He’s very cute, but I think if I knit one I’ll make mine alive.

I’d love to stay and chat, but I have some drinking to do.  (I’ll try not to hurt myself this time.)  Have a wonderful weekend, all.

If you’re looking for substance, you’ll have to look elsewhere. I got nothing.

I’m so drained. I had a review today at work. I’ve been stressing about it all week, and I got myself so worked up being anxious about it this morning that I was on the verge of a migraine. What if they hate me? What if they fire me? What if they throw rocks at me?

I went wonderfully, of course - I was told that they think I’m doing great work, and we had some really promising discussions of where my future with the company might lead. Fantastic, but the whole experience has left me feeling a bit..wrung out. Ergo…no substance.

(Randomness: one of my friends at Girls’ Night last night said that “ergo” is her fight-winning word with her husband. If she breaks out the “ergo,” she has already won the fight.)

Oh, and speaking of my future with the company…if you are a database administrator (or you know someone who is) and would be willing to answer a few question about the kind of work you do and the kind of training you need, please email me at g33kgirlATgmailDOTcom. Many thanks.

Anyhoo, I’m gonna go relax and not think for a bit. Here…enjoy a picture of the gorgeous clouds we had here today.

I knew that I’d be busy tonight (Girls’ Night Out, where I finally, finally get to talk about my husband instead of my boyfriend) so the first installment of the Weekly Spinning took place last night while Bradon and I watched Pan’s Labyrinth (link has music). A wonderful, fantastic, beloved movie, but I’m glad I’d already seen it…it’s hard to spin and watch a movie and read subtitles at the same time.

In any case, the spinning was a wild success. I’m so glad I decided to do this.

There was a bit of a learning curve as I got back into it, but before long I was spinning better than I ever have before. Do you recall me saying that I was having a hard time with spinning worsted? No problem. I don’t know what happened, I don’t know what changed, but I sat down to it last night and within a few minutes was off, off and away. It’s not perfect - certainly not - but neither is it the hair-tearing, flesh-rending experience it was before. I just got it this time, and I couldn’t be happier.

The other conclusion I’ve reached (and it’s a big “well, duh!” sort of conclusion) is that I have to let go of the perfectionism in this. If I want perfect yarn that looked like it was spun by a commercial mill…well, I know where to get plenty of it. This is my handspun, and while I am striving for a more even yarn and all the good technical stuff…it’s my handspun, and the only way to get better is to let myself make mistakes. Huzzah.

Fiber: Bluefaced Leicester, 0.5 lbs, purchased at Mew Mew’s Yarn Shop in Louisville.

Sigh.

My computer at work is still making that face at me. They thought they could fix it, then they thought the hard drive was bad, then they thought they could fix it again…the latest theory is that it’s the motherboard. In the meantime, I’m using our part-time accountant’s computer…which is great except that 1) her office is really warm, and I’m a furnace at the best of times, 2) though I have my own login, I’m not an admin on her machine and can’t install Firefox, and I really hate IE, and 3) she’ll be in on Thursday, so I’d better be up and running by then. None of it is insurmountable, but it’s all uncomfortable, and has led to diminished time on the internets, which means I’m remiss in both my blog reading and my group moderating on Ravelry. Bah.

There is knitting, at least.

I have a smidgen left on the Nuptial socks, and that smidgen is going to require a bit of concentration, so I started on Clapotis during my tabletop game on Sunday. I seemed to be having a hard time with the increase at the end of each row (as in, I forget it as often as not) but I was chugging along at a good clip. I was almost up to the 107 working stitches when I decided that it was knitting up a bit too tight on US8s. I was just a touch under gauge, but the hand was really bothering me. Lest I do something entirely silly, I showed it to Bradon and he agreed. Rippit, rippit.

Therefore, the triangle you see above is Clapotis, take two. Much better.

When trying to extract a cork from a bottle of mead, do not use your thumb to balance against the central rod (worm) of a wing corkscrew as you push down the wings.  Your thumb will get drawn up in the gears, and the pinching will be excruciating.  By the time you get your thumb out a largish chunk of flesh will hanging on by less tissue that is generally deemed proper, you will be bleeding, and it will hurt like a son of a bitch.

When trying to get a pair of socks finished, do not just throw them into your purse with your hard plastic water bottle without any consideration for protecting the needles, especially when those needles are a lovely wood.  Even if you have no consideration for the holes that you will inevitably poke in the lining of your purse, you are quite fond of the needles.  If you must persist, do not be surprised when bad things happen.  Be grateful that the nice people at Knitpicks put six wooden DPNs in a pack just for blunders like this, and learn your lesson so that it does not happen again.

If this is how the weekend went….

but if you ever want to be able to go home early on a Friday (or any day, really), just convince your work computer to make this face at you.

D’oh.

Have a wonderful weekend, and happy Mother’s Day to all you moms, kitty-moms, puppy-moms, rat-moms, fishy-moms…well, you get the idea.

So, in think about the impending Estes Park Wool Market, I’ve been pondering what I’d like to get this year. My first year was sort of higgledy-piggledy and I just bought lots of stuff. Last year I went with the intention of buying yarn for Eris, and succeeded fabulously. So what about this year?

The first thing that came to mind was A FLEECE.

Oh. My.

But after taking spinning classes with the inestimable Maggie Casey, and after helping watching Miriam pick out her gorgeous fleece last year, I couldn’t shake the thought from my head. I want a fleece. A glorious silver fleece, or maybe a rich caramel, or a white fleece as pure as the driven snow, but I must have a fleece. FLEECE.

Ahem. There are a few problems with this plan.

1. I have nowhere to put a fleece. Seriously. We still have a huge pile of wedding presents in the corner of our bedroom because we’ve run out of places to put stuff. Bradon would not look kindly on me adding a huge bag to our pile of stuff…especially since that huge bag would smell distinctly sheepy.

2. I don’t have carding equipment of any kind, and the prospect of buying some is expensive. Yes, I know I can send it away to be prepared, but I don’t really want to. I want the joy of preparing it all myself, totally from scratch. Even once that joy fades (and we all know it will) and I’m crying into the endless locks of wool still to be carded and praying for the sweet release of death…I want to be able to get to the end of it and know that I carded in all by hand. It’s an accomplishment sort of thing.

Now, both of these things I could disregard…I’m real good at ignoring impediments to me buying fiber. But then I reached problem number 3:

3. I haven’t been spinning. At all.

And there you have it. The real problem. I haven’t touched my wheel in months. The crazy, the wedding, the fact that I can’t leave my wheel set up and ready to spin, and a rash on my fingers that caught at loose fibers all led to a serious decline in spinning.

A fleece is a big commitment. That’s a lot of fiber, and it would be criminal to just let it sit and get ruined. If I’m going to buy a fleece, I want to do it right. I want to buy it, wash it, prepare it, spin it, and knit it. I want to hold up my end of the bargain, and with my recent history I’m not sure I can.

But I still want a fleece.

So I’ve made a bargain with myself. I’m going to spin at least once a week for a year. My aim is for Wednesdays, but that can shift as my schedule does. The aim is for one night a week of spinning. I’m not worried about getting through X ounces of fiber, or X yards of yarn, I just want to spin once a week.

If I can do that for a whole year (with reasonable exceptions for moving, severe illness, etc.) I will buy myself a fleece (and whatever preparation tools I need) at Estes in 2009.

That’s the plan. I love this plan. I’m excited to be a part of it.

After the…ahem…minor frogging incident, the nuptial socks continue apace. They appear to be the same size this time, which is heartening, but I know better than to let my guard down.

I’ve been trying to work on them when ever I get a chance, so they’re going pretty quick, and I expect the leg to go even quicker - it only took me a few days on the first sock. The black yarn has been rewound and seems to have recovered just fine from its premature trip through the washing machine, so I suppose that all’s well that ends well.

As I was peeking through Ravelry the other day, I noticed that I never posted when I finished the RPM socks that were my Rhinebeck knitting. They took me quite a while, since between being crazy and wedding planning I wasn’t working on them much, but I did eventually finish them.

They are now one of my favorite pairs of socks. Very nice yarn (Lorna’s Laces), very nice pattern…and I have a shirt that matches them perfectly. The sock knitting trifecta!

The other day Ellie sent me off to read this blog post. I started to leave a lengthy and weighty comment on her post, then thought better of it.

I really recommend that you read the original piece, but in summary it is about public displays of affection between homosexual couples, and about how even very “out” couples still hide their orientation, depending on the audience. It’s a very touching piece, and very thought-provoking.

I am bisexual. I don’t hide it. Bradon knows that I’m bi, all of my friends know that I’m bi…for pity’s sake, the whole internet knows that I’m bi. It’s not a secret. I’m not ashamed of it. I’ve never tried to hide it, never used wiggle words, never played the pronoun game.

Because I’ve never had to. Let me explain.

I have been attracted to girls. I have flirted with girls. I have been intimate with girls. I have been truly, madly, deeply in love with a girl; a girl who inspired poetry, a girl who drove me mad, a girl whose strength and beauty struck me dumb. A girl for whom I would have done anything - anything at all - if only she’d ask it of me.

And so, when she asked me to go…when she asked me to set aside my feelings for her, ignore her feelings for me, and go back to my boyfriend and let her return to hers…I went. And of all the decisions I’ve made for love, that’s the one that hurts the most.

But the point is, I’ve never really had a girlfriend. I’ve never had a girl to bring home to my parents for Thanksgiving dinner. I’ve never done “the dating thing” with a girl. There were friends I loved, and friends I fooled around with, but never a real girlfriend. That’s just not how it fell out.

And now, as it happens, I’ve found true love with a boy. I married him, easy as can be, with no legal impediments. If it had turned out to be a girl I’d found this kind of love with, I’d have had the ceremony, I’d call her my wife, and I would fight for every inch of my rights I could wrest from the government. I’d travel to foreign countries to make it as official as I possibly could. I’d sign her up as my domestic partner, put her on my health insurance, make her the beneficiary of my life insurance, and do whatever else I’d have to do to make her mine in everyone’s eyes.

But I fell for a boy, so all I had to do was head down to the county clerk’s office. No one tried to stop us, no one said we couldn’t, no one said we were unnatural or gross or sinful. It was too easy.

Here’s the thing - my parents don’t know that I’m bi. Okay, maybe they suspect, but it’s not anything we’ve ever discussed. It just never came up. Most of my relationships with girls took place while I was in college, and the girl I loved…well, I had a boyfriend, she had a boyfriend, and the whole thing was way to complicated to try to explain to my parents. So I just let it go. I always figured I’d cross that bridge when I came to it - but now there’s no bridge. There’s nothing to discuss. I married a man, and my parents never need to know that there was another option.

On the one hand, it seems disingenous. I’m bisexual…shouldn’t my parents know that? Even if I’m not actively hiding the fact…even if it just “never came up”…doesn’t that smack of deception?

On the other hand…what difference does it make? Why should my parents need to know? If I’d had a girlfriend in the traditional sense of the word, I would have brought her home, introduced her to my parents. It probably would have been a little weird, there would probably have been some tears and some long talks, but I’m their daughter and they love and support me, no matter what. It would have been okay. And if I’d loved her, and she’d loved me, they would have loved us together. Since there was no girlfriend, it never came up, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Right?

It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot. I’ve discussed it with Bradon. I’ve discussed it with Bill. I’ve hemmed and hawed and gone back and forth, and come to no conclusion. If I come out to my parents now, is it an empty gesture? An, “oh, by the way, since it doesn’t matter now…” sort of thing? If I don’t come out to my parents, am I hiding it? Does that mean I’m ashamed? Is it better to spare them the trauma (Yes, they love me, but there would still be a bit of trauma. My mother doesn’t “believe” in bisexuality. She thinks bisexual is another word for confused. I’m confused about a lot of things in my life, but not this.), or is it better to finally come clean…even if I never have a “real girlfriend”?

I don’t have an answer - I’m not even sure I need one - but I’m still thinking.

I just want to make sure there’s no misunderstanding.

Everyone makes typos. Everyone misspells something every once in a while. Everyone occasionally mixes up a “your” and a “you’re.” Everyone has incidents where their fingers are moving faster than their brain, and everyone sometimes gets lost in the “which” and “that” conundrum.

Lord knows that my informal voice is a grammatical nightmare. I have this love affair with parentheticals and ellipses and dashes that makes editors cry. I tend to run on and on, and get a little friendlier with commas than is really appropriate. My semicolon use is suspect (when I find that I’ve used too many commas in sentence, I start looking for a place to stick in a semicolon to break up the monotony.)

All of this is fine with me. No one is perfect, and I often find that “perfect prose” loses much of the author’s voice. Spelling boo boos and the occasional slip up don’t bother me.

Here’s what does:

1. Sentences should begin with a capital letter and end with appropriate punctuation. when i read something like this it makes me crazy and makes it really really hard for me to understand what the sentence is trying to say dont you think When an entire blog post or forum entry is written that way, I skip it.

2. Blatant disregard for the distinction between “their” and “there,” “your” and “you’re,” “to” and “too” makes me want to cry.

3. ThIs PiSsEs Me RiGhT tHe FuCk OfF.

4. Texting shorthand makes my teeth itch. “ill meet u 2nite bring ur friend cya!” is an affront to my beloved English language. Plus, it almost always takes me forever to translate it into something I can understand. Ironical uses of l33t-speak, “teh,” “pwned,” and the like are fine, but if the whole sentence looks like that I break out in hives. Strangely, lolcats don’t bother me (but I do have to translate some of them for Bradon.)

Does this make me an old fart? Maybe. Is this the way the language is going to evolve? Are they going to starting teaching texting shorthand in schools? Boy, I hope not.

Now, all this being said, rudeness is never okay. I would never go to someone’s blog and post a comment that says “Man, you can’t even type! And your spelling is atrocious! Didn’t you graduate from the sixth grade?” That’s totally unnecessary. If I stumble upon a blog where the disregard for the rules of grammar is so offensive that I feel it necessary to make that sort of response…I click away and don’t go back. There are a lot of people on this here internet, and those with a less visceral reaction to bad grammar may really enjoy that blog. It’s not for me, and that’s fine.

On forums it’s a bit trickier. The issue becomes one of community standards. For example, I may curse like a sailor in my own home, or at a close friend’s rambunctious party, but not in a family restaurant, and certainly not in a church. Similarly, the community of the forum sets the tone for the necessary exactness of language. My very favorite forum, the Straight Dope Message Board, sets a very high standard for grammar and spelling. When new people with outright poor writing habits join the board n start 2 rite like this, someone usually steps in and mentions that we, as a community, strive to write clearly and conform to the standards of English. If the newcomer does nothing to improve their communication…well, yeah, the snark starts to flow, and I don’t feel all that bad about it. The erudite writing on that forum is part of what makes it so special. Again, typos and goofs are fine, though there’s quite a bit of good-natured ribbing that goes on when someone’s post isn’t up to the usual standards; unparseable gibberish is right out.

On a forum like Ravelry, however, the community standards are a bit different. Love of fiber rules the day there. Good writing and clear posts are certainly appreciated, but are not the end-all and be-all. Now, at least 95% of the threads I’ve seen there are perfectly fine - I can read and understand the majority of the participants, and everything’s hunky-dory. Every once in a while though, I do see a post that makes me cringe - usually it’s lack of capital letters and punctuation, sometimes a few “2″s and “u r”s sneak in, and I’ll admit that it sets my teeth on edge. 99% of the time, I don’t say a word. I’m not the grammar police (as much as I would love that job) and I’m not going to call someone out for writing a post that doesn’t conform to my exacting standards. The other 1% of the time I’ll respond with something to the effect of “I’m having a hard time understanding what you wrote. Did you mean….” It’s respectful, it’s helpful, and it will hopefully lead to greater understanding for all involved.

Other forums, like the boards for The Sims 2, are desolate wastelands of language, rife with incomprehensible garbage…which is why I avoid them.

I love words. I always have. Words, phrases and sentences have always been my friends - sometimes my only friends - and I don’t like to see them abused. I’m not going to apologize for preferring a well-constructed sentence…but neither am I going to be rude when confronted with poor grammar. I’m simple going to take my mouse firmly in hand and click on.