Knitters’ Christmas Tea Party
I went to a tea party! The regular Thursday night crowd from the Morris & Sons SnB all met up on Saturday afternoon at Harrogate Teas. We nibbled on sandwiches, sipped a variety of teas, and guzzled our weights in champagne. (I’m serious.) It was so much fun! We also had a “Kris Kringle” swap of decorations, where I got a lovely sparkly dove ornament. And of course, we all frocked up. I’m wearing a vintage “Jonathan Summers” dress that Ma Snook gave me last year. (Everyone joked that I looked like a Stepford Wife.) Lyn has some great photos here, or read on for mine…
Miss Fee in a fabulous floral headpiece…

Alison and Sue prove that there is no occasion too formal for the winding of wool…

Lee was a fabulous organiser and looked so smart in his green scarf!

Jody knits along with our distant visitors Donna and Ailsa…

Recent graduate Ness chats with Jody and Lyn…

A room full of happy and talkative knitters!

“Can ‘Nice Girls’ Negotiate?” Depressing but spot on, I’d say. Money quote: “When men ask for something, they are being proactive; when women ask, they are being pushy.”

I see commercials for that 8 Hour Rapid Detox all the time on Go! network. Nice to know that it really is exactly the diarrhea-inducing scam I figured it was.

More on Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock
That was good timing! I posted my review yesterday and then found out that the 2.0 update dropped on the same day! The new version includes historical graphs of your sleep patterns. Here’s my data from last night:

Went to bed / woke up: 11:13 PM / 7:00 AM
Total time: 7h 46m

This wasn’t a good night’s sleep. I was more aware of the iPhone than I’ve been the previous few nights, and every time I turned over I thought of how it was being recorded for the graph. Then as the sun started to come up, the damn cats went berzerk. I didn’t sleep very soundly for those few hours. I finally got back into deep sleep an hour before the alarm… which meant there was no optimum time to wake me and I got up at 7am feeling groggy and annoyed.

Okay, so the jury’s still out on whether this is all make-believe. I’m trying to find scientific research backing the ability of actigraphy to accurately detect sleep stages, and I haven’t got proof yet. I think I need to get the Snook to hook his iPhone up too so we can compare graphs in the morning. I’m really curious whether he’s affecting my phone’s data…

Iconic Photos: Wrapped Reichstag. That is so cool. I’d heard of it but never saw the photos.

App Review: Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock
Last week I happened to see a tweet about a new iPhone app called Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock. As I am a notoriously crappy sleeper – and the app was pretty cheap – I decided to try it out. The idea is that your movements in bed are a fairly accurate indicator of which stage of sleep you’re in. (This isn’t snake oil; it’s called actigraphy and sleep clinics use it.) The accelerometer in the iPhone registers your movements through the night and therefore knows what stage of sleep you’re in. You set the time you want to wake up, and the app wakes you up at the optimum point in your sleep cycle in the half-hour window before the alarm. I’ve just been resting the iPhone face-down on the corner of the bed, not covered by anything. (It hasn’t fallen off yet.) I ran the “test” phase the first night, where you move around and it makes sounds to show it’s registering the movements of the mattress. Interestingly, it did register when the Snook rolled over but I didn’t, which made me wonder whether it would be accurate. I also wondered whether the cats’ daily wrestling match on the bed at 5am would mess it up. At any rate, the first two nights we used it, the alarm just went off at the specified time. (I expected that; they say it can take a couple nights to get calibrated for your sleep patterns.) Since then, I’ve had two days where it went off before the set time and I definitely noticed that I was awake instantly, without any grogginess. The first day, I actually turned it off and went back to sleep for half an hour (since I’d set it a bit early), and I noticed when I got up the second time that I felt more sleepy and crappy. This morning, I got up as soon as it went off and felt great. The Snook said he also felt better than usual, so maybe it does work fine for two people (or else our sleep cycles have synchronised over the years). I’m still not convinced it isn’t just the placebo effect. Maybe I feel awake and energised because I want the thing to work? Only more experimentation will tell. I’m eagerly awaiting the 2.0 update, which will actually graph your sleep cycles from the previous night. Theoretically then I could do some experiments sleeping on my own to see whether the Snook is throwing off my timing. So if you’re a bad sleeper like I am – or just a “body hacker” who likes self-experimentation – it’s a great little app to play with. Does exactly what it says on the tin!

“Amid recession, meth menace evolves.” An article about the rise of meth addiction in Elkhart, Indiana (where I’m from). Like Moire, who pointed me to the story, I was stunned by this quote from the local prosecutor: “I literally did talk to an RV manufacturing facility group of supervisors who sat there and said, you know, these guys really work fast when they are on meth.” That makes me sick.