Near the top of the heap

Statcounter amuses me when I check in, because although I am no doubt endlessly fascinating, most people who show up here are looking for information about nasal infections. Sweet!

Anyway, the oodles of visits are paying off - I'm still in first place in a Google search for "strep nose" and after months in fourth, I've taken over second place for "staph nose."

So what, right? Probably, but my post on strep & staph has now outdone the articles at about.com and medicinenet.com. I'm not sure what to make of it, but it is nice to be popular, even if for something that sort of sucks. Maybe I should get a Neosporin endorsement deal going...

A few show tunes

(that last one is apparently played by Osama bin Laden?)

What else? More hats!

I think I'm getting the hang of this... It is ridiculously fun, which has kept me not only off the streets and out of trouble, but maybe also out of blogland. Here are a few of my most recent hats:I think my target market may be redheads, but that's always been true, I suppose.

I really like the black-and-white spiral and the orange!

I've also made a few hats for little ones, but being as we're childless, I'm not sure who to get to model them. Maybe these are actually just a start on some very funky lingerie :)

Third time the charm?

So cool! One of my scarves has made the front page of Etsy today - instant sunshine.What luck! Looks like a few hundred people have taken a look, too.

Lonely soldier - good cover

would have taken some stones to do this song in my high school...

What I've been up to, in part

So, here're a few of the hats I've been knitting:

That one's for sale, as you can tell if you click on it. These one's are not yet in the shop. You could click on them, if you wanted, for fun...

Busy, busy

Naturally, these things would be better with photos, but that will have to wait. The past week's been pretty busy:

Scones with almond paste (made by me: candy success No. 2)
Built and tested a teleprompter (for work)
Knitted more scarves (I've lost track. 8? 9?)
Splurged on fancy yarn for scarves (what else is new)
Daily Japanese lessons :)

Oh, and regular life, which can be busy anyway.

A couple more hats

These two are knitted out of mohair...

A new project

I've had a basket of knitting yarn sitting in the closet for about three years now, and until this week I hadn't touched it, partly because weaving's kept my hands full, and partly because I would have to learn how to knit to use it.

But earlier this week, I bought a knitting loom (about $7 on sale), something I'd heard of from my father, something that sounded like it would make knitting a whole lot easier.

The loom I bought is just a circle with pegs on it:It is quick and easy, though it makes a pretty loose knit. I've found this can be partly counteracted when the hat is washed/shrunk. If you don't mind having a smaller hat, you can get the knit to be tighter with hot water and a bit of dish soap (same thing you'd do for felting, incidentally).

Anyway, here are two of the four hats I've made this week.



My model kindly didn't ask for much in compensation. But he wasn't too keen on trying on the light blue mohair with the sparkles.

What's music got to say?

Plenty! Or so it seems.

Having read the butterfly lady's post on research into what music can tell you about yourself, I took the test. I think it was pretty much right on.

Stupidest people in America?

With apologies to my e-friends who make a fair amount of money absolutely but aren't well off relatively, I think I've found some new dumbasses to pillory: Prince Fielder, Cole Hamels and Nick Markakis, all of whom are quoted as bitching about their salaries in a USA Today article.

This exorbitantly talented trio is weathering the long wait of a young Major League Baseball player who has a) arrived; and b) isn't getting the big payday.

But when I, or more properly, they say, "big," what's meant maybe doesn't square with what you might think of as Big.

Next season's haul? Fielder: $670,000; Hamels: $500,000; Markakis: $455,000.

OK, I get it. Their teams make money hand over fist on them, but come on. When you're making 10 or 20 times good pay, you have not one god damn thing to bitch about. At least not for the record.

Outfitting the loom

So I bought a new (to me) loom a while back and finally scrounged up enough dough to buy some needed items to outfit it for production work. One difference 'twixt a hobbyist and a production weaver is the need to put on long warps (i.e. 50 yards instead of two, three, five), and the upshot of that is a need to put these rake-like items on the beam the warp is wound onto.
That I did, with a couple of trips to the hardware store, and one to the lumber yard (where a kindly worker cut a really superb piece of no-void plywood into 1.25-inch strips that I glued to make double-thickness and cut to suit my purposes).

Anyway, after that, and some previous repair work, I now have a loom that should take me through the rest of my career as a weaver. Unless, of course, someone decides I'm such a brilliant scarf maker that I change professions!

Laugh until you cry

That's what I did, here.

Here's a for-instance:

I wish these guys would do a cover album

I see the previous post's link is dead, so here we are:

Avril on Bob

Fudge...

Well, I'm not so sure about how good it is, but I made fudge last night. I had some leftover chocolate from a flurry of brownie baking, so I figured I might as well. After an amusing screw-up (added the butter rather than the chocolate to the milk and sugar and had to start over), I think I succeeded for the first time in making candy (I have tried before - not great).

I don't have a candy thermometer, so I had to use an old-school method for guessing as to whether the choco-sugar-milk-salt was early or late "soft ball" during the crucial part of the cooking. This could be important later, because I'd like to make some marchpane over the weekend and it of course involves candy-ing...

Anyway, now I'm going to inflict/bestow upon my co-workers some fudge Cockaigne (I found this interesting site while double-checking my guess as to the provenance of "Cockaigne" - land of cakes).

The flurry of brownie manufacturing is going to turn into a food story in the paper, so I'll spill the beans about that later.

Guess the food

Here're the ingredients:

Corn syrup
Sugar
Palm oil
(and less than 2 percent of:)
mono- and diglycerides
hydrogenated cottonseed oil
salt
soy lecithin
artificial flavors
Blue 1
Red 40
Yellow 5

Yum!

Eerie similarity, no?

and

Masters of War

I missed this installment of Letterman, but I wish I'd seen it:

I recall this song was a (the?) top choice of BBC listeners as "best political song." I think that fits.

New knife

So, my father kindly brought back - among other things - a new knife for my kitchen, an ultra-sharp ceramic knife made by Kyocera. It came in an ultra-typical (for Japan) package, which stands in, um, contrast to the staid North American packaging.

To wit:

Mine is the knife at the top of the image. A shop downtown - here - carries other knives by Kyocera, marketed more like this image from the company's North American site:

Which of these looks like it comes from a place where people have more fun?