Knittin' in Nigeria

Between the different concept of time and the Lagos traffic, I got a fair bit of knitting done in Nigeria. I did manage to forget to pack any patterns so I had to make them up as I was going along.

Here are some snaps of my projects, starting with a pair of hairnets for my first host's daughters Hafeeza (shown) and Halima.

Here Ben (a member of the incoming Rotary GSE committee) models the hat I made for his 6-month old son. (I also made some booties, but didn't get a snap.)

Ben actually managed to keep the hat balanced on his head for quite a while, despite walking around, texting, and talking at the same time.

Fortunately Chimizie (another member of the committee) didn't try to model the dress I made for his one-year-old daughter.

There's not really any scale here - that's Tim's natively attired elbow to the left.

I also made a couple of things for myself as well including a new camera case:

and a pair of slippers:

World's least interesting knitting

The college knitting club is collecting squares to put together to make a blanket. I contributed some plain ol' garter stitch squares.

Pretty dang exciting.

Phantom baby bags

Imagine there's a picture of a pair of baby bags here - blue & green striped. Made 'em for a fellow faculty member's imminent twins & forgot to take a picture.

Wine scarves galore

I actually made a total of 48 wine scarves - 24 for my mother, 12 for a friend of hers, and 12 for a colleague of mine. The fact that I didn't have much trouble finding 24 different colors of yarn is indicative of my stash problem.

Cheater!

Maybe this is cheating in a stash-reduction way, but I'm still pretty psyched about it. I'm the faculty advisor for the new student knitting group (Fiber Arts for the Needy - FAN club. Those clever kids). We're making blankets and hats to give away.

And of course I'm donating a bunch of random yarn to the cause.

Wine scarves

This project has the advantages of being fast and using up all the scraps of yarn I've accumulated from various projects. It's a wine scarf - a little scarf you tie around your wineglass at a party to signify that it is yours. My mom saw them somewhere and wants a couple dozen.

The interesting thing about this picture is the other scrapy-type projects in the background. Going from right to left, we have the camera cozy in fabulous red acrylic, then three quilt-square trivets from Mr. PotatoHead's mom, and then two used-wine-cork trivets from my parents. On the far left there's my grandmother's knitting bag (which she may or may not have made out of scrap fabric, but I suspect she did.) And the quilt-square trivets win extra scrapiness points because the fabric was originally a gift to me from a friend who lived in Angola, which I used to wrap a Christmas present to my inlaws.

And yes, that's the Johnny's catalog there. I'm planning a garden I don't yet have.

First knit project

First knit project done - hat & booties for the son of Mr. PotatoHead's former co-worker.

First steps

Despite the yarn focus of yesterday's post, I also have too much cloth and embroidery floss and thread and cross-stitch fabric. And projects that I started but never finished. And little bits of other random craft crap, mostly left over from Sunday school projects.

In honor of the season, my first project was to finish up some cross-stitched ornaments that I made years ago but never actually finished. Here they are on the Corey-Olson tree:

The third picture involves very little cross-stitch...unless you look closely at the cuff of the mitten. But I had the little blanks left over from a church project and some random acrylic paint. I also had some leftover attempts at Hardanger embrodiery - the pink thing glued to the middle of the big snowflake and the thing that looks a little like a cross but was supposed to be a snowflake. And the cuff on the mitten was from a test piece I did for a larger thing I did for my mother. So good all around.

25 pounds

I have 25 pounds of yarn. That seems like both a lot and not a lot.

It is, clearly, more than really needs to be sitting around gathering dust.

Since I don't think anyone reads this anymore, I'm going to indulge in some electronic talking to myself.

A recent spate of stuff-organizing with Mr. PotatoHead has led me to realize just how much craft stuff I have. Yarn, thread, half-finished projects galore. In fact, I have half-finished projects inherited from three separate relatives. It's too much...not hoarders-level too much, but just too much.

Therefore: my resolution for 2010 is to reduce the amount of craft stuff 'till it fits in a single box* and I'm using this blog to post my progress.

Let's see how long this lasts.

*That I can lift.

That was fast

No more autumn for you. Well, not today anyway.

We've had a couple of heavy frosts, but today it's snowing. We've got about an inch on the ground and it's still coming down.

It's also very misty, or there would be better pictures. In fact, these pictures are testament to my dreadful laziness - I took them out of the hallway windows in my building without even going outside. It's not even that cold - it's Boston style snow in that it's about 33 degrees out and it's not really sticking to the pavement. Yet.

Ordinarily there's a lovely view of W mountain as a backdrop to the parking lot. The other picture should have Signal Peak in it, but, again, the mistiness.

Random movie #2

In honor of the beginning of hunting season, here's another little movie from the archive. It's a dikdik, and the movie doesn't even begin to do justice to how adorable they are. What with the long legs and the huge eyes, they're essentially the Kate Moss of the antelope world.

They might also be the only antelope small enough for Mitt "Varmit" Romney's taste.
(Assuming he kept up his NRA membership after he dropped out of the presidential race.)

I should also point out that I have no idea if there's sound on this thing. I'm using my office computer which doesn't have a sound card. Hope I didn't swear.

Foliage, western style

Mr. Potatohead was here for a visit weekend before last, and we couldn't have planned the timing better - the aspens were at their peak.

Granted, we dont' get as much red as in Northern New England, but the aspens practically glow. The pictures don't quite do them justice.

Spud on skis!

Like most digital cameras, mine can take little movies. Hoever, I never got around to buying the special cable I need to connect the camera to my mac to take the pictures back off.

But lo and behold, when I hook the camera up to a windows machine, I can transfer the movies with just the normal cable that came with the camera! Hooray! So here is the first in a series of somewhat random movies that have been sitting on the camera for a while.

That's Mr. PotatoHead skiing on a sand dune in Namibia. I don't remember if he fell over after I stopped recording. Let's say he didn't.

If you look carefully at the beginning of the movie, you can see my tracks w/nice carved turns. And that is my shadow in the picture-taking pose at the end.

Southwestern Cell

One of the great things about my job is that I have an outlet for my lifelong interest in merging science with the creative arts. And I occasionally get paid to do things that are fun & silly but still science-y.

I'm teaching intro bio this semester, and one thing I really struggle with is helping students develop a mental 3D conception of a cell. So after lecturing at them about cells, quizzing them on cell structures & their functions, and having them use microscopes to locate various organelles, I offered them the opportunity to build their very own cell.

Two groups took me up on it - I'd provide the molds and 10 liters of gelatin, and they'd bring the "organelles." I encouraged them to choose items that both looked like the organelle in question and had some functional feature in common. Behold - the resultant animal cell:

There's a definite Southwestern theme here - jalapenos for the mitochondria, habeneros for the peroxisomes, tomatoes for the lysosomes, black beans for the ribosomes. And for desert - an orange nucleus.

I also really dig the snow peas linked together to make the Golgi complex.



Yes, it's not exactly in proportion. And the smooth and rough ER are made of totally different materials. And the sectioning is a little wierd. If you think you can do better, I want to see it.

(There was also a plant cell group, but 1) they were a lot less organized, and 2) we learned an object lesson in why plant cells have cell walls when we took the cell out of its mold.)

Innaccurate profile photo

It's finally occurred to me that my profile photo isn't very accurate. (Well, it isn't very accurate anymore. It was spot-on when I put it up.)

However, over the summer I donated the bun to Locks of Love, and am now sporting a much shorter 'do. Evidently it is technically impossible to chop off the bun in situ, so it was actually a braid that got the chop.

It's a little weird to have a chunk of oneself just lying around the house.


And it's even weirder to re-envision myself as a person with short hair. So for now, the profile picture stays.

Birthday Lobster

Can you tell which is the real lobster?

Crested Butte: Year-round playground

Pardon me if I sound like a tourist brochure, but a lot of winter sport areas look like bomb targets in the warmer months (see: Vail).

Crested Butte is fairly spectacular 365 days a year.

My parents and my brother, sister-in-law, and nephew visited during my first weekend back. We took the Tater Tot on his first chairlift ride, which he loved. He called it the sky couch. He couldn't wait to get back on. This bodes well...he's the perfect age to instill a lifelong addiction to snow sports. Mwahahahahahaha!

Alas, since he lives in LA he may be beyond my auntly clutches.

It was uncharacteristically cloudy for our trip and it even sleeted a little at the top! Actually, it was coming down as snowflakes, but they melted right away. Winter's coming!!!! YAY!

There's a little leftover snow in this picture - just above the Tot's and my brother's heads. At this point it's just a breeding ground for cyanobacteria, but it's a fitting momento of a great ski season.

My brother is trying to get the Tot to take an interest in the pika on the rocks there, but the Tot was pretty fixated on getting back on the "ride."

My favorite blogger over at sievkins would have something clever to say about this.

Art no more

Alas, the Art has been reclaimed and is presumably being proudly displayed at the Potato Farm.

Speaking of art, in a slightly odd gender twist, the other three apartments in my entry are all occupied by male humanities/art types. I am the lone female and lone scientist.

Yesterday Phil the Photographer wanted to get me to participate in decorating the entry. While it would be great if the entry had a more inviting mien, I have no aesthetic sense and am therefore the wrong person to ask.

If he wants to know if that wierd dark red stain on the floor is blood (and if so, whose) then I'm in.

Scratch and sniff

Among the reasons I've become a lousy blogger is my inability to communicate non-visual aspects of living here. Like the smell of the sagebrush after rain. Yesterday we had a few rain showers - short, still-sunny, rainbow riddled affairs. Afterwards, the smell was unbelievable - I wanted to go roll around in it. (This is unwise for a variety of reasons). The system finally moved through around sunset, so the hills were bathed in perfect rosy light and everything looked so beautiful I wanted to take a thousand pictures and cry. Not necessarily in that order, but both would be about as effectual: the pictures would come out hazy and unfocused and the crying would make any observers think I'd gone nuts.

Sagebrush, for you flatlanders out there, does not smell like the sage you cook with. It is the same color, and the scent is pungently herbal (like cooking sage) but it's deeper and fresher.

It's refreshing in the same way stepping into a pine forest on a summer day is. Actually, the smell is a little piney, or at least reminiscent of pine.

Today there's literally not a cloud in the sky (and we have a lot of sky here) and it's that insane deep blue that you only get at altitude. Denver & Boulder have the cloudless days, but you have to climb a hill (well, mountain really) to get the true Colorado blue above the city haze.