blogsome is shutting down, apparently. blog moved here: 

http://catknitter.wordpress.com/

I am drowning in graduate school applications and analytical chemistry lab reports. Every weekend is devoted to writing and working, and I feel guilty when I do anything else. 

I went on a trip to Fort Davis & McDonald Observatory a few weeks ago. It’s an almost 8 hour drive from Austin, so I got a chance to knit for a while. I am having a hard time making the polar bear sweater’s shoulders look the way I want them to. My geometry/short row skills are sorely lacking.

This is what I had before leaving on the trip. (Classy bathroom phone pic? Yes.) I technically "finished" the thing on the bus ride out, but the shoulders are still too lumpy. I think I will tear them out YET AGAIN. I got a laugh when I noticed the Care Bears suitcase in the corner of this photo. Why yes, my weekend travel case is printed with pastel bears and the words "Setting sail for grandma’s!" I will likely continue using this suitcase until I am a grandma.

 That is all the knitting I’ve done this semester. I occasionally bring a project to lectures, but I haven’t made any substantial progress BECAUSE GRAD SCHOOL APPS.

In my downtime from school/lab/applications — when I should be doing my laundry, cooking healthy meals, and vacuuming my house — I go for extremely long walks around my neighborhood. These walks sometimes include emotional phone conversations with my parents and best friends from home, but more often they’re are centered around random contemplation and playing with all the neighborhood cats. Such as this friendly critter:

There are so many wonderful cats in Hyde Park. Some of them are disgustingly scruffy and some are clean, some are cuddly and some are mean, but all of them are entertaining. They cheer me up on crappy days. 

I encounter lots of cats with this maddening behavior, though: they look at me with an adorable expression and meow cutely, but when I approach them they step back a few feet. And meow cutely again. And then step back once more when I approach, but continue rolling their head about, asking for affection. Repeat, repeat, repeat, until I get frustrated and continue on my walk. WHAT DO YOU WANT, CATS???  CUDDLES? NO CUDDLES? Fickle creatures.

On an unrelated note, I discovered this video last week and I cannot even begin to describe how hilarious I find it. Seriously. I would need three pages to explain why I start giggling every time I think of it, and the album cover would deserve at least half a page. I haven’t heard Best Coast since July 2010 (when this album came out) and I can’t believe they’re a "real band." With good reviews. And for n+1 reasons I can’t believe I am actually listening to them 1.5 years later.

And then there is this:

In case this is impossible to read (probable), it’s the lyrics page for "Our Deal." The comment that made me laugh (out loud at Bennu while ostensibly working on my a chem fluorimetry report) says "it’s obviously about her cat." I want to be best friends with whoever wrote that comment.  

My mom’s birthday was on Saturday, so I decided a couple days beforehand to knit her a scarf. I’d also gotten her a pair of earrings painted with smiling suns while I was in Prague, but she’s long expressed a desire for a hand-knitted scarf.

I made the scarf with a simple seed stitch pattern; it was an easy knit but I think it makes a nice fabric. It’s fairly firm but still drapes well.

I used Lion Brand Homespun on 10.5 (6.5 mm)’s; I love the jewel tone colorways of LB Homespun. It gets a lot of hate from fiber-purists, but the vibrancy and cushy softness always win me over. The gradations in color are fun, too. This colorway’s called Ambrosia.

I think the bright pink looks nice with our hair color, too. (My mom and I have almost the exact same hair color).

I apologize for the poor photo quality. The digital camera I borrowed for my trip abroad has been returned to its rightful owners and I’m back to using my computer’s camera, so everything is dark and blurry.

Making this scarf was soothing. It’s made with a thick yarn and fairly big needles, so progress was quick. It’s satisfying to churn out fabric in such a manner. I stayed up far too late working on it because I couldn’t bear to put my needles down. I wish I more often got that feeling about "important" things. It’s not uncommon for me to find myself so immersed in a knitting project (or spinning) that I’ll stay up half the night because I can’t get myself to stop working. It’s rare that I get that obsessively excited about academic pursuits, but I feel like I should. I wonder if the super amazing and dedicated scientists I know lay in bed at night thinking ceaselessly about new hypotheses the way I find myself lying awake mentally plotting cable designs or puzzling out sleeve constructions.  

My soft cast was taken off today, my stitches were removed, and I had a hard walking-cast put on! My wound is healing cleanly, though my foot is currently sporting a lovely mix of green, yellow, and black bruises.

I was expecting an L-shaped scar (that’s what the internet said was common for a ligament reconstruction surgery), but I got this super-cool S-shape instead. It looks a little bit like a smiley face. Or perhaps a nematode.

My right ankle has already lost a great deal of muscle definition, though it’s only been ten days since I walked on it.

It is so skeletal. I finally understand what it would require to (and why I do not) have "skinny girl" legs. I love exercise way too much to ever have fashionably gaunt legs. Muscular calves and meaty thighs all the way.

After my stitches were removed, the nurse/assistant/whoever she was asked me what color I wanted my cast to be. I was not expecting this (I mistakenly thought it was black or white only), so I was quite overjoyed (and overwhelmed). My response was something along the lines of: "Blue! Well, actually, is the green lime? Is it bright? I think green. Or maybe pink? How bright is the pink? What does the purple look like?" She looked at me like I was crazy and asked, "Do you just want two colors?" I could barely contain my glee, of COURSE I wanted two colors. I wanted all the colors. I settled on green and pink stripes:

I suspect that she may’ve thought I was a twelve-year-old kid, but I am nonetheless very pleased with the bright colors of my cast. And, even more exciting than its vibrancy, I can walk again! I’ve been using one crutch, since it’s still pretty sore, but it’s amazing to be able to put weight on my leg. It makes moving around infinitely easier. I walked to get ice cream with Dylan tonight, an endeavor that would’ve been impossible on crutches yesterday.

It was intensely satisfying to see my ankle behave the way it was supposed to when my doctor pushed it around in various directions during my appointment today. My foot used to flop in a sickeningly disconnected manner whenever he pulled on it or pushed it to the side, but now it shifts forward the normal amount and doesn’t go anywhere it’s not supposed to when wiggled sideways. I am SO glad I had the surgery. I honestly can’t believe I went more than five years with an ankle so unstable that I could sprain it while brushing my teeth (yeah, this actually happened a few months ago). Never again.

I have spent the past few days watching Harry Potter movies and working on the scarf I started on the plane to England a couple months ago. It’s coming along nicely:

I’m looking forward to colder weather when I can actually wear knitted things again.

The hot summer weather of Austin is really wearing on me. Crutches + heat ≠ fun times.

Oh, and I’ve been studying for the GRE! The math section is so much fun. I did not expect it to be extremely difficult, but I also didn’t expect to react to these problems with glee. My favorites are the ones with random symbols thrown in…if (2 smiley face 3) triangle 4 is 2, what is [(1 smiley face 7) triangle 5 ] smiley face 3?!!? It’s great. The verbal section is full of interesting surprises; I’ve discovered that I do not spell nearly as well as I’d like to believe — I thought there was an extra "i" in scurrilous (scurrilious, NO) and one less "i" in ignominious (ignominous, NO). Oh well. No one actually uses words like those anyway. I’ve been putting all the words that I don’t know into cutesy example sentences based on Harry Potter and Song of Ice and Fire characters.

Okay, now story time! Once upon a time, back in the murky muddled snafu that was my first two years of college, I had an actual serious boyfriend for whom my 19-year-old self decided it was a great idea to make a sweater. There’s a widespread superstition among knitters that making a sweater for a boyfriend will lead to the dissolution of the relationship, but apparently teenage Caitlin did not believe in such nonsense and went FULL SPEED AHEAD in designing and knitting this thing. It was the first big project I’d attempted to make for someone bigger than me (how do boys have such long arms?!), but I worked on it incessantly, and I finished everything but the shoulders and collar. When it became clear that the relationship was quickly headed for the ninth circle of hell, I somehow twisted this loving creation into a bitchy weapon ("when we break up you won’t get the sweater!!!"). I was not exactly the model of kindness and maturity back then, sorry world. I stuffed the sweater in a box and didn’t knit much of anything for almost a year.

But!! I couldn’t let all that knitting go to waste. I remain quite proud of my polar bear design (I can’t draw worth crud, so designing a chart that actually looked like what I wanted it to was an accomplishment for me). The Polar Bear Sweater has been dragged out of hiding and I shall finish it this summer. It’s a bit (a lot) big on me:

but big also= comfortable, right? I can roll up the sleeves a couple times and wear as many layers underneath as I please! And now that it’s a girl-sweater instead of a boy-sweater, I am most certainly going to embroider a happy-face on my polar bear.

I think it should have green eyes and a cute inquiring nose.