Robert is knitting some seriously fabulous-looking Gryffindor banners!

Try not to yawn. I lost that game within about thirty seconds.

Spring Cleaning
I was checking out my referers list and it looks like I’m still getting hit hard by comment spammers and message board scammers. GAH! I figured the easiest thing to do was just delete a few of the problematic posts. People take everything out of context.

The Snook feels that the lack of any quotes from the film Tombstone underlines the fundamental flaws in the AFI’s Top Movie Quotations list. “I’m your huckleberry” really needed to be on there.

Is Bob Geldof annoying the crap out of anybody else? Now he’s actively trying to guilt people into playing Live 8. I think it’s great if artists want to perform for charity, but pressuring them into it really sucks. He’d probably make a law that everybody has to watch too, if he could.

Holy crap. I’ve officially lost 10% of my body weight! I was actually 100 grams short when I first got weighed, but my group leader Emily insisted I step up again – this time without my shoes – so I could cross the proverbial line into double digits. I was awarded a little gold “star” charm for my keychain. Hooray! Unfortunately Emily then asked me to tell all the new girls how I was doing it, like it was going to be this big inspirational moment, and instead I was like, “Uh, I haven’t really followed the program for a month now. I just got lucky with the BEST SICKNESS EVER.” (BSE? I must have mad cow disease.) So I sorta feel like a bit of a cheat, but hey, pounds is pounds, right? I also feel like I might have turned the last corner on this sickness. My doctor’s got me on antibiotics and my energy is finally starting to return. The sad thing is that now the Snook, the yin to my yang, has caught it himself. Poor dear’s been home for three days trying to recuperate. (I hate to see him feeling bad, but I do so love it on the very rare occasions when he lets me baby him.)

Happy Father’s Day, Dad! Hope it’s a great one…

(It’s probably pointless posting that since his company doesn’t let him read my site anymore, but I’ll say it anyway in the hopes that someone else in my family will see it and tell him about it, and if they do, could they perhaps mention to him that he hasn’t e-mailed me in MONTHS, and couldn’t he maybe drop his first-born a line every once in a while? Thanks.)

I feel like a little kid that’s found out DisneyWorld didn’t live up to the hype. For the past two weeks you haven’t been able to turn on a television in Sydney without hearing a manic guy screaming about the “MASSIVE LIQUIDATION SALE” going on at Fox Studios. “REPOSSESSED AND SEIZED GOODS! NAME BRANDS FOR A FRACTION OF THE COST! ADIDAS! VICTORIA’S SECRET! STAR WARS! LEVIS – $20! HARRY POTTER – 10 CENTS! MILLIONS OF BRAS! CDS AND DVDS! AHHHH!” Through sheer force of repetition I found it sinking into my brain. I started to get excited at the thought of all those bargains. “I could really use some new jeans,” I thought. “Ooh, and the Snook’s been after some new T-shirts.” I talked myself into it. So tonight I finally caved and headed out there with Amy. What a load of crap it turned out to be. It made the Shipshe Flea Market look like Bloomingdale’s. It was a big warehouse staffed by indifferent backpackers and dodgy looking types with walkie-talkies. We didn’t find any Star Wars stuff, nor any Levis. The “massive” discounts all seemed to have been taken off massively inflated recommended retail prices. I found myself grabbing things because they were “on sale,” only to realize that I wouldn’t buy them from Kmart for the same price. I ended up getting a a comforter (which the Aussies called a “quilt”), a quilt cover, a Harry Potter magnet, two crap CDs (Acker Bilk’s Reflections and The Very Best of the Allman Brothers, which I got because it will forever remind me of my roommater Eileen), and a packet of socks. SOCKS. I am officially old. I left feeling a little bit wiser and a lot more jaded. If you can’t believe in warehouse sales of Star Wars merchandise, what can you believe in?

This is the first unveiling of my latest knitting project, a cabled jumper for the Snook. The pattern is from the Sirdar Denim Book of Aran Knits (which for some damn reason isn’t up on our site, so I had to link to it elsewhere). He wanted something warm but not itchy, something like a sweatshirt that he could wear around the house. So I’m knitting it in Denim Sport Aran (wool, cotton, and acrylic blend), which worked really nicely on my sampler sweater. I’m calling it the Looking Glass Sweater because, with all the naiveté of a rookie knitter, I decided to adapt the pattern to be knit in the round instead of flat. So I cast on the body stitches, knit my ribbing, and then knit the first round of the pattern. Then I stopped DEAD IN MY TRACKS. The first problem is that this annoying pattern writes everything out in words instead of using a simple, succint chart. (I hate words.) It wouldn’t be such a bit issue except for problem two: every even-numbered round has to be knit backwards, and every single stitch has to be inverted (knits become purls, etc.). This is because in the original, the even-numbered rounds were on the wrong-side of the garment, and I’m knitting it from the front-side only. At any rate, I spent about two hours tearing my hair out before I cracked open Excel and plotted my own damn chart. It’s now a hundred times easier. I still like the concept of every other row being inverted from the original though, like some sort of Mobius strip or 4-dimensional space, which is why I’ve given it the name that I have. Never let it be said that knitters are not philosophical!

On a side note, cables are really hard to photograph! If you use the flash you lose all shadow and definition of the cables. This is the best I could do without the flash. As you can see, the sweater has panels of double moss stitch on each side, followed by a braid, a section of slip-stitch ribbing, and a triple intertwining central cable. Pretty neat, huh?