Pictures and Whining

So!

I'm starting to get caught up. I'm half-way down my list of blogs, and I did post an entry about the Fuji climb on my Japan blog. Also, those pictures are up.

I've turned the heel of my first sock, and am on the foot. Except for the gaping holes in the gussets, it's really not so hard. And self-striping yarn is just fun.

I have moved to Chapel Hill. YEA! I'm close to campus, just a short ride by bus from the stop that is about a minute from my door. My roommate is really nice. Tomorrow is SILS orientation, and school starts Tuesday. Now all I have to do is find a job, and I am set. Of course, the job might be the hardest part. But hey, what can you do?

Hilarity Monday: Good-bye Japan Edition

Oh, damn, has it been two weeks? Things have been crazy, as you might imagine. But I'm not dead, and I am home. In fact, everything is pretty peachy, except that it's in this weird in-between state.

Brief update, which will hopefully be embellished later: Mount Fuji was complete torture but we did it; Tokyo was cool but utterly exhausting; my flight was long but uneventful; I got to see my sister in Seattle, very briefly, which was great; Florida is hot and sticky but wonderful; my parents were delighted to see me, and I them; sitting with the dogs and cats is pure therapy and just delightful; there is no wireless internet at my parents' house, no way to connect my computer to their internet, and their computer is sloooooooow and annoying (sorry, M); I leave for North Carloina this weekend.

So that's it, in a nutshell. I hope to be talking all about Fuji and Tokyo and how weird and yet wonderful it is to be home in my Japan blog, but to do that I will need to spend yet more hours hanging out at Panera Bread COmpany or Barnes and Noble, since they are the nearby places with free wireless internet. Today was the first time I got to sit at Panera and I ended up drinking so much coffee my hands were shaking. And that was just getting caught up on correspondence and starting the UNC appointments and stuff! Just imagine the possibilities for caffeine overload in getting caught up on all the blogs and web comics and other things to which I became addicted over the past two years.

Anyways, my little Langoliers, I have not forgotten you, and I will read your blogs, will comment when appropriate, and I will update again soon, I promise. But for right now (and honestly, for the next couple of months, I think), I am in an odd, transitional limbo, with no real space of my own and no solid, constant internet connection for my little Powerbook. Hell, I'm writing this from my parents' computer, so I can't even give you pictures! So I am sorry, but have faith! This blog will return to its former, kind-of-interesting level of quality soon!

Meanwhile, here is your last Japanese-related Monday Hilarity. Well, it might not be the last, but you know what I mean. In celebration of the bizarreness that is Nihon, I give you: BINOCULAR FOOTBALL!!!!

Hilarity Monday - Good-bye Yatsushiro Edition

Oh, crap! Almost forgot it was Monday!

Spent the whole day cleaning and now get to hang out. I leave Yatsushiro in just 36 hours, climb Fuji in three days, and leave Japan in nine days. Yowza.

Here is another Japanese video, except that this one is only Japanese because I took it here. This week I am posting in honor of the amazing friends I have made here. This friend, who shall remain nameless in type, is one of the people I am so, so sorry to be leaving behind. During a group hangout one night, the star of this video read the warning "This Is Not A Toy" on the handle of a bug zapper shaped like a tennis racket. He took this to mean "I Am A Toy. Please Touch Me." While the rest of us egged him on, he decided to see what would happen, and I decided to record the incident just in case it turned out to be hilarious. See what happens!

WARNING!!!!!: Some silly girl drops the F-bomb in this video! I have no idea who such a potty-mouth could be.



Additional WARNING!!!: The star of this video is an intelligent, capable, awesome human being perfectly capable of reading and understanding the warning on an electric bug zapper. But he, like many of us, just wanted to see what would happen. I will be extremely unhappy if somebody leaves a comment insulting him for doing the kind of thing we ALL do from time to time. Please enjoy this charitably.

Hilarity Monday - Teaching English Edition

Whoa! This entry's a bit late. But it's still pretty early Monday for y'all, right?

So, yes, this blog has been intermittent lately. Thank you to those of you still reading, and extra thanks to those of you commenting. Things have just been super hectic the past couple weeks, and they are only going to get crazier. This is my last week teaching classes, and I leave Yatsushiro early next week. After that, I'm just all over the damn place. So I will do my best to keep the blog going with at least one entry per week, but it's going to be a while before things settle down. I do hope you'll forgive me.

Haven't been doing much knitting, what with the crazy busy and the ridiculous heat. But Brenda's baby shower was this past Saturday and it went very well, in spite of all my last minute freak-outs. She loved the blanket, hat, and booties, and I hope to get a bit of time to finish the sweater before I leave. She also got some adorable baby things, and really one of the delights of shopping for this stuff in Japan is the great Engrish you can put on your baby. There was a onesy that had an illustration of two dolphins and the words "Struggle for a ball!", a bib that said "I <3 MEAL" (except with a real heart graphic, not the punctuation), and another bib that said "Funky Baby." Brilliant.

Yes, Engrish is just one of the many things I will miss about Japan. I'm drinking another right now, C.C. Lemon. It has 70 lemons' worth of Vitamin C in it, don't you know.

Another thing I will miss is the hilarious-ness of teaching, or attempting to teach, English. Perhaps you all know that the Japanese have some trouble with "l" and "r", often confusing one for the other, so that innocent words such as "election" and "clap" become ridiculously funny when spoken by some people.

Also, Japanese grammar is fundamentally different from English, and words can be translated in the dictionary that are used in totally different ways in the two languages. For instance, "enjoy" gets thrown around a lot because it would be perfectly acceptable to simply say that in Japanese, but in English it becomes weird - not always wrong, but not natural. Examples include "Let's enjoy studying English now!" or "I will enjoy this weekend." Sometimes they try to make it better but make it worse: "Let's enjoying cleaning time!" Some of us blame Coca-Cola for this, with their giant "Enjoy Coke!" ads all over the place since the dawn of time.

Sometimes the word for "enjoy" gets translated as "pleasure," so I get gems like this one on student papers: "This fall, we will go to Osaka as a school trip. I will pleasure USJ." USJ, by the way, means Universal Studios Japan. I got paper after paper of kids writing about how they're going to Osaka, Kyoto, and Nara, which are famous for USJ and takoyaki. It's just a different world, folks. Then again, they are teenagers, so they're going to have a different perspective anyway.

In honor of my last week of being a teacher of English to Japanese kids, I bring you this video. It is a bit long, but hilarious. At least I think so, but then I've been in Japan for two years. Once or twice a year there's this TV special, of which this is a clip. The special involves a group of four comedians who get put into some weird situation for about 24 hours, and every time they laugh they get spanked with a whip. You don't need to understand Japanese to find this funny, but I think you do need to be Japanese to have ever dreamed it up. In any case, this is a clip from the one where they had to pretend they were in school. Since the whole joke is to make them laugh so they can get spanked, the people who create the show do all sorts of bizarre things to them to make them laugh.

Now, my English classes do not involve the beating of children or grown men, but just take a listen to the accent and pronunciation of that guy in the video and feel a bit of empathy, kay?



Lotions, indeed.

Going Postal

Argh. I lied. I spoke waaaaaaayy too soon, as I should have known.

Last week my neighbor, who is way more skilled in Japanese, came with me to the Post Office to verify whether I could ship my trunk home. This trunk is something I got at the Container Store in Pasadena in 2007, before I went on a film shoot to the Philippines. I brought it to Japan because it's a giant piece of luggage, and it carried a lot of my stuff when I moved. But it is cumbersome, and since my plans when I leave involve a domestic flight followed by a week in Tokyo (during which I'll be climbing Mount Fuji) before my international flight home to Orlando, I didn't want to have to deal with it then. The perfect solution seemed to be to ship it home. I mean, hey! It's like, a big box! Ship it!

So when the Japan Post man, who looked, as they often do, terrified to be dealing with foreigners, confirmed that I could in fact mail something that big to America, and that it would in fact be cheaper than I had feared, I was ecstatic. Tuesday night I packed it, and Wednesday that same neighbor helped me haul it in to the PO. When we walked in with the trunk and I saw the faces of the two people behind the counter, I sensed trouble. First thing we were told was that they only ship boxes.

Of course.

I was very frustrated, feeling like that had to have been part of our first conversation. But apparently not. Of course, if I could speak the freaking language, if I was actually capable of basic communication with people in shops and businesses, this could have been cleared up immediately. But we all stood around trying to think of options, while my trunk sat on the floor and got in everybody's way, and everyone sucked their teeth and said it was difficult, and eventually realized that it wasn't going to happen. My favorite possibility was unpacking the trunk and sending the contents in boxes, then shipping the empty trunk EMS (not the trunk with stuff in it, oh no) for ¥8000. That's $80. Wanna know how much I paid the Container Store for it two years ago? About $30 (I think - now it's $40). So thanks, but no thanks.

Grr.

Anyway. I'm going to unpack it and ship the stuff inside next week, and sit on the trunk for a while until I decide if it's worth the trouble to take it home. I mean, I know, for $40 I could get another one from the Container Store at Christmas when I go back to LA to pick up all my stuff from the storage unit. But this one has sentimental value! It has stickers from international voyages! Like caricatures of luggage have! I have that!

Sigh.

In other news, last night I began sewing the edging on to the Leaf Blanket. Wow, is it so much easier and quicker than I feared. And when I had one whole side, a corner, and part of the top done, I looked at it and squealed in accomplishment. The end is in sight! And the finished blanket will look good! I'll really have to block the hell out of it again, but maybe it'll be ready to send by next weekend when I ship the boxes. Sweet!

That's about all I have. It's Friday, thank God. Tonight is game night at Jon's - Settlers of Catan, woo-hoo! Tomorrow is poker night at Geoff's, after another couple rounds of the 777 Steps, and then Sunday is set for being Indian for a day. I'll get to wear a sari, apparently. I'll let you know how all that goes.

Also, I would like to apologize for the excessive use of exclamation marks in this post. Clearly, my writing skills have degenerated to an embarrassing degree.

10 Things I Want to Share

So!

1) I am now caught up on all the blogs I read. Mostly anyway - I did skip over a few, but I will continue reading them now that I can just read the most recent one rather than have to wade through three weeks worth of blogs from a variety of sources.

2) I have posted some of my pictures from China and two little explanations of such. I'm not finished, but iWeb is making me want to hurt somebody. Those are available at my Japan blog. The reason that blog is separate, by the way, is because when I first got here I needed a way to post pictures and talk about what I was doing in a way that would be easy for my friends and family, but especially my mother, to access, and I started this blog much later. The Japan blog is unsearchable and only available to the people I give the link to, whereas this is available through Ravelry and is searchable (but who the hell would be searching or me?). I like my privacy. But iWeb is getting increasingly more slow and difficult, and access to that blog seems less likely to disrupt my life than it used to, so feel free to enjoy.

3) I bought hiking boots the other day. They are very pretty and I love them. I will wear them tomorrow when I do the 777 again, so I can start breaking them in at the same time I continue my quest to get in shape for Fuji-san. Last weekend I did the 777 twice right in a row, and I wasn't all that sore afterwards. Good sign.

4) I saw Watchmen, finally. I enjoyed it, but not as much as the book. Several of the actors were not just terrible, but terrible choices for the role. Rorschach was the notable exception - he was note-perfect, as far as I was concerned. The change to the ending made sense for the movie, but I was still disappointed. The fight scenes were great and very sexy, but all wrong considering the whole point was that these were normal people acting as superheroes. Anyway, if nothing else the release of the movie prompted me to read the graphic novel, and I loved it, so at least there's that.

5) I saw the Twilight movie, too, finally. It was even more terrible than I expected. Way more terrible than the books, and they weren't in line for the Pulitzer to begin with. Oh, well, now I know.

6) I am still working on the lace edging for the Leaf Blanket. The child for whom it is intended is now two months old. I feel sort of like a failure. In the failure vein, I also still have not mailed my dad's birthday present, even though his birthday was April 2 and I called from China and had a Chinese beer for him (several, actually), just as I said I would.

7) Just when I thought I was done with baby things for a while, another friend is pregnant, and for once it's a friend who I know will genuinely enjoy and appreciate a hand-knit item. Sigh.

8) I started the Prepster, because every time I looked at the lace edging and thought how I needed to work on it, I talked myself into doing something else instead, and I needed to get back into the knitting groove. Also, I needed to knit something for myself. I adore the yarn I'm using, because it feels so soft and squishy and slippery-in-a-good-way. Here's hoping I've done my math right, cause I'm doing it in the round.

9) I have decided to attend the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill's School of Library and Information Science in the fall. This decision and process, and the financial implications that I am only now fully grasping, have caused me a great deal of stress and taken up a great deal of my time lately. I am excited, but also sort of feel like I might vomit. If anyone has a few spare tens of thousands of dollars lying around, I am a very worthy recipient.

10) I am tired of my job. Also, today I am extremely grumpy. There is a bachelorete party tonight for someone I don't actually know, but to which I am invited because I'm American and am friends with the organizer of said party. Part of me is insanely curious about the stripper that has supposedly been procured (this being rural, backwater Japan, I'm having a hard time with the visuals), the rest of me wants to just sit at home, knit, and watch the Full Monty (either way, I get strippers). Regardless, two and a half more hours of work and grumpiness. Bleah.

But here's some Engrish for you, from the Lama Temple in Beijing:

Oh, but I am excessively diverted.

Ed: Because I am retarded.

Progress Report For Those With Low Standards

Now for an actual knitting update.

Well, I've been... not living up to my own expectations. There's a big surprise.

On the one hand, I finished Brenda's gloves, a project I started back in January, I think. Way overdue.
Name: Not Quite Xmas Gloves, for Brenda here in Yats. A belated Christmas gift.
Pattern: Fetching, by Cheryl Niamath. Again.
Yarn: Ski Yarn Imperial Junmou Aibito, in color #3. Ski Yarn used to be Motohiro, the name that's on the label I have. I noticed the change in Ravelry and it made me wonder. Why in God's name would you make that change? It's possible that "Ski" is actually some mangled anglization of the Japanese word "suki (好)", which means "like" as in "I like this yarn" and is pronounced much the same as "ski," but so many uses of English words in Japanese products are so completely and obviously random that I can't be sure.
Needles: Bamboo DPNs, size 5
Other Stuff: Nothing exciting. Tried a new trick with the thumbs that didn't make any difference. Worked on these at Starbucks, at home, on the train, and most unusually, at work last week. I went and hid in a back room with my Japanese homework poised to cover it should someone walk in. While nobody has specifically said that I cannot knit at work, I know damn well that it would not go over well. However, I'm four months from going home and finding it hard to feel guilty. Most likely I'll be doing more of that.

Gave them to Brenda over the weekend and she loves them. Too bad it's already spring here and they are no longer necessary. Bummer. But there's always next year!Also, the Moon Booties are just about done. They're only waiting for some sort of tie-type thing to go through those little holes. I haven't made one yet because I need to finish the edging for the Leaf Blanket first, then I'll see what the yarn situation is like.

On the other hand, the Leaf Blanket... I'm not sure I can make myself go into that right now. Later, maybe, after I eat this pig-shaped cookie one of the other teachers gave me for some reason. I mean, how can you go wrong with a pig-shaped cookie, right? Oh, wait, this is Japan. The number of things that can go wrong is very large.

Thank you for your kind thoughts regarding my computer! It's nice to know that others are as addicted as I am. And really, what did people do at work before the internet? Knit, I suppose, or read, or chat with their co-workers. Take long coffee and smoke breaks. Maybe they even worked? Naw. If that were the case, wouldn't we all have flying cars and peace on Earth or something?

Friday Flowers

Isn't Friday supposed to be for eye candy or something? I keep seeing that on other people's blogs. So I've got something for you.Last Saturday I went and climbed the 777 Steps. This is exactly what it sounds like - a giant staircase up a mountain. Saturday was a nice day, and after reading about the Great Wall and talking to Pantalones del Fuego about the hike from one section of the Wall to another, I reflected that I am sadly out of shape and decided to tackle the steps. I've done them twice before, since they're only a little farther than my school, and last fall a group of us did the 3,333 Steps that are about a half hour away by car. The 777 killed me the first time, not so much the second time, and the 3,333 crippled me.
Also, I've been trying to get in shape so that I can climb Mount Fuji in July, just before I go home for good. That hasn't been working out so well, in that I haven't been working out much at all.
Surprisingly, while I was wheezing like an old smoker by the time I got to the top, it wasn't as bad as I thought. It takes less than 15 minutes to get to the top, and there's a lovely view of Yats from there, and I sat for a bit, ate an onigiri, and knit a row on the Leaf Blanket. But it was a bit chilly at the top, my fingers started to freeze when I cooled off from the climb, and I left.

There was this dude, however, who was just coming down when I got there, passed me on my way up as he climbed again, then passed me again on his way down as I was still struggling up, and then did the whole thing over again twice more while I was at the top and on my way down. You should have seen him! Charging up and down the steps like it was nothing! Five times at least! He must be made out of rubber bands and iron.Anyway, back to your eye candy - on the way home (I biked, by the way, so that was extra exercise), I stopped to take pictures of these lovely weeds. Aren't they pretty? Spring is just about here, which is thrilling! There were bees absolutely swarming over these guys, which I didn't realize until I'd started snapping away. Tried to get some good ones of the bees, but they were zipping around too much.And that's all I got. Oh, except I joined Twitter, for some reason. Anyone on there? I'd be happy to follow you, since I clearly need more ways to waste my time on the internet. I'm Traky007.

Edited - whoops, hit publish WAAAY too early.

These Boots Were Made For Walking... on the Moon.

The blanket is still blocking. Actually, it's probably not blocking so much as sitting, pinned all to hell, on the futon upstairs.
Wanted to show you the booties in progress. I no longer remember how or why I came across this pattern (that's the magic of Ravelry, isn't it?), but I fell in love with how it looks. Don't they just look like something out of 2001: A Space Odyssey? Or maybe the original Star Trek?
I'm making them out of the same yarn as the Leaf Blanket, but I think it's really too thick for them. I'm using size 1 needles, as the pattern suggests, and it's a struggle. My shoulders turned into extremely tense earrings during the first one, and I haven't tackled much of the second yet. Though really, the reason I haven't done the second one yet is because the Harry Potter books I ordered arrived and I realized that I needed to re-read the fifth one immediately or some sort of vortex of hell would swallow me up.
Anyway, the first bootie is so cute I could cry, but there were some difficulties. I found the instructions for how to shape the top of the shoe a bit odd, and then doing joining again in the round for the leg part left a small hole. Worst, though, is that I stupidly, stupidly did not do a looser bind off at the top. The pattern says 22 rows after the eyelet row, which seems weirdly tall - I only did 20 and it was very long. With a regular bind off, it tightened considerably, and while I don't know much about babies, my limited experience tells me they all have chubby little legs rather than twigs. I folded it over as in the picture, and here's hoping it fits without cutting off the circulation in her ankles. And then, how in the heck did it get all arched like that, and why are the top ribby things so much larger than the bottom?

Tonight I will try to make myself practice a crochet border and see about starting the actual border on the actual blanket.

Oh, and I do have the answer to one question I raised last time - that day's lunch was a typically bizarre combination of two dinner rolls, sauceless spaghetti with bacon bits and pieces of spinach, half a hard-boiled egg in some sort of meat shell, and fruit-and-yogurt salad. Ah, Japan, how I shall miss you. I'll have to try much harder to get my daily dose of weirdness back in the States.

Go Ahead, Waste a Few Minutes. Nobody's Watching.

I didn't work on the blanket at all, all weekend. I was a very bad knitter.

Instead I watched a bunch of sci-fi/apocalyptic movies and went to a really lame club despite being sick.

So, I offer you this for your Monday:


What I think is going on here: The man is going, "Thanks, honey! No one will make fun of me, now!" and the woman is laughing because the flowers are slowly poisoning her a-hole of a husband.

Write your own caption! Because honestly, what the hell is going on in this picture, which appeared on the back of some fabric softener I bought?

Also check out these websites I discovered today, which are entertaining.

http://www.buttafly.com/starbucks/index.php

http://www.earthalbum.com/

Thank you, StumbleUpon!

Leaves and Flowers

All right! I finally have a picture of the Leaf Panelled Baby Blanket, so now I can finally post about it.
After all, if I'm not sticking very well to my promise for shorter entries, I may as well always include pictures, right? Right.

So, the blanket is going well, now. I have learned the vital importance of stitch markers to lace projects, and also not to watch tv while working on something that required me to count a lot, especially as I am first starting said thing, and not familiar with it.
I'm only 30 rows in (3 pattern repeats), but I think if I can make myself do 10 rows (one pattern repeat) every night, I should be able to do the crochet edging and have the whole thing done by the 1st. Yes, that is the day Sheila is due, but that's also when I next get paid, so it has to wait until then. I'm a little nervous about how much yarn I have - I may not be able to do the booties in this yarn even if I do have time. Oh, well. I'll figure it all out.

Also - spring is almost upon us! I took these yesterday while I went for a walk (my way of excusing myself from not going to the gym), and the weather was gorgeous.
I did not need a coat, only a long-sleeved shirt. Not sure what the purple is, but the pink and white are ume blossoms, the precursor to the cherry blossoms. These are only a tiny sign of the gorgeous yet to come, but I think the bright splash of pink in late winter, when things have been grey for so long, is amazing.Lovely! Of course, it's only mid-February, so I expect it to get cold again before spring shows up for real, but the ray of light has given me some motivation. I'm going to put more effort into enjoying the time I have left here, and to finding money to pay for when I get back.

Unfortunately, I think the sickness that has been hovering all winter long has finally attacked for real. My throat feels terrible. Boo.

Amimono

So I had to share this with you, internets: my students knitting with their fingers.

(click on each picture to get the mega-huge version then hit back to keep reading)

Not exactly knitting, but close enough. These are my elementary school fourth-graders, in 4-kumi. The girls in that class are always doing something elaborate and crafty - one day I played the store game with them during the lunch break, and while I could not for life of me figure out how it worked (there seemed to be several shops and a lottery system involved), I walked away with some stationary and a pencil. Yesterday when I walked in, three of them were sitting around doing this:

I immediately asked them what they were doing, and what I picked out from their answer was "muffler," which I have learned is how the Japanese refer to scarves, and not to that big rusty can hanging off the back of the car. It's really more weaving than knitting with fingers - they just kept moving the thread back and forth across their hands, bringing the loop at the base of each finger around the yarn and over the finger. I watched them do it for a bit yesterday, then tried it myself today:I like that last one where my hand looks like a giant spider. Anyway, I thought that was pretty dang cool, and while as a craft it has some limitations, it still makes a pretty neat little end product:

Definitely a child's scarf.

While there are many, many aspects of English education in Japan that make me shake my head in frustrated, furious amazement, art and craft education seems to be top-notch. The elementary kids are constantly making something cool and artsy - and while there is definitely a sense of homogeneity to the finished works (it's usually not "Please draw a person" or "Make a robot from boxes" it's "this is how we draw a person" and "this is how we make a robot from boxes"), there is just such an impressive amount of artistic endeavor. You should see what my junior high kids make - you'd think they were all anime artists. Just check out what the elementary first-graders did recently:
While I would love to say that this yarn monster (I think it's a dog, actually) is my favorite:
I'm afraid my favorite is definitely this Optimus Prime-looking dude. How freaking cool is that?

Also, if you're wondering how and why I was finger-knitting at work - that's kinda how this job is. I had the yarn with me for today's second-grade lesson on colors - I have them run around touching things depending on what color I call out. I've been very reluctant to bring knitting to work with me up to this point - it's bad form to be too obvious in my slacking off, but given how well today's little experiment went off, I might break my own rule.

Updates in Knitting and My Bladder

You know, I spend waaaaaaay too much time on the internet. Mostly when I am at junior high, but also in general.

I guess I should have left the blog entry I did yesterday until today, because I've basically had nothing to do. Oh, there's still plenty I could and probably should be doing, but that's not what I've been doing. Instead, I've been surfing the net, checking on all the knitting blogs I discovered from reading the Yarn Harlot's post the other day where she was talking about the Noro Striped Scarf. I clicked on all those people she listed as having done it and then bookmarked those pages to check out later, which was today. And then I ended up adding most of them to my following list. My following list is now ridiculous. I mean, I didn't add all of them - bad grammar or writing immediately got the boot, and ones that looked to be too much about random stuff and not enough about knitting didn't get added here, although I may still check up on a few because I also read a few blogs that are actually about something other than knitting (mostly belonging to friends) - but all in all I added approximately one metric ton of blogs to my reading list.

On the one hand, this is fine, because not everyone updates every day, and I do have a fair amount of free time, especially when I am at junior high and have no classes, such as today. It's interesting to read the personal internet diaries of strangers, if creepy from a certain perspective. It gives me more blogs to comment on, so that eventually, someone might actually read this blog. Not that I'm ready for this blog to be read by hordes of strangers just yet, but one or two might be nice. Also, the huge number of hours I've spent goofing off on the internet in the past year has improved my typing, gotten me familiar with a number of aspects of this whole Web 2.0 thing of which I previously knew nothing about, and killed loads of time I would have otherwise spent doing nothing.

On the other hand, this internet obsession is bizarre and destructive. Starting next August, I will have to rejoin the real world. No more spending hours on end reading about other people's knitting projects, looking at pictures and playing word games on Facebook, obsessively adding yarns to my Ravelry stash, reading article after article on Cracked, obsessively listing books and comparing libraries on Library Thing, or getting caught up on four years worth of web comics. I am melting my brain with all of this useless stuff.

On the last hand, at the same time as I won't be doing all of that, I won't be listening to other people talking about me in a foreign language right in front of me. I keep hearing my name amidst a bunch of Japanese words I don't understand off to my left. It's driving me crazy.

Right, so, I'm adding the box that lists my other web obsessions, in case you get as bored as I do (if you're reading this, you really must do).

Last night I worked on the Nebraska Hat some more, but started getting bored already. This might have something to do with the fact that it was so cold in my apartment that my fingers hurt, and knitting was difficult. I decided to finally cast on for the Diamond and Smocked Blanket for Reidy, to give myself a bit of a break. After going to two more yarn stores this weekend and not finding anything that seemed like a better choice than the yarn I'd already bought, I figured it was time to plunge on in. I looked at the pattern and prepared to cast on to the foot-long size 6 needles I used for the Christmas Head Thing, then took a closer look at the pattern and realized that this blanket was supposed to be three feet wide. Um, whoops. So...out came the 24" size 6 circular. Not great, but better. So I cast on the 137 stitches the pattern calls for, then thought about three feet wide. Not very wide, really, for an adult and/or three cats - Reidy has said this is for her/her cats, and since I'm matching this to her living room, I assume it will stay on the couch and possibly be a lap blanket. I just hope she realizes it's not going to be an afghan, because I do not have that in me right now.

I remembered seeing something in someone else's notes on Ravelry for this blanket where they mentioned casting on an additional number of stitches for an extra column. I looked it up and saw that purlygirly had added 38 stitches. I thought, hmm, I should add two columns. That's a total of 213 stitches, then. I looked at the remaining tail of my cast-on - no way. Then I thought, do I really want to take all of these off and then cast on another 213? Um, no. Then I hit on the brilliant idea of a swatch. Of course! That's what I'm supposed to do anyway! So I cast on 48 stitches (enough for a column and a five stitch on each side border, theoretically), and started the seed stitch.

Seed stitch, it turns out, is a pain in my ass. But I was pleasantly surprised with the acrylic and mysterious Vittoria. It's quite soft, or at least much better than the almost-as-cheap acrylic I'm using for the Nebraska Hat. So we'll see how all this turns out.

Also, while I was in the second yarn shop for the weekend, not finding anything I'd rather use for the Diamond and Smocked, I felt really guilty about having been in this yarn shop numerous times and not purchased anything. I decided I needed to buy some yarn to assuage this guilt. Yes, I agree that this was a pretty flimsy excuse to buy more yarn, since even though I am a foreigner who stands out pretty dramatically in Yatsushiro, it's unlikely that they have a log in this store to keep track of my purchase-less visits. It's Japan, though, so who knows? In any case, I bought two small skeins of fingering weight wool, black and teal, that I'm going to use for wrist-bands, possibly to cover the tattoo I'm thinking of getting sometime before I leave this country. I thought the yarns were the same, but obviously I didn't look closely enough, since the kanji are clearly different. I couldn't find either yarn on Ravelry, and even when I had my Japanese teacher translate the labels for me and I found one of the same brand and name, it has different length and weight. Should I add these to the Ravelry database? I'm not sure I have a good enough grasp of the yarns themselves to attempt it. I wouldn't want to mislead anyone, or get it wrong, or whatever vague worries I have about trying something and having it not be perfect. Maybe if the label were in English...

Dammit, now I gotta go pee again. Drinking gallons of hot green tea is a decent solution to the cold, but the frequent trips to the icebox squat toilet are a significant down side.

I'll Just Finish This Before the Hypothermia Kicks In...

Finished the Christmas Head Thing and Robin's Fetching, and started Stu's Nebraska Hat!

The head thing is nice enough, but huge. Here it is being modeled by Brenda. I like the pattern and all, even with my wonky tension, but it's just so big I'm not sure if it's a practical wear. Was that just the yarn and needles? I felt like the yarn was thin enough, but maybe no. Now I'm wondering about making one for Emily. Maybe I should do something else for her. Anyway, FO details:

Name: Christmas Head Thing, #1 for Sheila in DC
Pattern: Bamboozled, by Random Cyn
Finished measurements: 15 1/2" long in body, 33 1/2" long with the twisted cord ties. 3 3/4" wide at its widest point, 1 1/2" wide at the narrow ends. See? Almost four inches across the top of your heaad? Doesn't that seem excessive?
Yarn: Patons Decor in New Lilac, the remnants of a scarf. Definitely less than 100 yards, as the pattern promised.
Needles: Size 6 bamboo needles I got for ¥100 (just under $1 US, yo!) at the new crafty store in Jusco. They're more than 12" long, which was silly for this project but will come in handy later, I'm sure.
Pattern mods: None, for once. I mean, yeah, I screwed up the pattern and didn't y/o properly for half of it, but that doesn't count.
Number of times frogged: Only once for real, when I took out a couple of inches after doing the pattern a little too incorrectly, and then once where I undid just one row. Sweet!
Knitting in Public: Not really, just the car on the way to Costco.

Robin's gloves look pretty good. I just need to get Katie to model them for me and you'll get a good picture. I'll save the FO info for that.

The hat is easy-peasy. I started it last night while I ate dinner and watched a terrible movie: Cyborg Soldier. I got the DVD for free, along with a DVD for a Steven Seagal movie, by commenting on the Great White Snark's blog. The Seagal movie, KillSwitch, was so incredibly terrible it wasn't even funny. No, I mean, I didn't even enjoy making fun of it because it was so bad and had the most mind-boggingly terrible ending I've seen in ages. Cyborg Soldier was a cinematic gem in comparison. Anyway, already more than an inch on the hat and it's pretty relaxing. I thought I had knit this pattern before but it turns out not, because I don't have the right needle size and the one I did was 2x2 rib, where this is 4x2x2x2. The pattern calls for a 4mm size, 40 cm long circulat, and I'm using a 16" size 8, because that's what I have. So I only cast on 90 stitches instead of a hundred, and when I get a bit more length I'll try it on.

And oh my God is it freezing in my apartment right now. My fingers are going numb and I swear I feel a draft against my ear, the only other part of me that isn't covered in fleece or knit blanket. Oh, for some insulation! Why, Japan, why don't you have any insulation in your houses? Maybe I could stuff some of the acrylic cotton from the Stripey Zo around the windows...

Abusing myself = no knitting.

Once again, a busy weekend with very little knitting. How on earth am I going to get these gifts done?

On Saturday I did actually get something done on the headband while in the car on the way to Costco. Living in backwoods Japan means that a few of what I consider the staples of Western food are missing. Cheese, for instance, and proper hot dogs or pasta sauce. One can technically buy both of those things at any old grocery store in Yatsushiro, but they taste nothing like what I think they should taste like. The cheese is that plastic-y sandwich slice stuff (but not as good), the hot dogs all taste like frozen breakfast sausages (as if nobody ever realized that meats with the same shape might have different tastes), and the pasta sauce seems to all be missing important ingredients such as garlic, basil, and oregano. Enter Costco, which is just like the Costco at home except it carries futons instead of beds, has entirely too much J-pop in the music section, and has gigantic raw prawns with their heads and legs attached in the seafood section. It has plenty of proper cheese, hot dogs, and pasta sauce, although this time around they didn't have the mega-sized Prego I bought last time, so I had to settle for something that cost more yen for less sauce, and isn't even as good. In any case, it takes about two hours to get there, and I can't drive (no car, expired int'l license), so I got a fair amount of Sheila's headband done in the car, and I only got a little teasing for it. There were a few moments when Elissa's driving gave me visions of stabbing myself through the eyeball with the needles, but it was fine.

As for the headband itself, I'm just not sure. It's a very nice pattern, and I have finally gotten the hang of it, but my tension is clearly off. I've been following the chart, and the whole thing is a somewhat complicated set of knits, purls, slips, yarn overs, k2ts, ssks, etc., all one right after the other. It makes for a cool headband, by there seems to be a vast difference between the tension of my knit stitches and my purl stitches, usually not so obvious in stockinette or regular cabling where there is enough space for things to work themselves out in between pattern changes. But this pattern has me switching things up every two or three stitches, or less, so the whole thing looks sloppy as hell. This is the first time I've ever done ssk, too, and now I finally understand it. I've seen it in patterns before without knowing what it meant, and I kept wondering how just slipping something is supposed to decrease anything. I looked it up in my trusty Knitting Answer Book, though, and a small dim lightbulb went off. Duh. But it turns out that I was still screwing things up for a while, anyway - the pattern calls for alternating a yarn over, k2t with a ssk, yarn over on every right side row, so that you get a pattern of alternating holes, like this:

X X O X
X O X X
X X O X
X O X X

I'd show you an actual picture, but I haven't taken one yet. The only reason I have the one above is that I hurriedly snapped one this morning before I came to work, knowing it was the only time I'd get a chance to blog for the next undeterminate number of days. You can see that the lighting is all wacked out, because the blue pillow is purple and the lilac headband looks pink (the sun was barely over the mountains and the light was lovely and orange and turned my colors weird).

Anyway (geez, distracted much?), this means that you have to wrap the yarn one way on one row (because you will be knitting next) and the other way on the other row (because you will be purling next). Then on the wrong side row, you're supposed to be purling the y/o stitches, except I was purling wrong on one kind of y/o, so my holes didn't appear on that row, giving me this for the first few inches of the piece:

X X O X
X X X X
X X O X
X X X X

Because I am a dolt. I figured it out and started doing it the correct way, then decided that no one would notice the messed up part because there's more of a pattern to the whole thing anyway, as you'll see when I can post proper (that word keeps coming up today) pictures. THEN I managed to do this a few inches later:

X O X X
X X O X
X X O X
X X O X
X O X X

And that I could not handle. I had finally gotten the hang of the pattern, wasn't looking at the chart, and guess what else I was doing? Watching a movie, of course. Friday night Katie and I watched Atonement (such a great movie, one of the best book adaptations I've ever seen) and Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium (goofy but entertaining), and so naturally I screwed up my knitting. Spent the first part of the car knitting on ripping back to that and fixing it. Then I had left the key to the chart at home so wasn't sure how to start the decreases and had to stop, and the whole damn trip took about four hours longer than it needed to because we had to go into the city and that was clearly a mistake.

Now I'm almost done, already started the decreases and everything. I'd like to finish tonight, but I can't promise that because I will be here at school late again with the final practice for the prefectural English recitation concert (thank god! I can't take any more "Iz zat ze Maori lawnguage?" "or "My name is Janet Blaun" [should be Brown] - I love these kids dearly, but I seriously can't take it anymore), and then I should really get to the gym. Yeah, suck. But I did the 3,333 steps (why, you ask? what an excellent question. I don't know) on Sunday, an all-day, completely exhausting excursion that is the other reason I didn't knit more this weekend, and my legs are still so incredibly stiff that getting down my extremely steep stairs first thing in the morning is torture. But hey! I climbed a mountain completely via staircase. In November. When I haven't worked out in oh, forever. Dolt.

Robin's Fetching is still sitting thumbless in a corner, but I bought the yarn for Aashima's Fetching and Reidy's Diamond and Smocked blanket, I think. I'm not sure about the yarn for the blanket - I got ten skeins for ¥500, and it's 100% acrylic, not even in the Ravelry database. Clearly not high-quality stuff, but she has said that this blanket is for her cats. And she wants either bright royal blue or sour apple green (to match her living room, apparently - !!!), and this yarn fits the blue bill. Still, I think she deserves something nicer, so the jury is still out. Maybe I'll do the acrylic blanket for the kitties in a different pattern, and do the Diamond and Smocked in something nicer. Yeah, in all my spare time. Of which I used to have plenty, as I recall, before the Winter Term ALT Busywork kicked in. Sigh.

Feeling Vaguely Tech-Savvy

Not that I am at all tech-savvy.  I am not far from hopeless, actually.  What saves me is the ability to follow idiot-proof directions, and to sometimes tell when directions are not idiot-proof enough.

I added those snazzy progress bars just now (yes, when I should have been doing something else, such studying Japanese or emailing my mother - but these look cool!), following instructions from Ravelry.  It was a pain, not so much because the technical aspects were hard for me (all I did was copy and paste), but because the specific idiot-proff directions I needed were surprisingly difficult to come by.  Here is the thread that actually helped me the most, and I found it after much floundering in the more obvious help areas.  The step 1 and step 2 to which the thread refers can be found here, and I found that through here, eventually.  The wiki help page was surprisingly unhelpful for the progress bars, I found, and in fact it ceases to make sense at all halfway through.  The We Heart Progress Bars group was where I found the actual help, and not through the many lengthy threads where everyone already seemed to know exactly what they were doing and only had a code problem somewhere further down the line.  

So now there's that goodness going on.  Now I just need to figure out how to put the icon that lets all my imaginary readers know that a link goes to Ravelry.

Oh, yeah, and Happy Halloween!  My favorite holiday.  Already had some of my students come up to me and say "Trick or treat!" for stickers.  Little darlings.  They have some Halloween stuff in Japan, but mostly in the form of decorations, like something else for the all the Martha Stewart types to latch on to.  There isn't really any trick-or-treating or haunted house business, which is sad cause those are my favorite parts.  So in an effort to bring some cultural exchange, I'm giving stickers in return for the kids to spout something else they don't clearly understand.  Hey, man, it's an uphill battle.

Scary movie night again tonight!  I put together the little treat bags M sent, hoarding some of the pumpkins for myself, and I'll try not to screw up my knitting while watching and stuffing my face.

Thumbs the Word

So, here is the Stripey Zo, all pictured up for your viewing pleasure.  Well, sort of.  I'm having trouble getting the other pics up. Bleah.

This makes blog #6 for this project, which is a bit silly.  Most people on Ravelry finished this thing in about five minutes flat.  I took more than a month and had to go on and on about it all over the internet.  But, at least he's cute.  I'm very pleased.

So, while I was waiting for the second picture to NOT load just now, I finished the thumb on one of the first pair of Xmas Gloves, the dusty rose pink ones for Jessica.  I finished most of the rest of glove one while waiting for the fireworks to start last weekend, and the other glove was done this week, mostly Thursday and last night while watching scary movies at a friend's house.  

Knitting while waiting for the fireworks was funny to me - I kept wondering what the Japanese people around us must have thought.  Three of us showed up way early to secure a good spot for one of the most awesome fireworks display one can see (it's a competition for professional fireworks people), so there were three foreigners sitting in a large field of Japanese people, and I'm there knitting.  Do they think, Oh, look at that foreigner doing something normal! or maybe, What?! Foreigners know how to knit? or maybe, Quit playing that damn disco music! because I brought my iPod speakers?  Doesn't matter.  One of my students saw me, though.  He came running by, stared for a few seconds, said "Suge!" (cool! or wow!) and wandered off.  Then he proudly told the teacher what he saw when I was in that class this week.  Good thing he did, 'cause I never recognize them out of their uniforms.

Anyway, I joined the Fetching group on Ravelry, since it seemed the thing to do, and saw what others have done to combat the big ol' holes that appear when you pick up the thumb stitches. I decided to try the picking up extra stitches and then decreasing on the next round. And... I'm still not completely pleased, but it seems better than the last pair, and I'll try to fudge it with the sewing up. That means one thumb and ends weaving to go on this pair, and that's Xmas knit #2 owarimashita. That's finished to you lay people. Let's look at the totals, shall we?

Christmas Knitting Tallies:

WIPs: 1

FPs: 1

Knitting in Public:

   Stripey Zo: train to Kumamoto, dentist's office

   Xmas Gloves: Naha hostel, Naha Starbucks, Yats Fireworks Fest

Oh, and it turns out that at least a portion of the computer full problem was solved when I emptied the internal trash in iPhoto. Why iPhoto has to have a separate trash can that does NOT get emptied when one empties the main garbage can, I do not know, but I felt like a real dolt when someone on the Apple help forum told me this. I have never, in the three years I've owned and extensively used the photo application with this computer, emptied that trash. There were 3995 items in it, and emptying it bought me about 8 gigs of space. Sigh. Dolt. I'll still have to get an external hard drive, but at least it bought me some time. I am even more afraid of grad school now, though, since it is once again clear that I am no computer genius. Well, you do what you can.