Keeping In Touch

I am so excited to be going to Allan and Jen’s wedding soon! Really soon! I have yet to finish a lace shawl I was going to wear!* Eeek! Yay!

This is the wire necklace I knit!** Yay!



This is "hiking" in Calero County with Dancin’ Cicada Jen and her lovely Mum! Yay!



This last Sunday was a dance workshop with Ariellah, which was really quite good; more like a long class than a “workshop," I guess (I’m not sure what the difference is… workshops are one-shots?) in that it was in a proper studio with only ten people. She does Gothic tribal fusion so most of the technique was directly transferable to the ATS that I like.*** The only part I didn’t like so much was one expressiveness-training bit where we paired up and then danced “to” our partner (i.e. the partner stood and watched). It’s almost impossible to avoid the lap dance vibe, which is icky. I ended up just repeating some drills and asking my partner for a technical critique... is my arm back far enough? Are my hands too stiff? Not in the spirit of the assignment, but oh well.

We saw Spiderman 3 on Saturday on Cryptic’s dime – after all, it’s basically research for the game. I liked it but I thought it was a bit flabby in places, and a bit too long.**** There were also previews for Pirates of the Caribbean 3 and Harry Potter, um, five? Looks like a good summer for eye candy, anyway.

Oh, a completely unrelated but possibly amusing work story: an important part of our software is to record how a drug product performs in clinical trials, so that people can relate the performance back to its manufacturing process and see what works and what doesn’t. I expressed this in a meeting by saying “If the stuff turns your rats purple, you want to know why.” A senior designer in the meeting, a lovely and dignified East Indian lady, started laughing so hard I feared for her life. It turns out she thought I’d said “If the stuff turns your ass purple…” At least I've learned a) to enunciate better and b) that any small lapse in verbal decorum won’t have people clutching their pearls.

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* I’m on the border, but each round is between 1,500 and 1,600 stitches and takes me about 45 minutes because lace is tricksy. I’ve done 10 of the 50 rounds. I’m not actually sure I’ll be able to finish, since there's also blocking to be done. Unblocked knitted white lace looks exactly like ramen.

** I used a thicker gauge wire (28 instead of 34) because that was all I could find and I wanted to have it NOW, plus I used 3.75 mm needles, not thinking that it would make much of a difference. It did! I thinkthe 6mm beads look smaller than in the original pattern (and did you see that Romi read this? Eee!), or maybe that's because I used pale blue beads with dark seed beads. I'm pretty happy with it, though, and I have a schwack of the wire. Time for experiments!

*** ATS is always improv, always in a group. Ariellah does mainly choreographed solos (as far as I can tell). But the movement “vocabulary” is very similar – controlled, level, isolated movements.

**** And obligatory nitpicking… what the hell was that experiment that ended up creating the Sandman? Scientists just turning on giant disintegrating blenders in open pits in fields in the middle of the night for no apparent reason? With minimal monitoring and no concern for confounding factors (“Oh, it’s probably just a bird”)? Yes, yes, I know, it’s comic book science, it doesn’t have to be for anything. Still.