I made this scarf to match my slouchy hat with the bit of sock yarn that I had left from the hat and some of the gray yarn I had left from the thermal pullover. I can't remember what inspired the stitch pattern but I think it was a scarf I saw on Ravelry.com. I decided to start from the two ends and work towards the middle so that if I ran out of yarn and had to introduce another color or something it wouldn't be just at one end.

Unfortunately I didn't plan ahead quite enough and I made both sides the same so that when I got ready to graft the two halves together the waves did not match up because instead of being complementary they were mirror images. Fortunately being the fabulous knitter that I am I was able to overcome my earlier mistake by knitting one row on each side that had only decreases and not increases to make a flat edge for grafting. It makes for a sort of funny, none matching wave in the middle of the scarf but since it is the middle everyone will just think I put it there on purpose. Well anyway that's my story and I'm sticking with it.

We saw two productions at the International Mime festival this year. The first one was an adaptation of the story of Tamar from the Old Testament using large puppets and the second one was an abstract piece called The Timidity of Bones. The puppets worked in some ways but the actors or mime artists or whatever they are called kept disconnecting their heads which I found a bit confusing. Also having read the story before I left it seemed as if the artists took some liberties with the relationships between Tamar and her dead husband's brothers but overall but to be honest not as much liberty as I was expecting them to have taken given the womens' lib promo in the description. Also they had voice/written narration which seemed a bit like cheating for mime.

The second production was my favorite. From the festival website: "Eerily impressed into the surface of a large, luminous white screen, the outline of bones and skeletal forms appear." I think it was actually a man and a woman who may have been at least mostly naked who were pressing their own bodies into the white screen but they certainly got the job done. Aside from the loud sound track/sounds of crackling electricity it was almost memorizing and short (only 30 minutes) - the best combination. The way the artists pushed their bodies and especially their arms and hands into the screen it really did look like bones that were sort of rising and sliding along the screen and then slipping back the same way that dolphins and whales do on the surface of water. It was truly artistic and memorable and has made me more of a fan of the mime festival. I will be looking forward to its return next year.

The name sums it up. This is a Clint Eastwood cowboy movie that Kim got for Christmas and as far as cowboy movies go it is pretty watchable. Unfortunately it lacks the standard happy ending good guy triumph energy which normally comes at the end of a cowboy movie that makes you want to swing your hat in the air and yell ye-haw! Ok well to be honest I haven't actually seen that many cowboy movies and the ones I have watched put me to sleep but that's not really the point. Clint Eastwood plays a retired gunmen who embarks on a journey to deliver some payback to a guy who knifed a prostitute and each of the characters he meets along the way is suffering from the same affliction: a general lack of forgiveness in the hard harsh desert of the west. It's a good week day movie to watch in the evening after dinner to spark a bit of conversation especially if you've seen enough of Eastwood's other movies to enter into a compare and contrast college essay sort of discussion. Fortunately when Kim and I watched it we'd had just enough wine to avoid Kim's follow up essay about imagery and foreshadowing but you should feel free to have one without me if the mood strikes you.

I didn't have too many expectations when I went to see this movie and in my opinion that is the only way to approach a blockbuster. I had seen a 10 minute filler show (the kind that fills the space between a show that lasted 50 minutes and the next hour break on tv) on the special effects which was what made me interested in the first place but that was about all I knew. Overall I though the movie was pretty good although it was unnecessarily long. When I thought we'd reached at least the 1.5 hour mark I thought to myself, well this isn't so bad the movie is more than half over and I don't feel like I've been sitting here all that long at all! As I'm sure you can guess in retrospect it was no where near an hour from the end of the movie. In fact I was starting to suspect that I was loosing any tangible connection I had to the time space continuum and that it would never end and one day I would finally stumble out of the theater only to discover floating cars and clothes made out of foil but then it finally ended and much to my relief the underground trains were still underground and connected to the tracks (I made that sentence extra long to give you a sense of my suffering). The special effects were as impressive as promised although I'm not convinced that the 3d really added much and I'm certainly not interested in watching my tv at home in 3d. There was a bit of a conservation/its wrong to wipe out indigenous people groups just for cash sort of message but most important is the message that as long as the attractive hero is on your side you can't help but win. I'm not sure I came out quite as concerned as the Pope did about the worship of nature especially since all those plastic 2d glasses were constructed as single use non recyclable items. Overall I would give this movie a thumbs up but as the guy on the train said on the way home "it really wasn't worth seeing twice"

I recently finished "Lost in a Good Book" by Jasper Fforde and I highly recommend it. It was witty and amusing and smart and entertaining and more importantly had just enough characters and plot twists to leave me wanting more rather than making me want to stuff the book into a small space under the bed in hopes that it would shrink before I found it again. The heroine of the series is Thursday Next who joins 'Jurisfiction', the policing agency within the book world, to try to track down a man who she trapped in an Edgar Allen Poe story in a previous episode (The Eyre Affair - which I also highly recommend). She teams up with Miss Havesham from Dickens, who I might add is rather more amusing than in her original incarnation, who helps her master book travel. Reading Jasper Fforde books gives me alternating desires to read more classics so I can get more of the literary references he makes to wanting to read more of his books so I can enjoy the witticisms that I do get. His characters are likable (the good guys anyway) and free from foul language and rampant sex and some even have cute and slightly stupid pets. If you are looking for a fun read that will make you want to read more then this is the book for you!

Having just made a pullover from a Vogue that was full of errors I've sworn off Vogue (again) and picked out a more simple Interweave Knits pattern instead. I knitted up a gauge/swatch yesterday and I think there is enough going on with all the color changing in the yarn without adding fancy cabling. This pattern has nice clean lines including a hem, which I've never knitted before, and shaping for both the waist and the cap sleeves. I've only knitted about and inch and a half so far but I like how it looks. Here is a link to a photo of the sweater. It's from Spring 2007 and it's called the Slanted Neck Pullover.

I finally finished this sweater after spending an hour or so trying to knit the last four rows of the hood based on a completely incorrect pattern. Thanks Vogue Knitting for reminding me why I swore off your patterns the last time. Anyway I got some help from several Ravelry knitters who had figured it out but then when I finally got it finished I didn't like how big and floppy it was and since it didn't even look good up I just ripped it out and then made the fold over collar you see in the photos. I'm pleased with how the sweater turned out in the end. I did squeeze in one more cable on the back than the pattern called for when I had my second attempt at finishing. Other than that the only change I made was to lengthen the sleeves.