Another snow day during which we still have power

I've received more alerts of potential power outages in North Carolina than in any other place I've ever lived, even without adjusting for the fact that I've lived here for a relatively shorter time. Despite this, we've only experienced a few brief power outages. The current snow storm has been no exception; I've received approximately three warnings about a possible loss of power, and here we sit, warm and well-lit. Beyond the presumptive closures of almost everything, here's what happens when it snows here:

 Our tiny pine tree was bent with the weight of the snow and ice, but recovered nicely after being brushed off and coaxed upright once again.

 Cyril was gravely displeased with the weather. Here he is being carried in the front yard to find a place to relieve himself. 

Cyril was much relieved (pun intended) that we could move the yard waste bin and reveal a small patch of grass for him. 

 Once we came back inside, he was very willing to let me try on his winter hat in progress. 

The cats' desire to frolic in the out-of-doors has been conspicuously absent this morning and afternoon.

Knits of 2017

At the beginning of the year, I like to reflect on the prior year's crafting. Not only does this tend to inspire me for the year to come, but it greatly appeals to the data analyst in me. You can find all of my knitting-related posts by clicking the "knitting" tag in the sidebar, or peruse the 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2016 lists here. Ravelry, which allows me to easily track my progress and record my projects, reveals the following yearly yardage totals that are 100% predictable when you consider how residency went:

• 2014: 851 yards
• 2015: 1,988 yards
• 2016: 5,159 yards
• 2017: 5,909 yards

The second half of 2017 was particularly productive, as residency was over and I had a bunch of cross-country drives during which to knit. The tally for 2017 is as follows:

• 2 pair of mittens/gloves
• 3 scarves
• 4 hats
• 9 baby sweaters 

The baby sweaters continue to dominate the knitting focus, and I anticipate that this will continue into 2018!

The Final Countdown

As many of you know, I've installed the "Final Countdown" app on my phone. Filed under "wellness," along with my meditation and yoga apps, it counts down the days, hours, minutes, and seconds until residency ends on June 17, 2017 at 5PM (with the start of cocktail hour at our banquet). As of this posting I'm at 35 days, 22 hours, and minutes and seconds that count down as I type. I've set it to display the countdown in a soothing electric blue that seemed somehow less aggressive than red or green event. As we inexorably move toward the end of residency, I find that in a similarly unstoppable fashion my to do list gets longer and my desire to complete those items evaporates.

Things I've been avoiding:

• Cleaning out my closet: There are things in there that I moved but haven't worn since residency began. I know, truly, that I will never wear them and that there are others in San Francisco who would, but the effort to remove them from my closet feels Herculean. 
• Recycling my old medical journals: So many of them have not yet been read. At some point I will just need to embrace that many of them will never be read, and resign myself to the fact that they were lightly skimmed at some point and recycle them. Until that point, however, they will sit, weighing down the desk drawer and my conscience.
• Studying for boards: This is sort of happening. I'm actually doing a little bit of studying each day, but nothing feels like enough.
• Finishing manuscripts that have languished for months/years: Can a little bit more languishing really hurt?

Things I've done instead:

• Went on a little vacation to Monterey: This involved kayaking with the dog, which Lynn thought was a great idea and I was quite dubious about, but which turned out to be fantastic. It also involved a lot of lovely walking, the aquarium, and some new yarn. See photos below.
• Knit: This could be it's own list. The parade of babies continues, and I have been trying out new techniques and some bold colors. Hopefully all of the expectant parents I know are feeling highlighter florescent accent colors and/or bold stripes...
• Pumped up my bike tires: I've not been on my road bike in months, and I'm trying to motivate in that direction...

This has to be one of the most photographed trees in the US, maybe the world - the "Lone Cyprus" on the 17 Mile Drive in Pebble Beach. 

The jellyfish were my favorite.

This little pulpito moved around a bunch for us. I kept thinking of Inky, the one who got away, and his mate Blotchy, who must rue the day he didn't follow his buddy to freedom. 

Walter, in the kayak. There is a longer story that involves him jumping out of the kayak and (later) being spooked by sea lions. Maybe for another post...

Busy is as busy does

And while I've been busy being a resident, (seemingly) everyone else has been making babies. I present to you, the sweaters of 2016... (Along with a little hat and mittens that also came along this year...)

  

I'm hoping to start posting more regularly now. Fingers crossed!

Like farm animals... making cute baby farm animals...

When one of my best friends and college roommate told me she was pregnant, I was super excited for her. When she told me how far along she was, I realized that her due date would line up with approximately five other friends who were expecting babies this year. All of them were due in the springtime or early summer of May and June. Shortly after I shared this, there was a thoughtful pause in our conversation. "We're like farm animals" she said, "all having babies at the same time." 

And here we are in early May, with all of my friends either at term or nearly so, and my list of things to knit keeps growing. You see, when I first started knitting things for babies I made tiny things: socks, hats, booties, etc. As the years went on I got faster and faster and more interested in knitting challenging things and creative things. This generally meant sweaters instead of hats and booties and when I was in graduate school this wasn't a big deal. The babies were fairly spaced out then (except for one year when there were ten) and I had lots of lecture time in which to occupy my hands. Fast-forward to residency, a time during which I have knit the lowest volume of items since learning the craft, and I'm struggling. The only saving grace is that everyone loves a six-month-size sweater even more than the newborn one. 

A sampling of the most recent garments:

And the winner is…

I’d somehow anticipated posting more in between the initial giveaway post and announcing the winner, but that didn’t happen… I’m happy to announce that Tanya, my awesome friend, will be the happy recipient of the hooded scarf. I’ll be dropping it in the mail to her this week. Even better, the charity she chose, The Moveable Feast, will be receiving a lovely donation that will help them continue to provide meals to people who are sick and need their support. Thanks Tanya!

The knitting of 2012

2.16 miles of yarn =

3 cowls

3 pair of mittens

2 hats

2 scarves

1 afghan

2 pair of baby booties

2 baby sweaters

2 hot water bottle covers

2 candle sweaters

2 bangles

1 pair of fingerless gloves

The 2.16 miles of yarn is equivalent to 137,100 inches. Employing a now tried and true calculation, that’s about as many stitches, which would take approximately 685,500 seconds of knitting, or just over 190 hours of knitting this year. As with last year, most of my knitting was concentrated during breaks, during points of heightened travel (read: interviews), and around the holidays. Goals for next year include not trying to knit so many gifts that it becomes a chore and taking advantage of idle minutes with small projects!

Knitting in the new (M4) year

I’ve been on vacation now for a full week, and I must say that I am enjoying it. Although I generally like my vacations filled with tightly scheduled relaxing activities, I think I’ve had enough time off that I’ve been able to genuinely take it easy. I had a few things that had to be accomplished during the first few days of my break, and now that the manuscript is submitted and the abstracts are reviewed, I have been catching up on all of the amazing television-watching and knitting that I have not done over the past few months. What I have been working on and planning:

The wedding afghan: When my oldest friend announced she was getting married, I knew I needed to do something awesome. I love to make something beautiful and functional for a wedding, and while this often results in lovely dishcloths or winter socks (to remind the couple to enjoy even the small things), I just didn’t think that would be enough. I started looking at afghan patterns in spite of the fact that Laura lives in Miami, and finally found a throw I loved that would work in a cotton blend. I’ve finished it, and although it’s a tiny bit smaller than I’d hoped (maybe I just imagined that a throw was larger…), it’s lovely and I think it will serve them well.

The someday sweater: Perhaps this has been ill-fated from the beginning, but it is shaping up nicely. I’ve knit the entire body, knit and ripped out the neck edging once, and planned for the sleeves and finishing several times over the past several months. The current plan includes dropping and fixing a few stitches down the front, ripping back the bottom and adding a little ribbing, and then using ribbing for the neck as well. It is proving to truly be a someday sweater…

Other gifts: In the interest of not stealing the thunder from various other friends or spoil any surprises, I will simply say that I am working on several wedding and baby gifts.

2,000,000

Those of you who know me personally know that I have a great many soap boxes. I try to be judicious in my hopping up and ranting, and remember that it’s important to pick my battles. While I know I’m preaching to the choir here, I’d like to take this opportunity to point out that there were 2,000,000 people registered as Ravelry users on February 29, 2012. Ravelry, for the unintiated, is a social networking site for knitters and crocheters. It’s not much use if you don’t do either of these things, but if you do, it’s pretty awesome. To start with, there are 1,999,999 other crafters posting cool things to look at. But the point of this post was not to extol the virtues of this particular knitting-related resource; it was, instead, to remind the world that there are prodigious numbers of knitters (and crocheters) out there in the world and slowly but surely we are all realizing that we are not alone. A quick google search revealed that 2,000,000 is approximately equal to the population of the city of Houston in 2010, and higher than the population of Philadelphia in the same year. Imagine that a major US city was emptied – it could be completely refilled with knitters and crocheters. So next time someone near you, jokes that he or she saw a knitter on the latest rendition of “Girls Gone Mild” remind him or her that, first of all, boys knit too, and second of all, that we are not mild and will poke you with sharp sticks. Happy 2,000,000th, Ravelry!

2011 in knitted goods

Based on yardage alone, I knit a little less than half this year than I did in 2010. This is not particularly surprising, given the prodigious number of items that I produced during that year, and given the rather abrupt decrease in knitting time that occurred in May of this year. (I will also note that this total does not include things that have yet to be completed; there is a 3/4 finished sweater and some mitten cuffs that are not reflected here.) The tally for 2011 stands as follows:

4 cowls
2 pair socks
5 hats
2 baby sweater
4 pair baby legwarmers
1 pair adult legwarmers
1 BlackBerry cozy
1 pair mittens

For finished items, this totals 1.91 miles of yarn, or 121,017 inches. If each stitch is slightly less than an inch of yarn, which seems like a reasonable estimate and is one I’ve used before, that’s almost 1/8 of a million stitches. If each stitch takes an average of 5 seconds (with a mode closer to 1-2 seconds, but with some distant outliers with more complicated patterns), that’s 605,085 seconds of knitting, or 10,085 minutes, or 168 hours of knitting this year. That would seem to average out to about 0.46 hours of knitting each day. That seems high, but I guess days of vacation where I knit for 4-5 hours in an evening would bring that average up quite a bit, as would days of lecture where I knit for 2-3 hours in an afternoon, and would perhaps compensate for what seemed like many, many days in which I did not knit at all.

Here’s to a 2012 filled with knitted things!

Square One

Some of you will read this post and recognize it as the larger metaphor it could be, and some of you will just enjoy a post about knitting. I can’t decide which camp I fall into at this point, but here it is.

I got some really beautiful yarn for Christmas this year, and I knew as soon as I saw it that I wanted to make a sweater for myself. I have made myself several vests, and made sweaters for other people, but have never made a real sweater with sleeves for myself. I spent hours on the interwebs trolling for patterns, and finally found one that I liked. (For those of you who are interested, it’s here on Ravelry, and here on Knitty…) I wanted to change the edging, substituting some nice ribbing for the scallops and the seed stitch, but that’s a modification I knew how to make. I printed out the pattern, and finally cast on in April of this year, shortly after finishing my dissertation defense. In a moment of what in retrospect seems like either psychic vision or self-fulfilling prophesy, I named it the “Someday Sweater.”

I knit a swatch, measured, ripped back, knit, measured, ripped back, knit, measured, and finally thought I had something that would work. I also measured several sweaters I already own that fit me well, and compared their measurements with the pattern schematic. I proceeded to knit through most of my trip to Colombia, and on through my M3 orientation. At the end of that long week of lectures, I had what was starting to look like a lovely sweater. Unfortunately, it was also starting to look like a big sweater, not in the absolute sense of the word, but compared to the desired measurements. I set it aside for a week, and then finally tried it on and confirmed that it was too large. I ripped back several inches, added a few decrease rows, and kept knitting. I made a brief pause to whip out a baby sweater, and to start some socks that currently seem never-ending, but mostly I knit on the sweater. It has been hibernating for a while in my bag because I was a little afraid that the modifications I made weren’t enough. The thought that the shoulders are actually too broad and the neckline too deep has been haunting me, and today, as I realized how lovely and cool it is getting and how nice it would be to have a sweater, I pulled it out of the bag. I carefully threaded a strand of cotton yarn through the live stitches and tried it on. It’s too big. My plan for tonight: rip it out and carefully rewind the yarn in preparation for casting it on anew.

Someday I’ll have a nice sweater to wear…

Bienvenidos a Bogota!

We've been in Colombia since Friday, but I haven't had a chance to post before now. Here are a few highlights from our first few days in Bogota!

Starting the trip off right, we visited the Bogota Beer Company, the "cerveceria pequena mas grande de Bogota" - the biggest little brewery in Bogota. The beer was pretty good, and ending our travel day with delicious bar food was a nice transition for our trip.


After a blissfully restful night, we set out to explore part of the city. We rode the Transmilenio, Bogota's bus system masquerading as a metro, and did quite a lot of walking. We walked around the Candelaria, Bogota's historic city center.


We saw the Justice Palace, Congress Building, City Hall, and the Cathedral (pictured above). We also saw the Casa de Narino, the presidential palace, and it's fancy guards. Below is a photo demonstrating the awesomeness of my zoom lens, because we weren't allowed to get very close.


We were pleased to see lots of cyclists around (Colombia is known for amazing cycling performances on the mountain stages of road races), including the one below who stood out wearing the brighter versions of the colors on the houses:

The first museum of the day was the Botero Museum, brimming with his signature voluminous figures in paintings and bronze sculptures. I'd like to point out that Colombia's most famous artist was way ahead of his time in terms of his love of little birds:

After the Botero Museum and some lunch (hard won, I might add, as it was the Saturday before Easter and lot of things were closed), we headed to the Gold Museum. We had a great guide take us through one of the exhibits and tell us about the symbolism and cosmology of the early inhabitants of Colombia, as shown in the beautiful items in the museum. In addition to all kinds of body ornaments and containers, there were some beautiful spindles in the museum:

There are more pictures from Bogota to come, as well as updates about Medellin and Guatape (today's day trip)...

Delicious Chicago

I went to lovely Chicago this weekend for the National Conference of Physician Scholars in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Actually, Chicago was not lovely for most of the weekend, as it rained and generally was cold and wet, but the places I went in Chicago were still delightful. My hotel was right on the river downtown, which is nice for conference going (as the conference was in the same area), but not all that nice for eating or much anything else (other than maybe picture-taking.

I headed directly to Wicker Park to take in the yarn fumes at Nina, my favorite Chicago knit shop. I found some lovely souvenir yarn, as well as a project bag that reminded me of this video:

Put a bird on it!

I was starving by this point, and knew that I wouldn’t make it to dinner without eating something soon. I stopped at the Milk and Honey Cafe, which served a surprisingly spicy corn soup, and was located next to yet another trendy bird sign, causing the hipster index of this neighborhood to spike off the charts.

After a brief stop at the Verizon store to get a new phone charger, I headed back to the hotel to drop off my purchases and headed back west to try out Green Zebra, a fancy-pants vegetarian restaurant I’d been meaning to try for a while now. It proved to mostly live up to the hype!

The salad was mediocre at best. The menu promised roasted squash, but there was none to be found. Toward the end it was even a little grainy, making me wonder whether the lettuce and scallions had been properly washed. The fig dressing was delicious though…

Dinner was amazing. I ordered the Farm Egg, which was a perfectly poached egg on top of smoked creamed potatoes, with little toasts forming a house around the egg. The potatoes were some of the best I've ever had.

Dessert was also incredible, making me wonder whether it is, in fact, only vegetables that cause problems at this vegetarian restaurant… The crème fraiche ice cream was 100% a reason to continue eating dairy…

The rest of the weekend was consumed with the conference, which was, as it was two years ago, a great source for thought-provoking talks as well as some of the best career information I’ve ever received. I think Adam, one of the conference organizers, put it best when he said “this is the conference of my people.” I thoroughly enjoyed getting to meet and reconnect with the other MD/PhD students in the social sciences and humanities!

Another knitter…

I spoke on a panel for a class of nursing students today. It was similar to all of the other panels I’ve done over the past 8 years or so, talking about gender, sexuality, and healthcare, except for one thing. Right after we came into the room, as the other panelists and I were organizing ourselves, the instructor walked onto the stage, introduced herself, and then proceeded to explain that she was going to knit during the panel and that we shouldn’t interpret that disrespectfully. I was so pleased to find another knitter! I told her about my own class/meeting/conference knitting, and revealed that I had a sock in my bag that I had considered working on during the panel, but had decided would be too distracting while I was presenting…

A year of knitting…

Always interested in tallying and keeping track of things, I was interested to see how much I had knit in the past year. As was totaled in the side bar before the new year, I’d knit just over 4 miles of yarn in 2010. According to Google, this is roughly 258,509 inches. If you figure that each stitch is a bit less than an inch, it is safe to say that I’ve knit over a quarter of a million stitches this year. But what exactly does that mean? It turns out that with a cool quarter mil, you can make the following items:

18 baby items (3 set of baby mittens, 6 baby hats, 1 baby sleep sack, 4 pairs of baby booties, 1 baby sweater, 1 baby sweater vest, 2 bibs)

1 dog sweater

8 shawls/scarves/cowls

1 hat

2 pair of mittens/gloves

2 pairs of socks

2 dishclothes

5 bangles

2 garments (1 sweater vest, 1 cardigan)

Not too shabby… Here’s to another year of crafting!

A lovely visit

My apartment has mostly been converted into a pre-holiday sweatshop, but I have been enjoying myself nonetheless. At the very least, working hard on crafting all day provides a lovely change of focus. (And I will note that tomorrow I’m kind of hoping I have some time to work on my model results. This sort of anticipation and excitement about academic work has not been noted since the last break…) My eyesight-killing, shoulder-tightening labor, combined with the fact that many people are already out of town for the break, has meant that my social life is a bit limited. There is one visitor, however, for whom the crazy crafting is not substantial deterrent. In fact, I might even go to so far as to say she welcomes it. That visitor is… you guessed it… Ash!!!!!

She and Walter knit while I… also knit… and took pictures of them knitting… You see how this could potentially limit my social interactions…

Finals: Work vs. Knitting

The title here really says it all…  Although I really only have one final exam this semester (and it is today!), I have other big end-of-semester deadlines (for example, a complete dissertation draft).  As always happens, I have also added to my list of holiday knitting at what is relatively at the last minute (considering that I started in May).  These two things have resulted in another battle in that time-honored struggle: work vs. knitting.  Luckily, thanks to a really awesome suggestion from a friend, I have been reading The Monday Motivator and am working on scheduling in my to-do list so that I make sure to do the things that are actually important to me (rather than the things that seem most urgent/doable at any given moment).  I’ve been creating the hourly schedules that used to indicate tragic finals stress levels, but now reflect that no one else is scheduling my time, so I might as well do it, and have met with some success.  My conclusions from the first week include:

• E-mail is a massive time suck and should be scheduled (and limited)
• Stata takes longer than you think, no matter how long you think it will take
• Thinking about what kind of crafting I want to do during a given week makes me feel productive and awesome, even if I do not follow the craft schedule (!)

All told, the scheduling is going well, and I am feeling that in the eternal fight between work and knitting, I, in fact, am winning.

A knitting victory!

I knit a lot… And I know that… Nonetheless, in the fall and winter when school ramps up I knit less than I do in the summer. Which means that sometimes things that get started in the winter don’t get finished until… much later. Enter the gray vest: I cast on for the bottom of the ribbing last February. Then, I became consumed with a variety of other projects all summer and didn’t really come back to the vest until school started. Now, finally, after the amount of time it takes most people to create a fully formed human, I can finally present the finished garment. (Please note that I recently posted about my desire to knit instead of doing work. In light of this, please do not pass along the happy news of my knitting accomplishments to any of my dissertation committee members…)

You will note that the best lighting in my apartment at night is in the bathroom... This should explain the oddly plush (actually terrycloth) backdrops.

Feeling crafty

I suppose everything ebbs and flows, but it seems like my desire to be crafty is particularly variable and highly correlated with my ability to focus on the rest of the things I’m supposed to be doing.  Take this week, for example: it’s been a really sad week in which I’ve attended 2 memorial services already, and will be heading to another tonight for my medical school friend who passed away on Wednesday.  All of this sadness has made it rather difficult to focus on my work.  I keep coming up against the inevitable connections between my work and that of my deceased friends and colleagues, and just feeling frustrated at the world for taking them away before they had a chance to keep getting more amazing.  Instead of thinking about my work, I find myself thinking about the knitting projects I’d like to make for myself, the ones I’m already working on for myself and for others, and the things I want to get done before particular deadlines (holidays, due dates, etc).  I suppose it’s not irrational to want to create something soft and warm in the face of all of this destruction, but it is a little frustrating overlaying the other deadlines in my life…  Hopefully things will look up soon, and until then, I’ll keep taking little breaks to dream about baby booties, sweater vests, and other crafty pursuits…

Babies!

If you’ve talked to me recently, you’ve probably heard about the profusion of babies in my life. None of them are mine, but all of them are connected to me in some way or another, sufficiently closely that I wish to knit something to welcome them into the world. There are classmates and colleagues, friends and family members, all having babies this year. As of last count there were 10 babies either already born this year (five) or scheduled to arrive in November or December (another five). This is a lot of babies! Luck for me, baby gifts are little…