No doubt you are wondering what happened to the meat blob. It turns out that cloned meat is not something that will happen soon. Another option that also probably won’t happen soon is the food pill. The size of the molecules for fats and proteins make it impractical, but the book Taste of Tomorrow goes into both conventional food pill technology and the nanotechnology that may make it possible eventually.

Would you want to give up food entirely? If you could be kept alive with nano-sized radioactive robots implanted in your body, would you do it?

Before you agree, think seriously about strawberries and cream.

The more likely future possibility is African food.

I finished the book last night and this morning (still getting up at 4:00) I spent an hour or two grading papers, did some social media and blogging for clients, and headed off for a meeting. #1 daughter and I had a lunch meeting, then I had a phone meeting, and skype and IM and emails and stuff at the same time.

It was too much. While I can now stand three meetings in a week, three in a day is too much, even if one of them is with my beloved daughter. Maybe also a 14 hour workday is too much.

I thn had more blogging and more grading to do, but I didn’t finish it. I was tired and stressed and bad tempered, I’m sorry to say. My husband had made dinner for me, bless him, and I watched TV and sulked.

I feel better now. I’m going to bed, though.

I got to sleep in till 6:30 this morning, so I feel fantastic. I think that all my problems could be solved by sleep. Not that I have a whole lot of problems. Having done all kinds of useful domestic tasks yesterday, I went to bed with a good book, The Taste of Tomorrow: Dispatches from the Future of Food.

Taste of Tomorrow is an enjoyable read. It’s as much about the author’s feelings and responses to the people he interviews as it is about the future of food. I was fascinated by the initial chapters, which focused on salads. The history of salad greens is suprisingly dramatic, and I am really looking forward to grilling some radicchio once it gets above freezing outside. I’m rethinking genetically modfied foods, too.

The book has now moved on to in vitro meat: meat produced by cloning, I guess. Cells from muscle tissue are grown in a medium, a sort of broth, until they reach the size of a cut of meat — some time in the future, since it hasn’t happened yet. I can only enjoy meat (and I do) by thinking as little as possible about what is is and where it comes from, so I’m not appalled by the prospect of in vtiro meat — or no more than I am by the meat we eat now. However, the author gets the maximum weirdness into the descriptions.
 
He interviewed Jason Metheney (and I’m probably spelling that wrong) and made him sound weird, just for sounding so completely reasonable. Click that link and you’ll find a brief YouTube intreview, and it sounds completely reasonable. The book includes Australian performance artists serving in vitro frog steaks and attempts to exercise the in vitro meat. This ups the weirdness factor considerably.

However, I think that everyone I know well will have just one thing in mind during the whole discussion: the meat blob in Better Off Ted.

In trying to find a film clip for you, I dicovered that many, many of my fellow web writers have the same reaction. I don’t know whether this will harm the chances of in vitro meat in the marketplace or not.

Other candidates for the future of meat aren’t very futuristic. Schonwald (the author of the book) considered rabbits, but lots of people already eat rabbits. In fact, it is odd of us, when seen in the whole panoply of time and space, to limit ourselves as we do in the U.S. to pigs, cows, and poultry. Schonfeld is Jewish, so pork is presumably off the menu for him as well, and he has to alternate among beef, chicken, and turkey. He was able to find a new fish for the first course of his futuristuc meal, but couldn’t see trying for a goat meat revivial, so he went to the lab instead.

I went to a lab, too, this week. Not an in vitro meat lab but a high density electronics lab, and you can read about it at our education website.  I found it fascinating. Schonwald is like me in this, I think: he likes to find out about new stuff and see where people work, be it a radicchio field or an in vitro meat lab. No wonder I’m enjoing his book.

I had a very productive day today. I cleaned my kitchen thoroughly and the pantry and living room with less vigor but still more than I’ve done for a while. I did the grocery shopping, taking an hour to hang out in a bookstore and see what was new. I did the topstitching on my jacket and an inch or two of knitting. I made Yuzu scented bath gel, sorted through my closet and got a bag together for charity, and bought much-needed linens. I had a “clean” dinner of salmon, qinoa, and broccoli. I changed my sheets and pillowcases and remade the bed.I sewed up pillow covers for the daybed in my office and did laundry.

It’s amazing how much other stuff you can do if you’re not working.

A box of decaffienated Yorkshire tea arrived marked “Royal mail.” I realize that royal mail is the ordinary British mail, but it seemed very special. Royal, after all.

Having accomplished all these things, I read The Taste of Tomorrow, which is getting excited about radicchio and genetically modified food. Now my husband is watching one of those cowboy movies in which a strange white guy rides into a town in Mexico and saves the indigenous people, all of whom are unaccountably clueless, to the accompaniment of wordless choral music: “Oooooh, oooooh, oooh.”

My whiteboard is getting fuller, but my office is still tidy and pleasant to work in, so I have no complaints. We’re trying to streamline our systems so we can get more work done in the same amount of time.

The rest of the house is not tidy, and we’re filming an intereview here tomorrow, so tidying is definitely on my list for today.

#1 daughter and I went out yesterday for fun, admiring high priced furniture and having a girl’s lunch at one of those places where your meal arrives on a triangular plate, stacked and sauced to look like hat trimmings. We made a hair appointment and really didn’t accomplish much of anything else.Then we split up and I went to do the grocery shopping while she went and spent a packet on electronics.

We have to spend a packet on electronics every now and then. Can’t be helped. At least she enjoys it.

I also did some knitting. The Nantucket Jacket is growing nicely, with the waist shaping done so that there’s a bit of a peplum. I was concerned that the edges weren’t even,but it’s clear by now that this is a design feature.  See the photo below to see how the peplum undulates gently as the stitches change.

I’m enjoying the knitting. This is Elann’s Highland Wool in Cedar. It’s a sturdy yet soft yarn that works up into a good basic fabric with a nice hand.

I knitted up the second skein yesterday while watching lawyer shows on Netflix and chatting with #1 daughter about love and life and haircuts. 

We talked a lot about business, too. You will not be amazed by this because it’s all I seem to talk about here, ever. There was a time when you could come over here and find a discussion of good and evil or evolution or underwear, but now it’s all work all the time. I think this is why I post so rarely. I get bored at the mere thought of writing more stuff about business.

However, in real life it’s fairly exciting.

At the moment, I’m comparing online project management and customer relationship management tools. It happens that I encountered the blog of another knitter/ tech guy who faced the same task, and she outlined all the pros and cons of a whole bunch of programs. The fact that she’s a knitter caused me to put greater faith in her thoughts on PM/CRM tools than I otherwise would have, and how irrational is that?

I suggested to #1 daughter that we figure out our workflow and then find a tool that worked with it, but she disagreed. We must find a tool we like, she says, and then develop systems to leverage its power. We tried Salesforce, the CRM the aforementioned knitter favors, and liked the robust data capture and reporting — but didn’t have time, in the year we paid for it, to learn to use it properly. We’ve now been using Solve360 for a year, but it doesn’t seem to support collaboration as well as Basecamp did — but Basecamp’s associated CRM seems pretty lame. This is the sort of thing that makes the decision difficult.

#1 daughter has served notice that she dislikes change and expects me to pick one and stick with it rather than having to use something new each year. If you have advice, pass it along.

I’m going to revisit Basecamp, though the knitter who wrote about it pointed out that it’s all about what has already been done. I feel as though it’s easier to assign and follow up on tasks in Basecamp, and easier to collect project files there. Right now, we send stuff back and forth to client/designer/animator/linkbuilder with Dropbox, Desk, Google Docs, email, and various other tools various other people use, and it all gets messy.

We also don’t have the data we need when we need it. I liked the fact that Salesforce assisted with projections and showed the sales pipeline and how we were doing.

#1 daughter says it’s user error. If we used 360 correctly, she maintains, it would have all the data we wanted and we could communicate and collaborate perfectly well with it.

What we need is something that will do for our PM/CRM what SproutSocial does for our social media management. We can put all our clients in there, work from within the dashboard instead of having to work elsewhere and then go add stuff later, and it gathers the data for us and creates reports (albeit inaccurate reports, according to #1 daughter).

On the other hand, it appears that Mavenlink offers groups health insurance, so I’ll check it out, too.

My whiteboard is getting fuller, but my office is still tidy and pleasant to work in, so I have no complaints. We’re trying to streamline our systems so we can get more work done in the same amount of time.

The rest of the house is not tidy, and we’re filming an intereview here tomorrow, so tidying is definitely on my list for today.

#1 daughter and I went out yesterday for fun, admiring high priced furniture and having a girl’s lunch at one of those plces where your meal arrives on a triangular plate, stacked and sauced to look like hat trimmings. We made a hair appointment and really didn’t accomplish much of anything else.Then we split up and I went to do the grocery shopping while she went and spent a packet on electronics.

We have to spend a packet on electronics every now and then. Can’t be helped. At least she enjoys it.

I also did some knitting. The Nantucket Jacket is growing nicely, with the waist shaping done so that there’s a bit of a peplum. I was concnerned that the edges weren’t even,but it’s clear by now that this is a design feature.  See the photo below to see how the peplum undulates gently as the stitches change.

I’m enjoying the knitting. This is Elann’s Highland Wool in Cedar. It’s a sturdy yet soft yarn that works up into a good basic fabric with a nice hand.

I knitted up the second skein yesterday while watching lawyer shows on Netflix and chatting with #daughter about love and life and haircuts. 

We talked a lot about business, too. You will not be amazed by this because it’s all I seem to talk about here, ever. There was a time when you could come over here and find a discussion of good and evil or evolution or underwear, but now it’s all work all the time. I think this is why I post so rarely. I get bored at the mere thought of writing more stuff about business.

However, in real life it’s fairly exciting.

At the moment, I’m comparing online project management and customer relationship management tools. It happens that I encountered the blog of another knitter/ tech guy who faced the same task, and she outlined all the pros and cons of a whole bunch of programs. The fact that she’s a knitter caused me to put greater faith in her thoughts on PM/CRM tools than I otherwise would have, and how irrational is that?

I suggested to #1 daughter that we figure out our workflow and then find a tool that worked with it, but she disagreed. We must find a tool we like, she says, and then develop systems to leverage its power. We tried Salesforce, the CRM the aforementioned knitter favors, and liked the robust data capture and reporting — but didn’t have time, in the year we paid for it, to learn to use it properly. We’ve now been using Solve360 for a year, but it doesn’t seem to support collaboration as well as Basecamp did — but Basecamp’s associated CRM seems pretty lame. This is the sort of thing that makes the decision difficult.

#1 daughter has served notice that she dislikes change and expects me to pick one and stick with it rather than having to use something new each year. If you have advice, pass it along.

I’m going to revisit Basecamp, though the knitter who wrote about it pointed out that it’s all about what has already been done. I feel as though it’s easier to assign and follow up on tasks in Basecamp, and easier to collect project files there. Right now, we send stuff back and forth to client/designer/animator/linkbuilder with Dropbox, Desk, Google Docs, email, and various other tools various other people use, and it all gets messy.

We also don’t have the data we need when we need it. I liked the fact that Salesforce assisted with projections and showed the sales pipeline and how we were doing.

#1 daughter says it’s user error. If we used 360 correctly, she maintains, it would have all the data we wanted and we could communicate and collaborate perfectly well with it.

What we need is something that will do for our PM/CRM what SproutSocial does for our social media management. We can put all our clients in there, work from within the dashboard instead of having to work elsewhere and then go add stuff later, and it gathers the data for us and creates reports (albeit inaccurate reports, according to #1 daughter).

On the other hand, it appears that Mavenlink offers groups health insurance, so I’ll check it out, too.

My office is a work in progress, but I think it’s becoming more pleasant. Things got out of hand while #2 son was living in this room over his semester break, frankly, but I spent several hours yesterday cleaning out files, picking stuff up off the floor, removing stray socks, and otherwise getting things in hand.

I have a new markerboard currently in an impressively organized state. It may not last. For the moment, though, it helps me to feel calm about my work. I’m not worrying that things will get lost and forgotten, something which has happened before and which therefore preys on my mind.

I’m also trying to capture data better this year. We tried to make good goals for our business this year, but we were foiled at every turn. What’s our conversion rate? We don’t know. Where do our leads come from? We don’t know. How long do our clients stay with us? We don’t know. How many clients do we need? We don’t know. What should we do to continue increasing growth at our desired level? Obviously, we haven’t a clue.

It was frustrating. More than frustrating, really. It kept us from accomplishing our goal of setting some goals.

Making my office a nice place to work is a reasonable goal, though. Last year I bought a nice desk and file cabinet and the year before that I bought a good chair, and I’ve now put some organizational stuff up. Good strong bookcases would be an improvement — they’d keep me from having to worry that all the books were about to fall on the floor, another thing that has happened.

Indeed, the whole point of my efforts is basically to make my office less stressful so I can enjoy my work.

I think that this afternoon, after church, I’ll sew up cushion covers and a good coaster for my tea cup, deal with a few remaining messes, and the office will be a thing of beauty.

Ideally, I would then be inspired to move on to my bedroom and do the same there. We’ll see.

The Nantucket Jacket continues. Nothing much happening with it,  but I am at least knitting regularly. I also made decoupaged clipboards for my office walls, having seen the idea on Pinterest.

The idea is to create snazzy clipboards and hang them on your wall in a group, where they will organize all your bits of paper and stuff.

With style.

I spend a lot of time in my office, including workday #6 for this week today, so it should be an appealing place, a haven and a source of inspiration. I’m working on that. I have nice furniture, interesting and pretty objects on the shelves, plenty of books, a candle with a crisp wintry scent, and once I get some nails in the wall I’ll have these clipboards up, too.

Pinterest is a good place to find ideas and inspiration. It’s a fairly light-minded place, like Facebook, and in fact my new Facebook timeline has Pinterest on it.

Twitter is serious — not for everyone, I know, but for me and most of the people I follow. It’s the place to keep up on industry news and announce job openings. Linked In is dull, the result not only of being all about work but also of being mostly about self promotion. You can’t really expect a place where resumes are the central focus to be entertaining.

The spring term is well underway, I’m getting stuff crossed off on my whiteboard, and choirs have started back up. We’re singing Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky in Master Chorale — a 1938 Russian film score. You can watch the film at the link. It starts with a violence warning and interminable credits on a background of crumpled paper. Fields of skeletons open the film. I don’t know what’s up with the story, because the whole thing is so dull and unattractive that I tried to skip through and find the parts with the singing. When I did so, there was a weird guy holding up a baby whom he seemed to plan to throw into the fire. At that point, I quit watching.

When I was a child, we learned that the Soviet Union was a dismal place where people waited in line for ages to get poorly made shoes and heavy bread. I don’t recall being taught about human rights violations or economic systems, just that it was a super unpleasant place. It was probably movies like this that created that impression.

Still, it’s fun to sing, and relaxing. I’m also thinking of joining a hiking class. It’s for people my age and older, so I should be able to keep up. I usually hike with my kids, who spring gazelle-like (well, the boys do) from rock to rock and make me feel old. If the hike consists of spry 60 year olds, I should be fine. They’re going to some beautiful places.

First I have to quit working on Saturdays, though.

I got to sleep in till 6:30 this morning, and I feel like a new woman. Nonetheless, I’ve spent the three hours since then relaxing and haven’t bothered to get dressed yet. I spent most of yesterday on the sofa, too, watching movies and grading papers and doing some knitting. There are worse ways to spend the day, but also better ways. I have more grading to do today, plus my Aussies to write for, but I haven’t given up the idea of cleaning house, or hiking, or sewing.

One thing I did yesterday was to go shopping at Walmart. I don’t know whether any of you have ever done this, but I’d guess probably so. I haven’t shopped at Walmart for years, but we’re currently working with companies related to them in various ways, so I figure I should at least be able to understand what they’re talking about. Accordingly, I went to the local Walmart for my grocery shopping.

I didn’t enjoy it. I was trying to find it cool and intriguing, like shopping in a foreign city, but really it was crowded and confusing. When you ask workers where to find things, they react with astonishment and then say things like, “Pens are in the garden center,” as though that provided geographic information (or even made sense).
 
They don’t have a lot of the things that I normally buy, and yet they have all manner of odd things unrelated to grocery shopping stuck right in your way, so you have to pass through all the make up to get to the milk.

They have a section that looks like a bakery with lots of different kinds of bread, but no loaf as more than 2 grams of fiber per serving, no matter what color it is. The produce section is colorful and appealing, but everything must be bought in pre-packaged lots.

So okay, it didn’t mesh with my workflow, as we say around the office. It was clean and well stocked, assuming that you want what they’re offering. They actually have few choices, but they make it look like they have lots of choices. That’s a talent.

It took me twice as long as usual and cost just as much, but the volume I ended up with was larger, #1 daughter tells me. I don’t know. I got confused.

Probably I shouldn’t have gone there for grocery shopping. I should have gone for something less goal-directed so I could have enjoyed the process.

The pictures here are of the Nantucket Jacket, or rather of one skein of Highland Wool on its way to becoming a Nantucket Jacket.

I love the color and the texture, the pattern is simple once you get it set up, so you can easily do it while conversing or watching a movie, if not while reading, and it’s a nice piece of knitting.

I have some qualms, though. It looks asymmetrical to me, for one thing. For another, the larger sizes become larger simply because there’s a lot more of the seed stitch, and that seems to make the cable sections appear rather crowded together.

I’ll keep going anyway, hoping all will be well in the end.

 
  I fed my family properly once at least before #2 son left for college: homemade lasagne, homemade bread, and steamed mangetout peas.

I also hemmed up a bunch of horrible 1970s golf pants the boys took a fancy to. See them strobing in the photo below.

Since then, I’ve gotten an inch or two done on the Nantucket Jacket, gotten my classes well started, and crossed a few things off the list on my markerboard.

I haven’t caught up on my sleep, unfortunately, and #1 daughter tells me I’ve been angry and mean. Not good. The little rash I might have mentioned is getting worse, too. I’ve managed Wii fit a few times and cooked a few meals, but I’m still working my way back to normalcy.

I spend an awful lot of time striving for normalcy. Sigh. Not much of a goal.

We’re also just getting around to setting goals for the business for the year. It’s been too busy to manage a meeting.

We lost a big job,and I was upset about that, but it might have been a blessing in disguise, really.

So today is our goal setting meeting, plus grocery shopping, housework, grading, and — I hope — a nap.

I’m also hoping to do some sewing. I had started a SWAP at the end of last summer, and gotten quite a few things done:

• a kakhi skirt
• kakhi pants
• a two-piece print dress
• several tops

I have a jacket half finished. I hope to add a lining to it today. It’s a really lovely lightweight wool, and I should be able to wear it through the spring, but it’s too light to be happy as an unlined jacket.

I’d also bought the fabric for all the pieces of the SWAP, and it would be nice to sew up a few more of the pieces I had planned before it gets too warm to wear them. I have too much else to get done for this to be a proper PSD, but I can think about it at least.

I’ve reached the point — and I’ve been here before — where sleep deprivation has become the main thing about my life. I know there are people all over the world who get up in the wee hours of the morning, and presumably they don’t all go around in a state of exhausted misery all the time. I don’t know how they do it.

My house is a mess, I’m eating any old thing that happens to be lying around at mealtime (including fast food that the kids go out for when it becomes clear that I’m not going to create lovely meals for them), I’m getting to gym class once or twice a week only, I’m being bad tempered about things like large, well paying jobs coming in, and I actually missed a meeting.  I haven’t been to church since Christmas. I look — oh, I don’t even want to think about what I look like.

Eventually my husband’s schedule will change, or maybe I’ll learn to go back to sleep, or I’ll get good at napping or something.

#2 son goes back to his college tomorrow, and #1 son and I both start back to school as well. I have to get my courses built this weekend, and I have to figure out a schedule. I have to clean my house, too.

I’m beginning a new knitting project. There is no reason for this. I have plenty of half finished projects. But a friend at church made the Nantucket Jacket from Interweave Knits which you see pictured here, and Elann had an amazing sale on discontinued colors, and I don’t have the energy to figure out where I was on any of the unfinished projects, so I have a new one. I downloaded the pattern, so I will have to sort out the issues with my printer today (or perhaps put it on a jump drive and take it to Kinko’s) and get it started.

The discontinued color in which I am making this is Cedar, a very nice green. I like the blue green family, and my eye color is in this family, so I figure it’s probably becoming.

It is not among the trendy colors for the upcoming season. One of the big colors for fall was teal, which is not at all dissimilar to this shade — it is, at least, a blue green. The spring fashion colors are showing a very pretty almsot sage green instead.

I can get my Nantucket Jacket knitted up really fast so it can get in on the tail end of the teal craze. I can make it at a leisurely pace and wear it when that color returns to the trendy side. Or of course I can ignore the trendy colors entirely, since I usually continue wearing not just colors but actual garments until the have holes in obvious places.

These are the colors for spring. The neutrals are gray and khaki, though they’re named Driftwood and Starfish, and those are pretty basic colors for me. The deep blue is a great color, too, and I think it could be worn as a neutral. I’m g. lad to see the end of all the chocolate browns; brown is a trying color for me.

The color of the year is Tangerine Tango, and it’s paired with a warm golden yellow. Cabaret is a deep pink, so we can sneak in all that hot pink from last year. Cockatoo is a nice blue green, and I plan to watch for a jacket in that shade, or a lovely wool which I can make a jacket from (or at least add to my collection of jacket fabrics I’m afraid to cut up and ruin). Then we have two purples: a darker blue purple and a pale pinkish one.

All in all, it’s a pretty collection. I think a spring SWAP in Cabaret and Sodalite Blue would have much the power punch of red and black, without the severity. Starfish and Cockatoo would let those who’ve been loving aqua or mint with brown carry on the combination for another season. Gray and purple are a nice combination for those of us who have gray hair, and also for blondes.

I may go back to sleep now, in hopes of having a better day today.