scifiknitter

I have a new-to-me computer! And I love it. We got a new 17 inch MacBook Pro for our daughter as a college graduation present. She needed an upgrade as her computer, a first generation 15 inch MacBook Pro, was starting to struggle a bit when she did statistical modeling on it. We timed the purchase so that her new laptop arrived when she came home for a week after her surgery. When we gave the new laptop to her, she gave me the first-gen MBP. Which, I will have you know, she bought herself. She is not accustomed to getting her computers from Mom and Dad, she has saved up her pennies and bought two Apple laptops over the years. I’m the lucky person who has inherited each of her purchases over time, though I paid cash for the first one. This lappy is a gift. We don’t think we gave an extravagant gift. For one thing, my father and stepmother contributed towards the purchase, and are official go-givers with us. The new machine is an investment in her professional future. She NEEDS computin...

I have become a big fan of the work of Rosemary Hill. Romi designs beautiful knitted lace (plus sells handmade shawl pins that are elegant and unstuffy). I’ve now knit two of her patterns: the Ice Queen, and Brandywine . Brandywine is a very special pattern. When you create a bit of beauty for a friend, a loved one, or yourself, you are also contributing to a long term project. When you buy the pattern for Brandywine, $5 of the $6.50 price of the pattern is donated by Romi to a group doing relief work in Haiti. She hopes to eventually contribute $50,000, and has already given $10,500. It feels good to have a piece of the action. This project started with both a lovely pattern and gorgeous yarn. I used about half of a skein of Silk Noir, a 100% silk yarn dyed by the Great Adirondack Yarn Company. From 05.2010 Brandywine This yarn has so many short lengths of different colors, it would sound like a mishmash if I listed them all. Combined, the overall effect is a brownish-pinkish-purple. ...

A law of blogging: the more you have to blog about, the less likely you are to have enough time to blog. My life has been very full with work and preparations for surgery. The surgery has now happened and I have recovered to the point of being out of pain with no pain pills required. I will be out of work on medical leave for three more weeks - a pause for some reading, some knitting, and some thinking during the glorious days of May. This past week I went to Fletcher Allen Health Center in Burlington, Vermont, and had a laproscopic hysterectomy. As usual, immersion in the alternate culture of modern medicine was an interesting experience. Every hospital is different, and FAHC is my favorite one so far. The hospital is a full fledged teaching hospital, rife with med students and residents, but without the underlying feeling of stress that I sense at Strong Memorial Hospital, the other teaching hospital that I know. Every contact that I had with every level of staff was friendly, polite...

From Ezra Klein comes this meme (and of course he got it from someone else): "go to your Amazon orders page, and see what the very first thing you ordered from Amazon was." It looks like my first purchase was December 5, 1998. I bought an imported recording of "J.S. Bach's Preludes & Fugues V.2" performed by John Lewis as a Christmas present for my father. I don't know if I ever heard that CD. I bet it's a good one. Wow. 1998. That's a pretty long-term relationship with a company.