Last year, while working on Hopkins, I posted some advice on colorwork. I think it’s still good advice, but I have an update. Instead of the magnet arrangement, use Mavalus Tape. You can take a little strip and put it directly onto the chart. When you finish the row, lift it and move it to the next line. It will not damage or stain your book. This is the absolute perfect solution for chart-following.

Pictured here is Erin, or the first few inches of her. Since I am working over 336 stitches, it will be a long time before there is enough to make a proper portrait of, so I am going with artistic curves. You can see the nice colors, at least.

This is Erin, from Alice Starmore’s Celtic Collection, being knitted up in Elann’s Peruvian Highland Wool on … hmm… I will have to check, but I think these are #3 needles. I know that I always want to see this information when I zoom through knitting blogs, so I try to put it in occasionally for zooming knitters.

I also have an update on the mathematical question: is it reasonable to use statistics to estimate the odds of finding a suitable mate? I realize that most of you have not yet had an opportunity to weigh in on this question, but I have to speak up here, because both Pokey and Sighkey have brought up a paltry objection: namely, nobody actually does this.

Well, granted. As I recall, when I was Pokey’s age, my major criteria for choosing a date were dancing ability and good cheekbones. (I will take the opportunity here to point out that all my kids have great cheekbones.) Was this reasonable? No. This is why married ladies such as The Empress and I have to tease unmarried girls like Pokey mercilessly — um, I meant, give excellent advice to them about their dating habits.

In real life, people either believe that there is One Certain Mr. or Ms. Right for them (the Cinderella hypothesis) and go around with the equivalent of a glass slipper in hand, trying it on one after another and discarding each in disappointment, or just randomly flit from one person to another with no plan whatsoever. Some of them are reproductively successful and some are not. What does this have to do with statistical analysis? Nothing. This is because math and real life have nothing in common.

I still think that the calculations are fairly trustworthy, or could be made so if we didn’t just use 1/2 whenever seeking a proportion. I think that Pokey has probably found that 2% of the guys she has seen during her vacation have been suitable — though it is possible that she has only seen four single guys in her age range, so that 2% of them equals a small fraction of a person. This does not invalidate my hypothesis. She will not admit this, of course.

Yesterday, I spent four hours cleaning my house, while my husband watched kung fu movies. I make no further comment. The connection between this event and my having chosen dates by their cheekbones is too obvious to require comment.

Then #2 daughter and #1 son came home from work and we had lunch, and she and I set off to the library for some more fact-checking. I was working on a senator. It turned out that — while this was not mentioned in the encyclopedia article I am checking — he had murdered a guy in his law office. There was a fight, he and the other guy both pulled their guns, both were shot, and the other guy died. The newspaper said rather demurely that the coroner’s jury could not establish who had fired the fatal shot. Hmm. A public fight, two guys with guns, one dies. Doesn’t seem that hard, does it? Are you beginning to wonder, though, whether there are any politicians from my state who did not have public gunfights?

We got home in the mid-afternoon and settled in with our knitting and a Gene Kelly marathon on TV. Gene Kelly — dancing ability, good cheekbones. He was never in my dating community, of course, but #2 daughter and I both enjoy looking at him. She had a soft spot for the young Frank Sinatra, too, but he was snapped up by a lady cabdriver.

Here’s a nice song for New Year’s — “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?” – from someone who figures that his or her invitee has received a thousand invitations. Their math is probably less realistic than mine. I have not received any, myself. My children are all at the age where what they have is multiple invitations involving last-minute cell-phone calls — dates, that is, to call one another and see whether they want to do stuff. So they may all be out roaming in packs, and I might be home with my husband watching Dick Clark (who must have a portrait in his attic, like Dorian Grey) celebrate in Times Square. Since we live in the central time zone, this allows us to toast the new year without staying up so late. He won’t dance any more, my husband, but he still has excellent cheekbones.

By the way, if you have never read The Picture of Dorian Grey, go click on that link and read it, for the whole text is there. You will start the new year with a serious flaw in your education corrected.

Many of us make plans, resolutions, or goals at this time of year. This has led to a mathematical conversation chez fibermom. Namely, if your goal for the year is to marry (or to find a suitable candidate for marriage), can you usefully calculate your chances of success?

This all started when The Empress, The Princess, and I were giving Pokey some advice on choosing guys to date. After giving our advice some thought, Pokey complained that — if she applied our criteria to all possible candidates — there would be no one good enough for her and she would have to remain a spinster. She might have been objecting to our criteria, but we were right, so I reject that thought.

Instead, I did some calculations for her, and determined that she could expect 2% of the population to meet her criteria. She did not find my calculations convincing. She thought, in fact, that the whole idea of using simple arithmetical calculations for this purpose was bogus.

I took the question back to the ladies. The Empress and I are married, The Princess has a steady beau, and Pokey is too young to marry, so this is an entirely abstract discussion. We have not consulted any men, or any mathematicians, either. But we would like to have your opinion on the subject.

Begin with 100 men. If you go to school, attend a church, work in public, or are otherwise out there in the world, then you probably know 100 single guys in your age range, and it makes the math easier. Pokey knows that there are more than 100 men in her year at her college (in fact, she has twice that many in her Facebook Friends), so we are using this number.

Start with the superficial things that would cause you to eliminate someone or make an effort to get to know him: appearance and self-presentation. We figured, for Pokey, that 50% of the guys in America would meet her initial criteria. She attends a conservative, not to say strict, school, so that 50 would be reduced only about 10% by her insistence that the candidate be sober, non-smoking, and honorable. She still has 45 fellows to choose from.

Since they are college students, we estimate that at least half the guys will be intelligent enough for her. 23 left. We think she should date fellows from stable family backgrounds, which we figure reduces her numbers to 11. They must themselves be emotionally and mentally stable as well, we feel, since Pokey is not restful. She does not suffer from stress, she says — she is a carrier. Still, knowing that only 6.5% of American men are diagnosed with mental illness, we figure that should still leave her at least half the remaining pool: 6.

Suppose that half the guys are willing to date her. This seems like a good conservative estimate. As I recall, young men are generally willing to date almost anyone, and we know that Pokey is cute and fun. In fact, here is a quote from an online dating service on the likelihood that a girl in her twenties will be able to find a date: “When you were in your 20s, you were sitting in the catbird seat. Men were plentiful and hormone-driven so all you had to do was show up and beat them off with a stick.” So we should be safe in assuming that three of those guys will be willing to date Pokey. Eliminate one on the grounds that some guys will be philosophically or politically beyond the pale for Pokey, or for some other unforeseen reason ineligible.

Pokey still has 2 — 2% — to choose from. We extrapolate from this to assume that the total population of single men is sufficient to ensure that Pokey — who only needs one over the long term – is practically guaranteed to find a suitable husband, even if she insists on the high standards we have proposed for her.

(We are, incidentally, assuming that any attachments in this age group will be fleeting. We do not consider, therefore, whether these guys are dating anyone. We figure that the suitable candidates, unless actually engaged, will be heartfree at some point in the next few years. Pokey disagrees with this.)

In order to make our calculations more useful, we could check statistics on things like the percentages of young men who are drug addicts, the likelihood of growing up in a stable family, and the incidence of neuroses. We could also try to be more exact in our figures, rather than just going with one-half most of the time.

But before we do this research, we must consider: is this a useful calculation at all? Will more data make our figures more reliable, or is there no point to it because, as Pokey avers, such things cannot be calculated?

Natalie did a more knitterly year-in-review, thus:

What is your favorite finished object of mine of 2005, and why?

And what is your own favorite finished object of 2005, and why?

Answer in the comments, then I will visit your blog and answer for you!

So here are most of my FOs for 2005. It has to just be “most of” because some of them never got a FO picture posted and have been given away.

the alien doll from Knitty, in scraps of wool

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

facecloth and tawashi in cotton

 

 

 

bathmat in Morrocco. It also had a facecloth and tawashi.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Brooklyn from Denim People

 

 

 

Headline News from SnB

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tychus from Knitty — I made two of these

 

 

 

 

Christmas present hat, made up (it’s a rectangle), in chunky wool

 

 

 

dull socks, in Woolease

 

 

 

swatch socks — same yarn, same traditional sock pattern

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fuzzy Feet — one of two pairs

 

 

 

 

ballet slippers from Felted Knits – I made three pairs of these

 

 

 

Hopkins, in Woolease

 

 

 

 

“Nothing but a T-shirt” in Sinfonia

 

 

 

 

 

the Sophie bag — I made two of these

 

 

 

 

a group of bawks — four of the eight I made

 

 

 

 

one of two completed prayer shawls, being worn by a toy reindeer

 

 

As for goals, Kali Mama has a few sensible, reasonable goals for the coming year, involving size 6 dresses and no-holds-barred artistic fervor and finishing all her knitting projects. Her list might inspire you. Crazy Aunt Purl has a very long list which may not inspire you, but ought to make your list seem manageable by comparison.

I am still working on coming up with a positive fitness goal (that is, something better than ”avoid becoming decrepit before it’s absolutely necessary”). Other than that, I think I have my goals fairly well defined. Not that I intend to list them, because you know I am pretty secretive. For a blogger.

Feebeeglee had a “year in review” game on her site. You put the first sentence of the first entry from each month together. Here’s mine:

We enjoyed a little mild celebration of New Year’s Eve, with ginger ale at midnight.
An Update on Moral Questions About Sheep
This book tells us that one angora goat can produce the wool for two pairs of cashmere socks or half a sweater.
Silkenshine flashed her stash.
Feebeeglee hooked me with up with these pictures of Ms. Rice.
Sighkey tells us that they have no White Shoes Rule in the Southern Hemisphere.
Independence Day is a fun holiday.
All of us who work in or for education know that the real beginning of the year is August.
Yesterday I was working mostly on creating alluring new vistas in the toy section.
There are about 60,000 residents in the town where I live, and we have a few thousand extra with the Katrina evacuees.
“Make more, more, more.  Slippers for every room, for everybody!”
The surgery was a success: it lives! or perhaps not exactly lives, but it is completed.

Another sort of year-in-review that I do at this time of year is checking my goals from last year. I find that I succeeded with #s 1, 2 and 7 and that they are worth repeating for this year. I also succeeded with #s 3, 6, 8, and 10, and am through with them. I did not complete #s 4, 5, and 9, and am willing to try them again. #8 morphed during the year, so that I completed something similar but not quite that. I think that I will take #8 on again. So I start my contemplation of goals for 2006 with seven goals already in place.

What if you played Feebeeglee’s game? Would you end up with an accurate year in reveiw?

My Christmas presents included this book and, as #2 son put it, “one of those little books they write things down in at the gym.”

When I started at the gym, my fitness goal was not to have to take statins. Then I worked up to the goal of working out for 30 minutes most days and doing strength training 2-3 times a week, which is the universal fitness goal recommended by the Surgeon General or somebody. When this got easy, I kicked it up to “not  becoming decrepit any earlier than I have to.”

This year, I am trying to come up with a more positive fitness goal. It is still Christmastime, and the rest of my family is still lolling around and partying, but I am going back to work today, so it seems like a good day for me to get back to the gym, and return to eating properly, and come up with my 2006 goals, and stuff like that.

Here is the knitting I have accomplished over the holiday. Notice that there is very little of it. There has been some frogging, admittedly, but mostly there just has been more reading, talking, playing games, eating, and lolling about than actual knitting. It’s a holiday.

It’s not that Christmas is all about food at our house, but that our other pictures have people in them, and you know I don’t put pictures of people up.

So here is breakfast. Our traditional Christmas morning breakfast is an overnight breakfast casserole. You cut up bread and put it in a baking dish. Then you cover it with cheese, meat, and vegetables in various possible combinations, more bread, and then a custard of 6 eggs beaten with 1.5 cups of milk or cream and some seasoning. This year we used croissants, ham, and tomatoes. In the morning, you can just pop it into the oven when you get up, and it is ready after the gifts have been admired.

There were a lot of gifts for the kids. They don’t get up very early any more, but my sleeping time was 1:30 a.m. to 6:00 a.m., so I was very tired. This is because I come home from late service at the church, wait till everyone else is in bed, and then play Santa Claus. The kids started appearing at 6:30. My husband complained far more of being tired than I did, though he didn’t get up until 9:00. As a general rule, if you are a sort of Christmas abstainer and are complaining about your fatigue to the Santa in the household, you should not expect a whole lot of sympathy.

Anyway, I made this cake and #2 daughter made the mice to put on it. She and I made the painted holly leaf cookies together a few days back. You can see that we were going for understated elegance this year. We always make dessert to take to my parents’ house on Christmas day. This is a favorite — a flourless chocolate cake composed mostly of pecans and eggs. Well, the ingredients also include ground chocolate, and dark chocolate, and sugar, and butter. And a layer of apricot jam between the cake and the chocolate glaze. Or you can use raspberry. #1 daughter made hers with walnuts, and it turned out very well, too. She eschewed the mice, though.

Once the gifts and breakfast had been fully enjoyed and the cake had been made and my husband had been winkled out of bed, we went over the river and through the woods to my parent’s house. This is their driveway. We were thrilled to find that they had paved the road since we drove out here last year.

At my parents’ house we had yet more food and presents and conversation. One of the coolest gifts was Grandpa’s roll-up keyboard. It is made of rubber, and can literally be rolled up and put in a bag, but you can also play it like an ordinary keyboard. There were a lot of electronic presents this Christmas, but this one was the most astonishing. Although #2 daughter’s Creative Zen Nano was pretty amazing to me, in a sort of “who would ever have thought such a thing would be possible?” sort of way. It inspired a discussion of the MIT electronic shirt, which apparently is a shirt into which you plug all sorts of electronic devices. I cannot find it via google, but we were debating whether the wearer would be thought cool, or if it might be the ultimate pocket-protector look.

Another marvelous gift — to me and my husband from my parents — was my great-grandmother’s collection of rainbow glass. Here is a snap of the pitcher and a globlet. It looks like clear glass, but light reflects off it in elusive rainbows. I would like to know more about it. I googled it, but “rainbow glass” must not be the proper name for it, or perhaps not the modern name for it. Or else I have gotten worse at internet research, because I couldn’t find anything about this stuff, either. I did find a reference to a type of glass made with mercury that appears to change colors, but it seems to be used for jewelry rather than tableware. What with the poisonous nature of mercury and all, it might not be suitable for drinking glasses. If anyone out there knows about this type of glass, I would love to have some information.

Following our Christmas dinner, we came home and lolled around. My husband and #1 son went out to parties, and #2 daughter and I made fudge while watching “White Christmas.” #2 son was in and out of the room, sliding on his new carpet skates and scaring the dog with a cap gun he and #1 son bought at the flea market while doing their Christmas shopping. There was also knitting, but no pictures yet of that.

There were phone calls and emails and IMs from far-flung friends and family. Today, #2 daughter has to go to work, but the rest of us have another full day of lolling around planned.

It’s a tough job, but someone’s gotta do it.

 

 

Merry Christmas!

We enjoyed our Christmas Eve enormously.

There was a certain amount of baking and cooking and present-making and such, and a great deal of lolling about.

The kids headed out with cookies to deliver and a list of places to go to pick up the goodies for the reveillon.

Son-in-Law’s mother came by with a coffee cake and we gave her a box of homemade chocolates and caught up on family news.

We opened presents from the family, including a bunch of music from New Zealand which we will be dipping into directly. We had not previously been familiar with popular music from Kiwi-a-go-go-land, so this is an exciting prospect.

 

We had our reveillon in stages. Only #2 daughter and I went to church, I am sorry to say, but we enjoyed the service.

The church was beautifully decorated, with masses of red and white poinsettias and lots of lights. I sang what needed to be sung in the tenor range and #2 daughter sang any soprano bits that were going. There was a baritone and a sax and our excellent organist on organ and piano. The result of this unusual collection of instruments was that the music was warmer than usual. While in general I would always favor a balanced sound, the arrangement we had made for a nice, intimate feeling.

And the mysterious post-deadline craft project got to come out and play. Here it is: the sock monkey, with its nightcap and teddy.

If you have never made one of these creatures, as I had not, I can recommend it as a fun project. I used the machine and hand-sewing about equally, and found the directions easy to follow and sensible.

It was admittedly not a surprise to #2 daughter, the recipient, but she likes it anyway. A bawk and a hat are also peeking into the picture.

Merry Christmas! Or almost. At sunset, the first day of Christmas will begin.

So today’s song has to be “The 12 Days of Christmas.” Here you will find a cool site that clarifies the twelve days, with Christian symbolism for each of the gifts. The symbolism is associated with the story that this song was a means of hiding the catechism in times of persecution, a story that you often hear these days. Here is a debunking of that story. The debunking is pretty thorough — more thorough than necessary, really, since music historians are unanimous in agreeing that there is no evidence for the story in the first place. It is interesting, though, if you have some leisure this morning.

If you have a lot of leisure, you might like to try this math problem based on the song (or if you just want the answer, go here), or this one. Here’s more detail. If you have little children to amuse, you might prefer these coloring pages showing all the gifts.

When I was a little girl, we spent the 24th cleaning our bedrooms. The idea was that we, as overexcited kids, needed something to occupy our time. Today, my kids will be going out to pick up the food for our feast from the butcher and the baker (the candlestick maker is not involved). I will clean up the astounding mess people made yesterday while I was at work and do a little more cooking and baking. We have music practice and church tonight, and will open presents. After sunset, there will be no more work. And there won’t be a whole lot of work before sunset, either. The time for preparation is past, and now is the time for frolicking and enjoying the fruits of our labors.

In case you were wondering, the last gift did indeed arrive, and I did complete the mysterious craft project, too. I told the kids last night (after I got up in the middle of a movie to make Jam Thumbprints, because how can one rest until the Jam Thumbprints have been made?) that I intended to sleep in this morning. They scoffed. And they were right. But, as they pointed out, I would at least not be waking up at 2:30 thinking I had to go make the Jam Thumbprints.

I got home exhausted last night. I’m not sure why… it was a busy day at work, but not busier than other recent days have been. Maybe the extra effort of being on my feet all day with a cut on the sole of my foot (still haven’t figured out how that happened). Anyway, I didn’t do anything but make dinner, and then knit and play games with my kids. You can see what little there is to see of Erin here. A hot bath, then to bed with a book.

Along about 1:30 in the morning, there was insistent ringing of the doorbell, and a stranger on the porch looking for his son — a friend of #1 son’s. He had been over earlier in the evening, with a girl who is also part of #1 son’s social set. So I, only partially awake, told his father that he had been over earlier with Firstname Lastname. However, instead of giving the girl’s name correctly, the first name was that of the girl to whose Chanukkah party #1 son is going on Sunday night. The last name was the name of a character in the book I was reading before I fell asleep.

I don’t know the man or where he lives or even his name — the boy’s parents are divorced, and the mother is the one we know. So I had no way to rectify my error when, as I was drifting off to sleep again, I realized what I had done.

Whatever part of our brain is in control when we are half-awake, it functions differently from the part we think with when we are fully awake. Yesterday morning I went in to see whether #2 daughter wanted to get up and work out with me. “Do you want to get up or sleep?” I asked. “Both,” said she. She had no memory of it when she finally got up, but it was probably the truth.

This morning I have a date with all three of the kids to go to the gym at 8:00. My husband is passing on this family outing, for some reason. Then we are to go to the local bakery for croissants for the special breakfast recipe the boys have chosen for Christmas morning. It is a Pampered Chef recipe called “Ham and Cheddar Croissant Bake.” It adds some vegetables to the ingredients in its name, and covers them all with an egg custard. I am also making this other Pampered Chef recipe which is supposed to look like a Christmas tree. The one in the picture is from the chocolate party — I will fill the morning one with fruit and nuts instead of chocolate. These two items will provide us with enough fat and sugar to make the boys feel as though they have been fed properly (for Christmas, that is) before heading out to my parents’ house.

Well, I hope the man found his son. A 16-year-old missing at 1:30 a.m. is not necessarily alarming — often it is more a matter of being in trouble for a missed curfew than of actually being missing. Still, I have had worrying moments like that with my own kids, and know what it is like.

We’ve been having a slight musical controversy at our house. I want Christmas music at this time of year. We have so many different recordings that we can’t hear them all between Thanksgiving and Epiphany, and many of them are so wonderful that I would like to hear them more than once. So I will put on a Robert Shaw Christmas CD — and #1 son will swap it for Sam Cooke or The Kinks.

So it was good last night to come home to his compromise discovery — the Christmas recordings of Smokey Robinson. You can go here and listen to whole crowds of them. My favorite for today is “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.” This link is not to Smokey Robinson’s version, which is of course under copyright, but to a pretty snazzy site with midi and lyrics. If you want to sing or play it yourself, this useful site will provide you with not only the mid (in four parts) but also with sheet music for instruments in a number of different keys and for vocalists, as well as lyrics. I am imagining you at your holiday parties, suddenly needing the tuba part, and now able to click on that link and print it out in moments. Or Garth Brooks and Mariah Carey have also recorded it, if neither homemade music nor Motown appeals. It’s Christmas; I won’t argue with you.

This is of course a very popular carol, unhindered by the fact that the vast majority of people singing it think that the first line means something like, “Hey, you merry gentlemen over there, may God give you rest.” Possibly something like “stop worrying,” or even “Shut up, you drunken louts!” Actually, it is more like, “May God keep you happy, guys.” I share in that wish for you. Ladies, too.

We’re singing “He Shall Feed His Flock” from Messiah, “Come to the Cradle ” by Michael Card, and Schubert’s “Ave Maria” on Christmas Eve. Here is some interesting history for Schubert’s piece. The previous link will give you a beautiful performance of the piece on the harp — though our plan for Christmas Eve is that #2 daughter will sing it and our director will play his saxophone. The Baritone is singing “O Holy Night.” Our pastor came into the store yesterday and mentioned that he was shortening his sermon in order to fit in all the music.

So of course we are practicing our music, as well as baking and making candy and wrapping gifts and so forth. What we are not doing today is going to the gym. I have a mysterious wound on the bottom of my foot — gash a couple of inches long. I don’t know how it got there. I do know, though, that I can’t do cardio on that foot. I will do a stability ball workout at home instead.

School is out for the holidays, and both the boys had sleepovers. My husband and #2 daughter are sleeping in and I am enjoying the unaccustomed quiet. I was able to make oatmeal for breakfast without any chorus of “Eeew! Oatmeal!” and am trying to complete the Mysterious Craft Project by Christmas.

But, you know, if I don’t finish it, it will be okay. The last mail-order gift has finally shipped, according to the sender’s website, and I hope it arrives on time, but if not, then that will also be okay.

Wishing you a peaceful day…