Kiss My Knits!

Knitting, TV mania, obese cats, and kidless holiday!

Had a gift certificate, so I got Newsradio Season 4 on DVD. It’s the last season with Phil Hartman, and includes some of my favorite bits, as when Mr. James’ flop of a business book (Jimmy James, Capitalist Lion Tamer) was translated into Japanese (Jimmy James, Macho Business Donkey Wrestler) and became a bestseller there. So he had it translated back into English and gave a reading.

Good times, good times.

Click For Summer Fun, Star Trekkin’, and Miscellaneous Knitting.

It was impossible to pick out the toe of the socks, so I frogged them (rip-it! rip-it!) and started over. This time I’m also carrying along a strand of reinforcing wool/nylon for the toe. Toes of steel! Mom will be able to kick some serious booty without worrying about her footwear unravelling.

The only issue is that now I wonder if it’s too narrow. I used the magic cast-on from Knitty and cast on 18 stitches – 9 top needle and 9 bottom needle – and began increasing every other row as indicated by that cast-on. However, it looked like it was too pointy, so I started doing an increase, increase, straight pattern of rows instead. So now it’s got kind of this flower-basket thing going on at the bottom. As long as it fits, I don’t care if it looks a little funny, because it’ll get stretched when it’s on her foot anyway.


It’s a blurry picture, but you can still see where the socks are in relation to my foot. It’s hard to gauge whether it’s as it should be, because my toes are really significantly wider than hers are. And I’m not up to the total number of stitches for the body of the foot (which, by the way, I’m dropping down to 54 from 60 this time). So maybe I should just keep knitting and see what happens. I would just hate to have to rip this out a second time. Not because I don’t want to do the work again, but because I don’t want the yarn to get all fuzzy.

I’m going to post this to and see what they may have to say. If you’ve knit socks before, I’m open to suggestion and comment. Otherwise… well, I guess we’ll just see what happens!

New Futurama is on the way! Looks like I’ll be bumping back up to the next tier of cable channels in 2008!

The hubby and I finally got a chance to watch Stephen Tobolowsky’s Birthday Party last night. Excellent movie. Highly recommended. Packed with extras, too – there are gobs of additional stories. Even though I told the hubby that the extras would still be there tomorrow, he really wanted to see them all last night (this is unusual for him). He woke up this morning, bleary-eyed, hanging his head down and muttering, “Curse you, Tobolowsky!” So there’s a ringing endorsement from us both.


In DR news, I put in some moon mage visions, looked for some tattooees (I’ll look again tonight), did some paperwork, hid a Real Gem, tested a thingie in Plat, and generally did the little stuff that needs doing on a regular basis. I’m hoping to schedule a (REDACTED) at the (REDACTED) sometime in the (REDACTED), which I’m sure will be (REDACTED). Isn’t that (REDACTED)? I thought so too!

(Note: my ankles are far more shapeley than this picture would indicate.)
On the knitting front, the toes in the socks are just too dang wide. They fit me like a glove, but of course, they’re not my socks. I’m going to try to rip out the toes and make them narrower. If that doesn’t work… I’m starting over! And this is why every non-paid gift I knit takes forever and a day. I’d rather have it right than quick.

My mother is no doubt muttering (REDACTED) at the monitor right now. Sorry, Mom!



There was a fair amount of response to the picture of my daughter the ham, so I include here another picture to show why you should never tell her to smile. As one of my husband’s friends said, “you guys sleep with your door locked, right?”


But then, when you catch her in a natural moment, it’s wonderful. Of course, we’ll need a new bed after this, but that’s a small price to pay.

Jayne hats on the needles for Ohio, then Florida and Virginia!

Well, I spilled the beans to my mom as to what the present was, so I can post freely. I asked her to try these on, and while she does have wide feet like me, these looked a little too wide to my eye. They’re probably okay across the ball of the foot, but they need to be narrower further back on the foot. So I have put in a lifeline, pictured to the right, and am about to rip back to that point and do a slight decrease. These felt okay on me, but my mom’s a full size smaller than I am. It’ll be interesting to see what effect a different number of stitches will have on the pooling that’s starting to show up. I’m betting it’ll be more pronounced, but whatcha gonna do, eh? We’ll see.

On a totally geeky note, while I was in Myrtle Beach, I found The Living Room, a little coffee shop/used book store that made a great cuppa joe. I looked at the shelves while I was waiting for my coffee, and saw something that made me laugh out loud – I had to have it!

Holy moly! I didn’t even know they made these!
I remember playing Zork from Infocom in college on my Mac Plus. Ah, those were the days. I loved all those Infocom games. It’s a straight line from these single-player text games to my involvement with Dragonrealms. I once got so stuck on an Infocom gagme that I had to call the eighth grade little brother of a dorm-mate I barely knew to try to get tips on a particularly tough puzzle. He totally understood why this strange 20-year-old college girl was calling him, as any good geek would.

And like most grownups of my age, I remember “choose your own adventure” type books where you’d select one of two outcomes and turn to the page for that outcome to continue the story. I just had no idea that the two had come together in this happy congruence. And written by Steve Meretzky, no less!

This may not mean anything to anyone, but boy, those Infocom games will always have a special place in my heart. A special place in my closet, too – I still have the original Infocom games in their packaging, complete with the peril-sensitive sunglasses in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy which is now available to play online.

By the way, the original Zork text-based adventure games are available for download here if you’re in the mood for a trip down memory lane.

Mom, don’t click!

The Koigu project went well last night (finally!), to the point that I didn’t go to bed until 1am. This was a mistake, as I woke up at 5:30 feeling poorly. Then my daughter woke up and crawled into bed with me. If I’d been feeling better, it would have been great, but it was still good because she was so snuggly and sweet.

She’s been playing chess recently. She understands how the pieces move, and how they capture, and I think she’s starting to get the idea of thinking a move ahead. She does play by her own rules, of course. Wants to move and capture all the pawns, then some other piece, and so on. So here’s my little ham with our Simpsons chess board. This is why you never tell my daughter to “SMILE!”


We only caught one mouse last night, so either that’s it or the one we caught was shouting out little mousey warnings to the others. I’ll reset the traps tonight, just in case.

Behold the stupidest, fattest, loudest, laziest cat in existence. This is Nerys, named in a contest on my husband’s old computer bulletin board, back before there was this newfangled intermanet thingie. Ironically, we originally got her to be sure another of our cats got enough exercise. You can see how well that worked out.

Has she lifted one fat-sheathed muscle to chase the mouse? No. She has not. And yet, if our old cat Purr-Zha were still around, this wouldn’t be an issue. OId, blind, toothless, diabetic, arthritic, and cancer-ridden, he would still have taken out this mouse with one swipe of his paw. Nerys, on the other hand, can’t even reach her own butt. Man, did we get the short end of the cat deal.

The Koigu is swatching up at 6 stitches per inch on a #3 needle, which would have been too tight, so it’s just as well I’m being thorough and checking the math now. I’m going with a WendyKnits pattern, which looks like it’ll work just fine.
(ETA 7-27-06 I wound up getting 6.25 stitches per inch on the final product.)

The hubby leaves for Raleigh in about 15 minutes. Fortunately, my daughter’s summer camp, which I thought was only for a few days, will run all week in the morning. Yay! I can still have my morning Jayne-hat knitting time!

And finally, of interest only to Firefly fans, an actual sign that was spotted in South Charlotte. Photographer Matt Wiggins titled it best:

When Bounty Hunting Doesn’t Work Out . . .

Well, that didn’t go as expected.
Mom, don’t click!

Well, today was the last day of school, so I decided to head on up the road to Davidson to hit the Needlecraft Center, because it’s going to get a lot harder to take road trips after today. So I snagged myself some Koigu! See the pretty? I do have immediate plans for two of the skeins. More than this, I cannot say. Out of curiosity, which of the two colorways do y’all like best?

While driving back from Davidson, I was listening to the radio and my mind was wandering. I thought about the influence of the media, and a story my dad had told about being a kid in the audience at a radio show when the host commented on he and his buddies. They were all tow-headed*, and since one of the people in the band was called “Whitey” for his hair, it was remarked upon. 60 years later, and he still remembers it. And so did my grandmother, since I remember her talking about it too, saying that when she heard the fellow say that on the radio, she knew he had to be talking about her kid. I started thinking about it, and realized that while I knew it had happened, I couldn’t think of exactly where. It was 60 years ago, though, and the buildings have changed a bit since then. So when he called today to mention something, I asked him where he used to go and see the shows.

We had a great trip down memory lane, and the landscape of Charlotte music. The Briarhoppers (left) were mentioned, and so was Betty Johnson and the Johnson Family, Fred Kirby, and Arthur Smith, among others. I got to hear the story of how my dad got his first new bike, too.


So here are some questions for you: have you ever asked a parent a question that got you an unexpected or illuminating answer? Is there a question you wish you could ask your parents?

By the way, here’s what my dad was calling about. The Little Girl Giant, which I really recommend you check out.

*The things you learn. According to http://www.wordorigins.org/ , “Tow is an old (14th century) word for flax. People whose hair resembles flax–light colored and tousled–are tow-headed. The term dates to the 19th century.” Neat!