing me).
• Most browsers (Safari being the exception) are entirely unaware of color profiles for images and they assume sRGB based on a PC’s gamma value of 2.2. (A mac generally has a gamma value of 1.8.)
• I haven’t tested this one yet, but I think this means that my photos will therefore look correct on PCs, regardless of browser, since sRGB assumes their gamma value. The only place my photos would look incorrect are on browsers or programs that ignore color profiles on a mac.
• Exporting with sRGB therefore seems to be most likely to have my photos appear correctly to the widest audience. Windows users and Mac users using Safari.
• The solution for my own viewing purposes seems to be to use a browser that doesn’t ignore color profiles. I’m attached to Firefox, and didn’t really want to switch to Safari just because of this, so I was quite pleased to find out that Firefox 3 supports color management, but the option is turned off by default.
• So, I installed an add-on for Firefox 3 to allow me to enable color management. (The option is otherwise rather hidden and complicated to turn on.)
• Now, my colors are consistent between Aperture, Safari, Preview, and Firefox.
  
  Huzzah!

It’s time for another tale of Kristin’s Cooking Adventures! Read on to find out how these ingredients:

became this tasty risotto on Friday:

Read more »

I miss heat. I admit that I am one to easily get cold, but the temperature change from Puerto Rico to here makes me sad. And cold. But that’s okay. I’ve survived winters before.

Now that I’m back, I have more work to do to get my laptop up to date as my primary computer. Unfortunately, my previous version of Photoshop Elements wasn’t made for the intel-based macs, so now I find myself without a real photo program. I’d been debating previously about whether I should get Adobe’s Lightroom or Apple’s Aperture for photo management, and now it’s pretty clear that I should get one or the other. They should be able to handle the every day photo editing I need. I may need to get Elements in the future too, but I might see if I can get away with GIMP or some such. At the moment, I’m playing around with the Aperture trial, and while I like it, I’m a bit concerned about speed issues. Lightroom is supposed to be faster, but Aperture seems more flexible. Anyone have any experience with either?

While waiting for the bus yesterday, I saw this:

Duck? I don’t get it. Do you?

And today you get a photo from the Glee Club. For every home football game, we go out and sing for the tailgaters to raise some money. Today was the game with MSU - big rivalries equal big money. Unfortunately for the home team, the game didn’t go so well. The singing did, though, even if it was a bit cold. I couldn’t feel my hands or feet at a couple points. (And yes, I was wearing gloves.)

Just so you all know - I made it back safely (and even on time - gasp)! Long day of sitting on planes and in airports though. Oof. Lots to do in the next while, but for now, I think it’s bed time.

One last picture from San Juan for now: