Amphigouri: varnished nonsense

My favorite method of casting on when starting a knitting project is what I thought was called the Long Tail method - muuuch simpler for me than other methods I’d seen, though I still haven’t managed to properly estimate the amount of yarn to start with (I invariably have to cast on two or three (or four) times before getting it right). David Demchuk at Knit Like a Man has a great YouTube tutorial for this method of casting on, and it looks like I’ve been doing it a little wrong (which explains a lot about why, in particular, that first loop on my needle looks all screwy!). Thanks, David, this is great!

(via CRAFT magazine)

Margaret Atwood wrote about pigoons in her book, Oryx and Crake - pigs modified with human stem cells in order to grow organs to be used for transplants. Looks like now scientists have actually created sheep that are “15% human” by “injecting adult human cells into a sheep’s foetus.” According to an article in The Mail On Sunday, Professor Esmail Zanjani (University of Nevada) has spent the last seven years working on the process:

He has already created a sheep liver which has a large proportion of human cells and eventually hopes to precisely match a sheep to a transplant patient, using their own stem cells to create their own flock of sheep.

The process would involve extracting stem cells from the donor’s bone marrow and injecting them into the peritoneum of a sheep’s foetus. When the lamb is born, two months later, it would have a liver, heart, lungs and brain that are partly human and available for transplant.

Let’s hope these “sheeple” don’t evolve the way of Atwood’s pigoons…

(via /. )

I have about half a dozen draft posts that need wrapping up and publishing, but I had to toss this one up quickly.

One of the things that struck us when we moved back to Maine was the ability to buy beer and liquor from the local grocery stores - not just from the liquor store next to the supermarket (or a couple miles down the road for the uber-packie, as was the case where we were in MA). After several months back in state, I’m still left somewhat gobsmacked when I wander down the aisles at Hannaford and note that they’ve got a better selection - both of wine and hard booze - there than did the small liquor store in our old neighborhood.

Even more surprising to me was to go to CVS to pick up a prescription refill, wander the store while waiting, and notice that even CVS sells wine and beer! See below (alas, my camera-phone skills are a bit lacking, quality even worse than usual):

I love how they’ve managed to shelve the wine under the “Juice and Water” sign.
(admittedly, the water is maybe half-way down the same aisle, but you’da thunk they’d at least put the water *under* the signage)

Happy Pi Day, y’all.

And if you were curious how to celebrate on this Day of Pi (3.14), there’s a site to tell you all about it. My personal favorite:

Convert things into pi. This step is absolutely necessary for two reasons: To utterly confuse people who have no idea what you are talking about (thus opening the door for enlightenment) and to have fun seeing how many things can be referenced with pi. Consider two approaches:

• Convert naturally circular things into radians like the hours on the clock. Instead of it being 3 o’clock, now it’s 2*pi o’clock. Or, instead of it being 3 o’clock, convert the inclination of the sun into radians and describe that as the time.
• Simply use 3.14 as a unit of measure. Instead of being 31 years old, you are 9pi years old (approaching your 10th birthday). With this same approach, you can find out your next pi birthday (don’t forget to celebrate it when it comes!).

Not only do we have a new cute nephew, we have cute cats.

Born March 8, 3:57pm, at 7lbs, 9.2oz and 21.25″ long.
Hiya, Nephew! We’re so glad to meet you!

And wouldja get a load of those feet?? He’s got the Family Feet, that’s fer sure…

A month or so ago, I wandered downstairs on my way to work and heard the sounds of an overly active cat in the kitchen. Peering around the corner, I was mildly amused (once I got over the “gak, we just bought a house with mice!” gut reaction) to see one of the cats trying desperately to play with a little mouse that eventually disappeared into the base of one of our cabinets. Bah. That was the last we actually saw of it, I think, and my assumption was that Escher (and the others) managed through their constant vigils in the kitchen to drive the little bugger outside where it belongs. Turns out I was wrong.

Growing up, we had a family cat who, when on our summer vacations in a very wooded area, would hunt and bring back dead (and mangled) rodents and display them proudly by our back door for us to praise. Not so much with the Escher - “Hunter” really isn’t the best way to describe his attitude of “oh, look, a mouse! Here Mouse, don’t you want to play? *poke*poke*chase*chase* Whussamatta, Mousie? *poke* No move? *poke* Bored now…” - he’s not after the hunt so much as he is looking for a new playmate. Unfortunately, it appears that this particular playmate was a little too close to his food dish for comfort. Yuck. Thankfully we were present and heard the scrabbling in the kitchen and were quickly able to dispose of the evidence. Time to get a couple traps, I guess, to be on the safe side.

In other news, this past weekend marked what we expect to be our last trip ever to the MA house. w00t! We’d managed to put all the stuff destined for the dump into the garage and shed and hired a guy to dispose of it for us which saved a great deal of time on our end; all that remained, really, was Hubby’s old motorcycle, some yard equipment, and an office desk & chair - all of which managed to fit into a Uhaul quite nicely. We narrowly avoided disaster getting the bike off the truck once back in Maine (damn, those things are heavy), but all told, this whole selling-the-house/moving process has been much less painful than I had ever hoped. We’re still on schedule to close next week, which we’re going to do through our lawyer so we won’t have to make yet another trek down there (wanting to save up vacation days, as a nephew is soon to be arriving, and we’ve got a North Carolina mini-vacation coming up in April). Will be nice to have one less major thing to worry about so we can focus more on the new house (and all the unpacking I still haven’t done!).

For Christmas I received a book containing a really cute knitting project that is kinda beyond my current skill level - involving cables. Never fear - the knitting class at the local knitting/quilting/stamping shop to the rescue! I have never done cabling before, so in order to learn, I’m making a scarf using the same cable in the book pattern. Turns out it’s not nearly as complicated as I’d feared (at least this pattern isn’t), and I’m having fun truckin’ along. More pictures than necessary below (as I’m also fiddling with my camera):

And because I was still camera-tinkering:

“Dude, it’s so on!”