Sorry for the lack of posts...

...but it's hard to blog from the PICKET LINE!

Basically, I've spent all of my free time preparing and mobilizing for the grad student's strike here at UMich (because we need a GODDAMN CONTRACT! Right? YEAH!). Today was the first day, and I am achy and covered in blisters.

Regular blogging will resume when the dust has settled and I get a living wage.

Fighting the Good Fight

So, as alluded to in my last post, I spent the weekend at another one of those three-day-long socialist meetings. These meetings are so odd - on the one hand, I really enjoy them because I no longer live near a proper branch and thus no longer get these kinds of awesome conversations and get all pumped and inspired to do stuff (instead, as you know, I watch a lot of of ANTM). On the other hand, as much as I like the people there, they do tend to be a bit pretentious and drop terms like 'historical materialism' and 'radicalized youth' like they were the names of celebrities and they were desperately trying to get in to a club on Saturday night.

Mostly though, it was just exhausting. I stayed focused by writing really detailed notes and by knitting these socks:

Check out the TV: It's SPRING BREAK and I'm rewatching as much of Lost as is humanly possible.

They don't really have a name yet, but they're gray, not fancy at all, and for my mechanic stepfather. Given the atmosphere, I was toying with calling them proletariat socks of something equally ridiculous.

If you've ever wondered what our kind does for fun, stay tuned - Dani and I blogged the Oscars and it will be posted this week.

Fuck you, Murphy's Law!

Man, I must have some messed up karma or something, because because everything that could have gone wrong since leaving Houston has. Well, I guess not everything, but most things. Let me start at the begining:

1) the plane trip to Minnesota:
So, yeah, here's what happened. I got to the airport in plenty of time and checked in. I got pulled out of the security line ("randomly," of course, like always. I don't know if it's my affiliation with revolutionary politics, or the fact that I look vaguely Middle Eastern or what, but the Houston security dudes are totally suspicious of me), but that was alright. Whatever. So, I go to my gate, plop down with some knitting and....the lane is delayed for an hour and half.

Eventually, we get on the plane (yay!)....and pull away from the gate (yay!)....and.....sit there. The captain then comes on to tell us that there's weather issues in Dallas, where I had a layover, and that we won't be flying for another 3 HOURS. So we get off the plane and I get rebooked on a direct flight to Minneapolis (yay!)....on another airline (gah).

I leave the gate and terminal, and have to pick up my baggage at the lost luggage counter at airline #2 (which took forever), change terminals, and check in again. Only now it's later and there are a bazillion people in the airport so it takes forever. this flight is delayed an hour and a half too, but I do eventually make it to Minneapolis.

2) The gigantic socialist thingy:
Remember that? I was totally psyched because a)nothing's better than spending Memorial Day weekend plotting to over through the capitalist system and b) my bestest buddy ever was housing me! Sweet!

Except that not even the most hardcore socialist can really handle 30 straight hours in one room talking about dialectic materialism. Seriously, we were all zombies by the end. But that wasn't too bad. The bad thing was....

3) attack of the headcold
...I got totally sick. Jon was sick last week, and must have passed it to me at some point when we were not sleeping enough or eating properly during said gigantic socialist thingy. I was feeling kinda nasty on the second day, but didn't think much of it, and the third day I was really tired, but who wouldn't be at that point?

I'd decided to stay in Minneapolis a few extra days to bond with Dani the Wonder Friend, and we had plans! Awesome plans! Yesterday, our plans involved a baseball game.

See how happy we are? Dani and her nachos and me and my delicious bratwurst.

Too bad we left in the seventh inning. We couldn't make it, we were tired and congested and generally grumpy. And today, we both woke up feeling absolutely horrible. Seriously, I didn't even know the human body could produce this much mucus! We've spent the day whimpering staring vacantly into space.

This is where Murphy's Law gets cruel. I haven't seen Dani in like, 6 months! And instead of hanging out together and being generally awesome, we're napping in separate rooms. I swear to god, if something else goes wrong its a government conspiracy.

I did finish the other end section of the scarf, though. So that's good news.

Oh man.

What a horribly hectic week. Nothing really major happened classwise - I had a particularly tedious group project to do and some heavier than usual reading. It was pretty light research-wise too. So what was so bad? Probably some combination of a continued lack of sleep and the psychology graduate program recruitment weekend. I'll start at the beginning.

Monday went pretty well until I got another migraine. I spent the afternoon and a lot of the evening on the bathroom floor because it's the only room in our apartment without windows, and therefore the darkest and most migraine-friendly. Once I started feeling a bit better, I had to finish a problem set for stats, which meant I got to sleep far later than I was planning to. Oh well. Tuesday went well enough, except that I agreed to host a student for recruitment weekend (my research assistant on my honors project! Oberlin represent!), so I spent much of the day trying to clean up. During my questionnaire design class, I got really bored and scribbled some cable designs for a pair of socks I'm planning. Here's said charts all knitted into swatches:

(click for bigger)

I want to do a cable on the side of the sock that splits at the gusset, and half runs down the foot and half runs down the heel. See the little wedge of stockinette at the bottom? Those would be the half cables running next to it. And I really wanted a cable design that had six strands to it so the half-cables would be braids or braid-like and not just rope cables. Which one do you like? I'm leaning towards the first, I think, but I like the sharpness of the diamond in the second one too. Leave me a comment with your vote! And I'll draw the name of someone who voted for the winner and name the socks after you. How exciting.

Wednesday, I was in Oberlin! Yay! I gave a leadoff for the socialist group there for International Women's Day. Well, women's day was actually Thursday, but that's when the student I was hosting for recruitment weekend was supposed to come in, so we held it a day early. While I was there, I visited my favorite professors, wen to taco night at Dascomb....and the local yarn shop. Where I spent entirely too much money last year because it was on the walk home from campus.

(click for bigger)

The skein underneath the dinosaur is Andes by EA yarns in color 19 (blue/orange). Now, I'm generally not a fan of complimentary color combinations, but I've been loving me some orange and blue. Still not down with red and green or yellow and purple, though. I'm planning a slouchy cap...perhaps with wee cables? We all know I'm a fan of wee cables. The yarn with the wee people dolls (Texas Renaissance Festival, represent!) on the right is a skein of Noro Transitions in gold/blue/purple. I have been dying to knit with this stuff since I first heard about it. It was on sale, so I let Jon pick a color and have promised him a hat with it. Speaking of Jon, though he has a well-documented disinterest in the art of knitting, he loves him some yarn. He's taken to rolling unwound skeins into balls, and has developed a distinct yarn palate (if you will), with a taste for thicker, high quality yarn and a particular weakness for variegated colors. He's also taken to posing unwound skeins around our apartment for mini-photoshoots, so expect to see more pictures like those above in the future.

So, on Thursday, we scrambled around the apartment trying to make it guest-ready. We cleaned up and put stuff away, blew up the air mattress, jon even mopped the kitchen! All the movment startled the cats, and they ran for cover.


The rest of recruitment weekend went well. And I finally finished said tedious group project. hopefully life is all settled and ironed out now that I'm past the post-Spring Break adjustment period and I can start churning out some FO's again. Speaking of which, the body of Flair is done and about half of one sleeve! Stay tuned for more.

Even Dirty Commies Deserve Nice Hats

This weekend I went to a big socialist meeting for our national organization. Some of you out there, and by that I mean the three of you who aren't related to me, might not know that I've been a card-carrying member of a socialist organization since before I could legally vote. However, I grew up in a house where Trotsky and Lenin were well-represented in our home library, so it's not like anyone was surprised when I broke the news.

Anyway, those of you who are not at odds with the capitalist system may not realize how much these people can talk. This was a three-day meeting, with a full agenda. It takes them 15 minutes to basically state that they are anti-war in a fancy way (well, that's an exaggeration, but not much of one). Time limits mean nothing to them. We got up at 6:45 am to get there on time, stayed until 7:00pm, and then went out for drinks and more political ranting afterwards. I should also mention that I don't drink coffee and there were no other caffeinated beverages available. So, I turned to knitting to keep me awake and focused. Those that don't knit assume that we're not paying attention, but we know better. We know that the repetitive, unceasing motion keeps you from fidgeting, keeps you from boredom around hour 11, and has other good benefits. Such as my finished Shedir:


Unrelated, but like the dart board? My mom sent it to me in a totally unexpected Valentine's Day package. I hit the bullseye earlier today and refuse to let Jon remove it. I'm very proud of my successful darting.

Isn't she lovely? This hat conquered the conference. Initially, I (and the other two knitters who were there) were getting a lot of flack for it, and many friendly quips were thrown our way when people got up to speak (further showing the low regard time limits were held in). But, curiosity got the better of them. They'd walk by and look at it, and were struck by the simple beauty of the cables. And they'd touch it and say how soft the yarn was. By the end of the first day, they were generally interested in when it would be finished and whether I would knit them one too. You know what? I'm also quite fond of it.
Yarn - Blue Sky Alpacas Alpaca Silk (50% alpaca, 50% silk; 146 yards) in plum purple. This yarn is exquisite. Soft, and shiny, and it knits up into this amazing lightweight fabric that is remarkably fluid.
Needles - 34" size 3 addi turbos. So trusty.
Pattern - Shedir from the breast cancer special issue of Knitty. The only modification made was that I knit 3 repeats of the cable pattern before decreasing instead of 5. I did this in part because I was afraid 5 repeats would make it too long, as Eunny discussed here, and also because I was afraid I'd run out of yarn. It turned out to be just shy of a perfect length, but not short enough to warrant adding to the brim, and I only had a tiny amount of yarn left, so my estimation was about right.

Remember what I said about the socialist thing being long? Well, after finishing Shedir, I had time to make Jon half of the biggest sock ever.

Ok. Maybe it doesn't look so big in the picture, but let me just share some specs: the leg is 10" around, the heel flap is 5" long, and the widest point of the gusset is 13" around (I tried it on earlier, and I can wear it as a sleeve....I don't have little stick arms, either). Over a foot. Impressive, no? And, I've already used up about 1 1/3 skeins of yarn. Apparently, his feet are about the size of pre-felted slippers. They're turning out to be a good fit, though.

I'm using the same upscaled dragon pattern as I did for these socks. I generally don't like knitting the same pattern twice in a row, but I (prudently) brought yarn for a second project with me to the socialist meeting in case I finished Shedir. I decided that at the last minute, though, so I just grabbed something I could knit on my size 3 addi circular so I wouldn't have to deal with finsing yarn and needles. So Jon's socks it was.