preraphaelitepunk.com

The upper GI endoscopy yesterday didn’t show evidence of ulcers, and apparently I’m negative for Helicobacter pylori, so apparently that’s not it. Hmm. The gastroenterologist wants to do either a CAT scan or ultrasound next — he had mentioned it might be my gallbladder. Not sure about that, but maybe. He also said that a couple of areas of my stomach showed ribbing that was a marker for Crohn’s disease in people with Irish ancestry, but he seemed to think that was a long shot.

(The GI guy has a tendency to shoot apparently off-topic questions at me out of nowhere: I was in the recovery room and kind of dozy, talking about my interior bits, and suddenly he started questioning me about my ancestry. Somewhat perplexing; it might help if he’d explain the reason for the question early on, but whatever. Oddly enough, when I replied, “General British ancestry,” he initially didn’t think that included Ireland, even Northern Ireland. Perhaps I should’ve been clearer and spoken geographically rather than politically, and said “All over the British Isles,” but I plead dopiness from the sedatives.)

Anyway, just because it’s been a while since I’ve posted a photograph, here are the stills from the procedure. You can see the ribbing in the left upper and right lower corner shots; click to embiggen, if you’re into that sort of thing. Anyone know any doctors or med students? Maybe we could play Snapshot Diagnosis; first one to pick the disorder that matches any eventual real-life diagnosis gets a pair of hand-knit wool-free socks. Anyone?

In the meantime, at least I’m doing okay. Occasionally my stomach kind of gently nudges me, as if to remind me that it holds the power of life and death, or at least productivity and lying in a limp puddle on the floor, over me, but no real pain, and only minimal nausea. It’s been a week of significant savings on the food front, as well as on the coffee beans and wine fronts, given that I’ve avoided all three pleasant occupations as much as possible through abject, cringing fear of pain — today I’m having my first cup of coffee in over a week, and am equally thrilled with the caffeine and the lack (so far) of negative consequences. Oh, coffee, how I’ve missed you. My appetite is even coming back a little, too, which is a pleasant surprise. I’ll probably hold off on reintroducing the wine for a while longer, because the thought still makes my stomach clench a little with worry.

Little knitting has been accomplished, because for a while there the very thought of yarn somehow made me queasy. (This makes no sense, but I chose not to argue with the body and its peculiar tantrums.) At least yesterday, after Cindy very kindly took me home and I crashed for a couple of hours, I got about 10 rows done on my sweater; I’m about to start the French cable for the waistline. There’s no bloody way I’ll get it finished before the meeting next week, which was my original deadline, but at least some progress has been made.

So, aside from the grisly photos of my interior, not a whole lot to report. I was hoping to have a firm diagnosis by now, but I’ll take what I can get: at least I’m functional, and doing reasonably well, and don’t apparently have anything obvious and life-threatening. It could be a helluva lot worse.

No sooner did the air conditioning at work get fixed (and, to their credit, they did close the office after lunch on Tuesday) than all kinds of hell broke loose on the health front. Yippee. Two visits to the urgent care clinic later, including one in which I started throwing up in the waiting room, they are pretty sure I have a gastric ulcer, and, as an added, surprise bonus, are positive that I’m rather hypothyroidal. (The word “goiter” was bandied about. Sexy.) I don’t know the exact levels yet, or which exact thyroid hormones are involved, but when the doctor called, he sounded a little concerned. I think the words “extremely low” were used.

I have apparently flipped straight into middle age: a week ago I had no prescription medicines at all, taking only vitamins and an omega-3 supplement; now I have two prescription acid blockers, an antinausea medication they usually use after surgery or during chemo treatments, and a fairly heavy-duty painkiller, and will pick up the thyroid meds sometime today. The last is something I’ll probably be on for life. Hopefully, I’ll be able to drop the others, or at least not take them on a daily basis, if my probable ulcer responds to antibiotics. Otherwise, I’ll have to start looking for one of those pill organizers with the daily and AM/PM compartments that all the cool kids are carrying.

We’re still waiting for the blood test results for Helicobacter pylori, but the doctor I saw yesterday wants me to go ahead and schedule an endoscopy as soon as possible, to get an idea of what’s down there. Whee: my very first camera-down-a-bodily-orifice test. I’m thrilled.

Well, okay: the upsides are potentially pretty good here. I’ve had sporadic stomach pain of the “feels like someone’s holding my stomach and making a fist, and occasionally digging in with fingernails” sort since high school, and if I can get that under control, that’ll be a vast improvement. At least knowing what it is helps, too. And it’s probable that getting my thyroid hormones back to normal will help with energy levels, and will almost certainly help me get rid of some of the extra weight I’ve mysteriously gained lately.

Anyway, at the moment at least, I seem to be doing okay. Heavily medicated, but okay. There were a bunch of things I’d wanted to do this weekend — Summerfest, the Indie Craft Experience in Centennial Park, and the fundraiser for a local filmmaker — but I’m not sure whether I’ll be able to do any of them. At the very least, I’m a bit nervous about driving if I have to take any of the antinausea or pain meds; also, if I start going downhill again, I’d rather start whimpering, displaying abominably poor posture, and possibly vomiting in the privacy of my own home, rather than out in public.

If I ran the world — or even just ran the place where I work — things would be very different. Different in many ways, but at the moment the most important difference would be what would happen when the office HVAC broke down. (This happens with grim regularity, and is rather darkly amusing because, without naming names, heating and cooling technology is kind of what our little nonprofit group does.)

Firstly, I’d make sure that our office building had operable windows. Also, outlawing fans is a bad idea. Stagnant, hot, humid air feels ten times worse than hot, humid air with a bit of air circulation.

Secondly, I’d give everyone an automatic Heat Day, which is like a Snow Day except in reverse: close the office the instant the heat rose to 80°F (just under 27°C; for convenience, SI users could leave when it hit 25°C).

If that were not possible — visitors were coming from out of town, meetings were scheduled, etc. — then I’d at least try to do something to demonstrate sympathy and concern. Personally, I’d set up a little tiki bar in the break room, and serve free frozen drinks and chilled tropical fruit nibbles to all employees all day.

What I wouldn’t do is just tell people that they had to come in regardless, and to dress “lightly but appropriately” and just suck it up and be a mensch about the heat and the locker-room smell, all the while taking the day off myself.

I’m just saying. . . . It’s currently 84°F (about 29°C), and I’m about this far from either rebellion or melting. Or possibly subliming; it’s hard to tell.

It took me about two hours, I’d say. That’s slow for someone who actually crochets well, but pretty darned good for me.

Most of the afternoon’s been spent playing with yarn and hooks. The good news is that I’m getting better at working the chain — I find it helps if I insert the hook in the first loop, then twist it around and sort of hook over the bottom loop, then twist again so the hook is facing up again. Somehow, that seems to be faster and more reliable for me than trying to slip under both the top loops in one go, or (as I usually wind up doing) trying to pry the second loop over the hook with my fingernails.

The bad news is that my fingers are a little sore, and I only just now remembered that Cindy had a photography show that was closing today, and I’d meant to go to the reception. Given that the reception was supposed to end right about, er, now, I suppose I’ve missed it. Oh dear.

I officially do not have enough time. Well, part of that probably is because of my habit of wasting weekend mornings by faffing around on the computer, and then taking a nap, so it’s largely my own fault, but still, I think it’s a valid point. (I also apparently have enough time to write this long and rambling blog entry, but even that’s taken me the best part of two mornings, so I think it still counts as evidence that I have too much to do in my available free time. Either that, or I’m a really slow writer, which is probably also true.)

I started making a list of all the things I want to organize, redo, finish, or inflict an extra-thorough cleaning on around the flat. When the list reached 35 tasks, I had to put it aside and go for a little lie-down. (The sad part is that I hadn’t even finished adding items to the list — though, to be fair, I did break them down into some reasonably small subtasks, so maybe it’s not quite as overwhelming as it feels.)

My cooking and baking have been virtually nil lately. This week, for instance, I managed to prepare one thing totally from scratch: tofu frittata with asparagus and sun-dried tomatoes, from Vegan with a Vengeance; except that halfway through the baking my neurotic oven freaked out and thought it was overheating, and shut itself off (no, I still haven’t gotten that fixed), so it came out more as a scramble. That, plus the pizza I made last night, which doesn’t count as home-made because I cheated horribly with whole-wheat pizza dough from Trader Joe’s,* prefab LightLife soysage, and Teese. (At least I made the tomato sauce myself, and the broccolini was fresh, not frozen.) Everything else has been from a box or a tub, with a little fresh fruit and raw veg thrown in to fend off scurvy. I’ve got to do better. It’s expensive eating prefab stuff, and although most of the packaging is recyclable, it’s still a waste.

I’ve also been meaning to print out all the recipes from my favorite food bloggers — marking them as “keep new” in Bloglines works, but when you’ve accumulated maybe 150 recipes, it is rather difficult to remember which blogger created, for instance, the cool-sounding chestnut and apple muffins I’ve been meaning to try for the past three months — and put them in a notebook, organized by type and with credit lines so I remember who created which things. It just seems a little wasteful, though; instead, I should probably find some recipe software for Errol the Mac, who is portable and small enough to perch on my toaster oven as I prepare things, and move the recipes into that. (I’ve tried clipping recipes to Google Notebooks, but found it got overwhelmingly chaotic too quickly.) I really need to figure out the best solution soon.

In addition to not doing as much food prep as I’d like, I don’t seem to have enough time for knitting. I’ve got almost all of a sock that I knitted on the plane to Vancouver:

(The lace pattern doesn’t show up well in that, but trust me: it’s there. Once I get around to finishing the last four rows and doing the cuff, I’ll post a picture of it on an actual foot, probably mine — though I should probably shave my legs before taking the photo. Eeep.)

There’s also about 12.5 inches (about 31.75 cm) of a sweater, although the only photo I have shows significantly less progress than that:

Plus the cupcake hat for Christi’s baby, and a couple of projects that are currently hibernating (cabled scarf and checkerboard ankh afghan), and two projects that I haven’t had the nerve to admit to Ravelry I’m working on (hat for myself using this yarn, and a simple lacy scarf in black bananasilk). I like all these projects, but trying to split my time between them all means that nothing is moving very quickly at all — no way I’m going to finish the sweater before our annual meeting, which was my original deadline — and of course the knitting is a distraction that prevents me from getting other things done, too.

Then there are the non-knitting crafts I want to pursue. I spent yesterday afternoon practicing crochet with my grandmother, and actually succeeded in making a small single-crochet swatch. My how-to books have been helpful in learning the concept, but it actually helped a lot having an experienced crocheter right there to watch, to ask questions of (e.g., “Is it supposed to be this hard to work the chain, or am I doing something wrong?”), and just to chat: my grandmother and I get along pretty well but don’t have oodles in common, what with her being the widow of a Southern Baptist pastor and my being a godless heathen, but somehow playing with yarn and hooks gave us some common ground. It was actually one of the most relaxed visits we’ve had, and we’re planning to get together again on the last weekend each month. (Next month, I’m going to try teaching her to knit. Oh boy.)

Eventually, I hope to be able to make some of the cool lacework cardis I’ve seen floating around the Innarwebs, but maybe a good first non-swatchy project would be something small, maybe like these cupcakes. No idea what I’d do with them once they’re finished, but they should be fun and just challenging enough to help me learn.

I still haven’t been able to find the Pebeo Porcelaine pens I want, or the ShrinkyDinks, though to be fair I’ve only looked in one of the more indifferent craft stores. ::cough cough::Michael’s::cough cough:: If I can’t find them in a proper arts supply store, I suppose I’ll just order online.

I’m also curious about beading. This got started while I contemplated another sweater I really want to make, which calls for a silk beaded yarn for the contrast lace band around the waist and arms. Obviously, bug silk is right out, but I’ve got some vegan soysilk yarn I think would be a great substitute. The only thing is that it doesn’t come in a beaded version, and I’m not sure how to tell what size beads I should get to fit the yarn. (You can make the sweater without the beading, but I think the extra sparkle on the accent areas is rather prettier than the plain version.) I’d better learn, because there’s a throw blanket I really want to make, as well, that calls for beading along the edges. Then there is the possibility of making my own stitch markers, which doesn’t look all that hard. . . . What I may do is drop by one of the yarn shops and ask them if they could order a batch of the soysilk for me, and then ask if they have any suggestions on how to bead it.

Of course, if I had truly unlimited time as well as oodles of cash, I’d take pottery lessons and make all sorts of cool and practical mugs, dishes, and ovenware. Last time I looked, though, the classes were priced well out of my reach. I guess I’ll have to save that for when I win the lottery.

***

* The organization of the Trader Joe’s near me still baffles me, and I still cannot figure out where they keep basics like baking soda, but they’ve definitely grown on me. I adore their Tuscan white-bean hummus, they carry whole-wheat pita (staff of life around here) that actually doesn’t contain honey, and their price for Gardenburger ribz is actually rather good. I also appreciate the fact that they slap a big honking V on the front of the packaging of their vegan store-brand items, and the staff actually know how to pack groceries in canvas tote bags. I just wish they didn’t overpackage their produce so egregiously, and would tell me where to find the baking soda.
(back to the top!)

I never used to feel spring cleaning urges, but they’ve kind of snuck up on me the past few years. Not that I generally do much about them except get cranky, and maybe clean out a drawer of chuck a few old clothes on the donation pile, which then sits in the corner cluttering up the place for another six months minimum. (I tell myself that this donation layover is strategic: if I haven’t missed the item in six months, then I definitely didn’t need it; if I suddenly need it or want it during that time, though, I’ve still got it. This attempt at self-delusion would probably be more successful if I could put the donation boxes in a garage or attic, rather than leaving it as a big box o’ clutter on the little end table right by the door.)

Part of my problem is my tiny flat. I mean, I love the low utility bills, the efficiency, and the fact that it is the work of a moment to run the vacuum cleaner over my entire floor (or would be, if Nigel would stop shedding and/or I had a vacuum cleaner powerful enough to lift more than one dog hair at a time without then requiring several minutes’ rest to recover from the exertion). What I don’t love is the fact that, in order to declutter any area or rearrange any furniture, a space must first be cleared to put everything you’re organizing, relocating, or chucking out.

I really should just go through the entire place with three big, biodegradable garbage bags: one for donation stuff, one for recycling that has been lingering for a while (e.g., magazines I might want again at some point, but probably won’t), and one for throwing away the truly useless stuff that cannot possibly be rehomed. While I’m at it, I could collect all the stuff I’ve borrowed from people but not yet returned, and centralize it all in one box. (I could also go through the yarn stash and make notes of where I’ve stowed which skeins. When I first started Ravelry, I noticed that feature and thought, “How bizarre — who could ever forget where they’ve put their yarn?” Let’s just say that I have learned better since then.)

If I’m feeling really ambitious, I could even repot the houseplants, and deadhead them. Clean off the bookshelves and reorganize all my books, which have gotten into disarray over the past couple of years. I could even redo the blog template, with something with a wider text column, better layout, and room for widgets.

I probably won’t get to any of that, quite frankly. I’ll probably spend this weekend getting not much of anything done, as usual. The end of May is leaving it rather late for spring cleaning, anyway.

But at least I’m thinking about it. That counts for something, right?

Right?

It turned out that I forgot the cashews I’d bought specially for my trip; also my umbrella, which has gone missing somewhere in the murky depths of my flat. It also turned out that the conference hotel apparently believed that the correct temperature for a meeting room is something only slightly above absolute zero, with a noticeable draft in every part of the room, so although it was mild enough weather when I managed to get outside, I’m surprised I managed to get out of there with all my toes intact. (Must investigate knitting insulated liners for my dress shoes.)

The conference itself was interesting, but not as exciting or as helpful as I’d hoped. That’s not to say that I got nothing out of it — but most of the good ideas will come in handy when we move to more online content. (I particularly liked the idea of integrating social bookmarking for online content; I’m not sure how well that would work with members-only pages, but there are a couple of ways around that, I think. Of course, if I ruled the world, I’d make a lot more of our content accessible without member login, as well as completely redoing the online bookstore, but that is another story entirely and I shall stop talking about it now lest I get carried away and start ranting.)

The stuff I’d really hoped to learn, about paperless workflow, was not particularly helpful: either we’ve been doing it for years (e.g., sending out PDFs to authors instead of paper proofs), it seems weird (getting PDF proofs from the printer, which seems pointless because we’re sending them PDFs in the first place, so . . . why?), or the people giving the presentations either farmed it out to subcontractors (copyediting) or admitted that they hadn’t moved to paperless work (proofreading). All the XML people I spoke to, who were mostly vendors, wanted to take over our entire process and send it to India — a strange thing to propose to me, I thought, as it would effectively put my colleagues and me out of jobs, would it not? — and weren’t particularly interested in talking about how we could do it ourselves, or what tools or books they might sell me to help that process. (Additional note to vendors: if someone identifies herself as an associate editor, please do not later refer to her as assistant editor. These things, albeit minor, tend to rankle.)

It also struck me that, in comparison, our winter and annual meetings are much better organized. Granted that there’s an economy of scale (the CSE meeting had something like 325 attendees, I think; I can never recall how many people show up at our meetings, but I want to say that it’s usually at least 10 times that), but honestly, how difficult is it to put up a little sign on your registration table saying “Registration”? They had a sign you could see in front of the escalators, but the table itself was behind the escalators, with no label at all. The gap between sessions was usually 30 minutes, which is way too long (and is probably why the last sessions of the day let out at 5:30, which I think is rather late); on the other hand, on Tuesday the plenary speaker was supposed to start at the exact same time as the first sessions of the day let out, with no gap at all. Thus, you either skipped out of the sessions early, or tried to squeeze into the back of the room at the last minute. Or, you could do what I did: read the title and summary of his speech, realize that anyone who made his living telling people about futurism and isn’t talking about art is likely to make me either throw up a little in my mouth or giggle uncontrollably, and skip out on that particular speech. (This turned out to be a wise decision: while waiting for the next sessions to begin, the people sitting around me spontaneously and energetically began telling me how truly and spectacularly horrible the speech had been. Apparently, the man used “vision” as a verb, which we all agreed should be a capital offense.)

Also, if one more speaker had assumed that everyone in science editing must obviously work for a journal, not a book, I was going to scream. Perhaps I should raise this issue with the organization, and volunteer some time on some committee to ensure that editors of scientific books also be represented? Or maybe I should gather some data on our own work, and try to get a presentation accepted at a future meeting? Hmm.

On the other hand, they gave us a free continental breakfast every day (vegan option = just fruit, which gets tiresome, but at least guarantees I won’t come down with scurvy), and the opening day’s keynote speaker, Ian Sterling, was truly excellent. His slides were perhaps a little, er, colorful — I had not realized quite how much blood was involved when a polar bear is successful when hunting — but he was engaging, eloquent, and extremely successful at conveying the import behind something like four decades of research. I wonder whether we could get him as a speaker at one of our conferences. . . ?

General impressions of Vancouver: not as exciting as I’d hoped. Architecturally fairly standard, at least in the downtown area where I was. Lots of hedges fencing in private homes, which was a bit weird but in a pleasant-ish way. Lots of hybrid taxis. Lots of homeless, including a large number of younger people sleeping rough. (One of the moderators, who was a local guy, actually mentioned that in his post-session comments: apparently the government has turned out patients from mental health care, regardless of whether they have any outside support system in place or anywhere to go. If that’s true, apparently our northern neighbors learned nothing from our stupid turfing-out of patients in the 1980s.) This last factor probably affected my impression of the city the most; as upsetting it is to see homeless people here and feel powerless to help them in any real way, somehow it’s even worse in a country that I expect to be more progressive when it comes to serving their citizens rather than the interests of big business. (I don’t remember seeing large numbers of homeless people in Quebec City two years ago, so either this is a fairly recent phenomenon, or it’s something happening on the West Coast, or it was better hidden, or something.)

Pleasant things about Vancouver, though, included the fairly large number of parks within walking distance of my hotel, the mountains ringing the city, the delightfully mild weather, the apparent concern of its citizens for their dogs (all dogs I saw seemed happy, well-adjusted, and calm but pleased to be out and about; they even responded when you smiled at them, which seems rare among big-city dogs), and the interesting city wildlife. Okay, they were mostly pigeons, which are everywhere, but there were some freakin’ gigantic gulls around, and they were fun to watch. On one walk, I even encountered a young mouse, who stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and kind of looked at me like, “Er, what? Should I move, or are you going to go around me? What’s the protocol here?” Rather cute little mouse, actually. (Now that I think about it, I really hope he was wild and just inexperienced, and not someone’s companion who had gotten lost or abandoned. If he doesn’t know how to look out for himself, he’ll be in trouble, poor thing.)

Anyway, I’ll shut up about the meeting and related bits now. Photos will be posted later, possibly tomorrow or Friday. I’m actually glad to be back: being there alone, without Internet service, unable to use my phone without incurring international roaming charges, was kind of lonely. Of course, now I’m sitting here alone in my flat, Nigel still being at his vet’s for boarding, but at least I’ll get to see some actual people I know tomorrow, and pick up my lovely dog. (That will be a relief: while I was away, I had a peculiar dream about Neil Gaiman telling me that he’d found the perfect dog for me to adopt, and when I woke up I had the hardest time shaking the conviction that something had happened to Nigel and the vet just hadn’t called me. Silly, I know, but it was unsettling.)

Packing for a trip is always like this: no matter how carefully I plan, draw up detailed lists with illustrations and carefully numbered steps, and get an early start packing, it always seems to disintegrate into something a step away from pandemonium. Well, it’s a modest pandemonium, reasonably quiet except for the muttering and occasional swearing, but the point is that it never goes as smoothly or as quickly as I think it should.

Case in point is, obviously, the trip to Vancouver for the meeting. I’ve actually planned ahead and checked Google’s weather for Vancouver all week, and found that the temperatures have actually been a fair bit warmer than those in Atlanta (though we’ve had an abnormally cool week): today, for instance, Atlanta’s high was 22 degC (about 72 degF), whereas Vancouver’s was apparently a shocking 33 degC (just over 91 degF). Consequently, I packed extremely lightweight clothing, and felt rather smug about my preparedness.

Of course, now I learn that the temperatures are supposed to drop pretty much as soon as my plane touches down, and the expected high temperatures for my stay are in the mid-teens on the Celcius scale (low end of the 60s Fahrenheit). This I learn, of course, after I’ve already packed my carefully selected outfits for each day, plus a couple of more casual things for the evening.

Screw it. I’m not repacking everything. I’ll just throw in a turtleneck.

I think I’m on better footing food-wise. I stopped off as Cosmo’s today and bought enough food that I may risk making customs officers think I’m part of some wacky underground movement smuggling vegan food bars and jerky across the border. (Yes, Vancouver seems to be pretty darned vegan-friendly, but it never hurts to prepare for the worst. Plus, I’ve got essentially two full days on airplanes and in airports to deal with, and I’m not sure how tired I’ll be or how inclined to gad about, particularly at first. I’d far rather overpack food and wind up with leftovers than bring only a couple of things and be ready to gnaw my own arm off by the second evening.) I think I wound up getting one of every flavor of the new Pro Bar Food Meal Replacement bars (can’t wait to try them! such cool flavors), plus some extra Vega bars, some drink mixes, chocolate, rice crisp bars, and an embarrassment of various jerky items. (I have learned that a little variety in one’s emergency food is important. It is dismal to sit in one’s hotel room in a strange city, exhausted and cranky and ravenously hungry, while being simultaneously sick to freakin’ death of the one brand of food bar you’ve brought with you.) If I’d really had my act together, I would’ve made some tofu jerky from How It All Vegan, but that would’ve required actual action on my part to marinate the tofu last night. Obviously, that wasn’t going to happen.

I also got a couple of things for when I return, probably tired and cranky and in need of treats. Most exciting among the rewards for coming back home is a great big log o’ Teese. I’ve heard super things about this product, and the Chicago Soy Dairy certainly has a phenomenal track record (Temptations frozen dessert, anyone?), so I’m pretty excited. It’s supposed to be rather akin to a dairy fresh mozzarella, which would potentially mean that, if it tastes good unmelty, I can recreate the ungodly-good salads I used to make with really proper heirloom tomatoes that actually smelled like tomatoes (no refrigeration, ever! genuinely vine-ripened!), avocado, buffalo mozzarella, olive oil, and about a bucket of supermarket balsamic vinegar. (It works okay with tofu, but you really should marinate the tofu in the vinegar for at least half an hour. Well, that’s assuming you like vinegar as much as I do, and I really like vinegar.*)

I do wish I could bring some oranges or bananas with me, but I seem to recall that customs people frown on that sort of thing when traveling internationally. Surely I can find some little shop near-ish the hotel that sells fruit, or find the bus that goes to one of the natural foods stores on my HappyCow printout, so I don’t come down with scurvy while I’m away.

The primary hitch I’ve run into while packing, though, is deciding what knitting to take with me. I’m a little worried that my sweater might cause a little alarm among the various airport security staff, given that it is being knit not only on metal needles, but on circulars (i.e., metal needles that are linked by a flexible yet sturdy cord, which the imaginative yet malignant might see as a possible substitute for piano wire in the weapons arena). My plan to buy substitute bamboo or plastic needles, which might seem wimpier and thus less threatening to non-knitters, didn’t really come about (i.e., I took a nap instead of going shopping), so I’ve decided to avoid possible problems and just pack my sweater-in-progress in my checked luggage. My other WIPs include a cupcake hat for Christi’s upcoming daughter (whom I have temporarily and in a thoroughly unofficial way named Elmindreda, simply because it amuses me), but unfortunately I’ve left that at the office (lunchtime knitting project); a cabled scarf, which would be ideal but for the fact that I can just see myself dropping the cable needle and crawling around the entire airplane looking for it, asking people to move their feet and getting hysterical because it’s the second cable needle I’ve lost; and a checkerboard afghan with a pattern of ankhs, which is cool but (a) hibernating and (b) also worked on metal needles, and I don’t have non-metal needles of that size. (Plus, I don’t fancy trying colorwork in airports or on a plane.)

I’m kind of inclined to do socks, which are compact and use dinky little needles that are bordering on toothpicks. True, some people get freaked out by the sheer number of dinky little needles involved (usually four or five), and each needle has not one but two points, thus doubling the scary pointiness, but . . . they really are practically toothpicks. The pattern I’m considering (mainly because it’s pretty, and I’ve already bought it and printed it out, so it’s convenient) calls for size 2 needles, which are 2.75 mm wide. For the non-SI-friendly, that’s 0.108 inch. They’re hardly threatening. You’d be hard-pressed to stab a block of tofu with it, let alone an actual person.

So, barring the last-minute things I still need to pack, such as my toothbrush, and getting dressed in the morning — and actually getting up in time to catch my flight — I should be pretty much set.

Of course, by the time my plane is somewhere over Toledo, I’ll probably remember that I’ve forgotten something absolutely vital, simply because the Fates have deemed that it is impossible for me to go anywhere, even for a weekend, without forgetting something. My bet is that I’ll forget to water the plants, and they’ll all wither and die.

*** ***

*When I was, oh, maybe eight or so, I decided to Play Restaurant in my playroom in the basement. I had a whole menu planned out of things I could make by myself, and coerced my long-suffering but supportive parents into agreeing to be my customers. What I was particularly excited about, and actually pressured the poor grown-ups into ordering, was the “wine” (quotations used intentionally), because I had learned somehow about the relationship between wine and vinegar and, never having had wine in a personal and direct fashion, became convinced that I could turn vinegar back into wine simply by diluting plain, bog-standard white vinegar a bit with water.

I can still remember the looks on their faces. . . . Mom, Dad, I’m sorry. It seemed like a good idea at the time, honestly.

(”Zwhoosh” being the sound of time zooming by at a mad pace, of course.)

Apparently the Martians have been messing with my time sense again, because somehow it’s gotten to be bang in the middle of May, and I haven’t updated le blog for, what, six weeks now? I have no idea what happened to April; did we even have one this year?

I shall try to do better. I know I’ve said that before, but this time I really mean it, for sure.

Erm, just as soon as I get back from my upcoming trip to Vancouver, that is (yay! Canada! Northwest Coastal Region!), and recover from the chaos and uproar that are sure to ensue when a gaggle of feral science editors get together and talk shop and show grammatically precise and correctly punctuated PowerPoints to each other about online manuscript submission, open access, and streamlining peer review. Good fun.

To fill in the time until I get back, assuming not everyone has abandoned even pretending to read this thing on the reasonable assumption that I’ve flaked out completely, as opposed to just partially, I submit a meme. I wasn’t tagged, so I hope I’m not committing some breach of meme protocol by hijacking it, but I’m sure someone will let me know if I am. I personally encountered it first at Carena’s Craftblog (she who is now responsible for my mad craving for a Pebeo Porcelaine 105 pen, and is the main source of all my non-knitting-related craftiness urges. Well, except for the shrinky-dink craving. Please, please, do not let me loose in a craft store unchaperoned right now, or I shall soon be penniless).

I don’t generally do memes, but this one involves books, which cannot be entirely of the bad:

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users.* As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Miserables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes: a memoir
The God of Small Things (ETA: Does Small Gods count as close enough?)
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

It’s possible that some of the things I read yonks ago actually were for school and I just don’t remember that. It’s also possible that I left off a couple that didn’t make a huge impression on me; f’rinstance, I’m pretty sure I at least started something by Jane Austen, but after this many years I cannot remember which particular Empire-waist-dress-wearing, be-bonneted heroines were involved. They all blend together for me, much like the bits and bobs of Hemingway I’ve tried. I stand amazed, though, at the presence of several Atwood and Gaiman books on the list — how on earth can people refrain from tearing into those books as soon as they get their hands on them? Particularly Oryx and Crake, which is one of my absolute, forever favorites. . . .

(Someone out there would probably despises either or both of those authors, but feels equally appalled at the number of Dickens books I started but wound up burying under piles of other books and dog hair so I wouldn’t have to look at them any more. Sorry. Dickens just makes my teeth itch.)

Anyway, there’s yer meme. I’m too much of a weenie to tag someone else, but if you do happen to pick up the thread from here, it would brighten my day and/or night if you’d let me know with a link or an e-mail. Alternatively, if you felt compelled, you could gently mock my reading choices or recommend books on the list I really should read (or avoid) through the comments.

I’ve got a list of about a dozen errands and things I have to accomplish before I leave on Saturday, but I’ll try to stop in again if I can. I haven’t yet decided whether to bring Errol the Mac with me, because the hotel is one of the snooty convention ones and charges for Internet access, and I don’t know yet how prevalent free hotspots are in Vancouver. (At least I’ve got my HappyCow list of veg-friendly restaurants, my passport [complete with absolutely preposterous photo, because they made me take off my glasses, with the result that I look like a concussed gerbil with a toothache], and both Travelocity and hotel confirmations printed out, so at least I’ve got the really vital things sorted out and pre-researched.)

*** ***

*Not sure how old this meme is. You can see the current rankings here. Brave New World, for instance, has dropped as of this writing to number 187.

Every year during deadline season, the stress seems to manifest itself slightly differently. There’s been the insomnia; the strange sensation as if someone was gripping my stomach (the organ, not the bodily region) and periodically digging nails in; the pinched shoulder nerves; the tooth grinding. Forgetting to eat until I’m nearly falling over is a repeat visitor, as are vivid dreams and nightmares.

This year, apparently, it’s music: I find myself singing. Out loud. Songs I made up. Rather badly.

There was “We Are So Screwed,” sung to the tune of the theme song from “My Three Sons.” For variety, a very similar song to the tune of “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.” And, of course, various obscenity-filled songs telling uncooperative and/or dictatorial authors to get over themselves and do anatomically unlikely things. Usually, I don’t realize I’m doing it until my voice has gotten loud enough for people standing in the hallway outside my door to hear me.

Apparently it’s carrying over into my free hours, as well. I realized after dinner that, sometime between about 9:00 last night and then, my cable needle had gone missing. It’s the small one, the only one that goes with my size 8 needles, and I cannot find the thing at all, even after spending quite a fair bit of time tearing through the nightstand drawer (in case it had fallen in) and the floor all around the futon. Obviously, Nigel has stolen the needle and is hiding it, filled with secret glee that I cannot make further progress on my cabled scarf:

It was only when I had given up that I realized I’d been singing “Where the Fuck Did the Cable Needle Go” to the tune of “Camptown Races.” Complete with “doo-dah”s. Evidently, I need help.

Instead of knitting tonight, I suppose I’ll just have to make do with watching the extras on my “Little Britain Live” DVD (from my kind and generous parents, who also provided me with “Little Britain Abroad” and the first series of “The Catherine Tate Show” [Am I bovvered? Apparently, yes.]).