eat light:

thanks to alice_at_night for sending me this link.

knitted condom, anyone?

i particularly love the warning notice:
Warning: People who use the knitted condom have a much higher risk of pregnancy and STDs. The knitted condom may also cause burning, chaffing, vaginal dryness, loss of errection, and extreme pain. People who want to enjoy sex should not use the knitted condom.

(i think they mean "chafing.")

xtingu posted this vid awhile back. i really liked it and forgot what it was called or how to find it (without going back through all of xtingu's old posts, anyway). today i was looking at a couple of knitting instructional vids on U-tube (for the magic loop cast on and for knitting on two circular needles, in case you're curious. i had already figured out the latter over the weekend, but wanted to see how a "pro" would teach it, in case i might have missed a tip or a trick; the former is just a really cool way to start a closed tube rather than an open one, which is how circular knitting usually goes--it's good for the toes of socks and such.)... anyway, this vid came up in the "more" list. i watched it again, and it resonated in a way that it hadn't, before, because my knitting obsession post-dates my first viewing. (i learned to knit when i was 18 or 19, but did not become obsessed with it until september-ish. since that time, i have nearly doubled my lifetime total of completed projects.) here it is for your viewing pleasure, in case you haven't seen it before. even if you're not a knitter, or if you're not the least bit interested in knitting, the animation is cool. i just wish they'd rendered the mechanics of knitting more accurately...

i finished another sweater last night. i have been a little manic with the knitting lately...going a little stir crazy, i guess. i have been having good writing days lately too (not every day, but many days), so i'm not knitting to the exclusion of my real work or anything. but still, i started this like a week and a half ago.

( yarn pron with piXXX! )

i have started a new knitting project (no pics yet--i'll post some when it's done). i'm making it with some cream yarn (lamb's pride again) that i bought a long, long, long time ago--it was marked down to half price, and they had 10 skeins left in the same dye lot, so i bought all of it. i have always been meaning to do something with it, and now i am. finally. after moving it 2-3 times in vermont, then out to seattle, then 3 times in seattle (4 if you count the move to a storage area in april 2006).

( knitterotica behind cut )

i thought i would post some photos of the sweater project i'm finishing up. it will be a late-ish birthday gift for glaucon. as you'll see from the photos, the sweater does not have a collar yet; i have to add that (it will be knitted in the round) after sewing all of the seams. each panel still has a certain number of live stitches at the top--those metal things that look like big safety pins are stitch holders. they keep the live stitches from unraveling. the collar, which will probably be a turtleneck (because that's what glaucon requested, though the pattern calls for a crew neck, and i may have to revert to that if the turtleneck doesn't look right), will grow out of those live stitches, plus a few that i will create along the top of the front panel.

it is really something to put a big project like this together--really satisfying. i'm excited to finish it. i have knitted a number of whole sweaters before: a total of 4--one adult sized, which i knitted for myself in the early 90's, and 3 of varying child sizes for the nieces and nephews i had at the time (my youngest niece had not been born yet). it has been awhile!

a professor once gave me a valuable piece of advice: when asked for a good graduate school survival tip, he said, "get a hobby." he was right. i guess i have 2 hobbies. knitting and running, taken together, give me plenty of tactile and somatic, soothing and meditative activity as a counterbalance to thinking and writing, and especially to the stress of getting overwhelmed by the dissertation as a "whole project," to say nothing of what comes afterward... these two hobbies are both good metaphors for the kind of slow and steady work that gets a dissertation written, too: step by step. stitch by stitch. mile by mile. row by row.

word by word. page by page.

meh. i know it's cheesy, but it helps my self-confidence, so :-P TBBBBTTTBTHTHTH!

( knitting porn behind cut ) OK, back to work...

i just added a new link to my sidebar. it's for the yarn harlot, a blogger, comedian, and knitter (not necessarily in that order). i'm a sometime knitter too, so when i heard about the blog (in today's p-i), i decided to link to it.

speaking of knitting...i'm currently working on a hat for a friend. i have completed other projects, too: a sweater for myself, and sweaters for 3 of my nieces and nephews (the 4th--my second niece--had not yet been born at the time). my next project will be to complete a brown sweater (it's man-sized, not arguchik-sized) i started several years ago. i'm hoping it will fit glaucon. we'll see. it's somewhat close to done already--i have finished the back and the sleeves, and the front is about half knitted. then i'll just need to assemble and finish it.

i've been feeling extremely run down over the last few days--emotionally and physically wrung out. i'm not sure if it's from traveling, jet lag, or if it's from dealing with my parents' legal and medical situation. there are things we're dealing with, "we" being my siblings and myself, that i haven't blogged about and probably won't. it concerns my parents' finances. long story short: we need to take over, and have been figuring out the legal processes for doing that. at the same time, we're trying to have them medically evaluated so we can explore the possibility of getting one or both of them on one of the new anti-dementia drugs like aricept. there's a whole class of these drugs out now, but aricept is the only one i'm familiar with so far. anyway, we had a meeting with our parents' estate lawyer yesterday that went well, in terms of finding out what non-adversarial options are available to us under the legal framework that our parents put in place while they were still "all there." but it went very badly in terms of our father's response. he became extremely agitated, combative, and paranoid about the meeting (he didn't understand the purpose for it, even when we tried to explain it in very clear, simple terms), and refused to even get out of the car. so...we had the meeting without him.

most likely i'm worn out from all of this, in combination. all i've got to say is...i'm damn glad i'm not an only child. this would be excruciating if i weren't sharing it with a bunch of other people who are thinking and feeling pretty much the same things i am. my thoughts and feelings are a conflicted, tangled mess, and it really helps to be able to talk about it with my sisters and brother. i'm also just glad that i'm not carrying 100% of the responsibility on my own shoulders. the four of us together have formed a pretty useful little democracy here, and we debate our options before deciding what to do. because we are unanimously in agreement about the necessity of immediately taking legal steps to protect our parents' interests, i'm 4X more confident that we're doing the best, right thing.

p.s. unfortunately, i'm also beginning to feel like it might be time for me to relocate from seattle, to someplace that's closer to my parents. i really don't ever want to live in michigan again, but it would be nice to live within driving distance, so i could visit them more than once per year (which is all i can afford as a graduate student). one more motivation to crank on my dissertation.

(my to-do list for the next ~year and a half: 1. finish dissertation. 2. defend it and graduate. 3. find "real" job!!!)