Whine The First: I'm leaving tomorrow for Chicago. And thanks to various last-minute things happening at work I will have to check email daily even though I'm on vacation. Even though my two colleagues are both travelling on business, they're headed to places where they won't be checking mail.

Whine The Second: I feel better but am not completely over sinusy ick. Flying will be interesting.

Whine The Third: I'm supposed to be on my way to Naomi Novik's booksigning. But my car won't start. I know why; somehow one of the dome lights got flipped on this weekend, and the battery's really low. No way to get AAA here in time, and not much sense in jumping the car anyways when it's about to sit for a week. So no fannish squeeing over dragons for me tonight.

Whine The Fourth: It's entirely awfully clear that my current knitting project isn't going to work; I don't have enough yarn to finish the shawly thing (a clapotis, for the knitspeakers) I'm making. It's beautiful yummy hand-dyed and there is no way to get any more, so I've had to rip The. Whole. Thing. and I'll need to start over again with something else that eats less yarn.

Ok. That's it for the whining. On the positive side:

Plus the First: Yay, vacation! And I wasn't planning on driving to the airport anyways.

Plus the Second: I can pack tonight AND watch Project Runway AND finish Victory of Eagles.

Plus the Third: I have to check email because I found out late today that it looks like I'm getting $$ to fund more awards. We're close to the end of the year deadlines so the various paperwork and decisions can't wait until I get back. But more money for economists makes me happy even if it's not more money for THIS economist.

It's been a run-around-in-circles sort of week at work with lots of unexpected small Must Do Now stuff appearing from thin air. And I'm feeling poor-ish thanks to sinus troubles. I should be grateful; I left work at 5 yesterday (skipping a party for my boss) because I wasn't feeling great and got home just before a power outage at the metro stop.

Last Sunday I went to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival because Bhutan was one of the featured countries. That was intriguing, since I knew very little about Bhutan other than 'it's near Tibet, sort of'.


They built an entire Bhutanese temple on the Mall.


A group of monks were there demonstrating what they called Monastic Arts, traditional crafts done in the monasteries as a form of prayer. This is made of very fine silk threads hand-wrapped around a framework of wood. Sort of like the most complicated god's eye you can imagine:


One monk was working on a sand painting:



Bhutan has a long tradition of weaving and embroidery. There was a display of naturally dyed yarns and threads:


Although I don't think you can get all these colors from natural dyes. I didn't get a chance to ask if patchwork is a traditional Bhutanese craft but they're certainly using it in a Bhutanese way:





Seeing things like this is one of the best things about living up here!

Yesterday began and ended with Drama! with phone calls from my sister at 8:30am and 10:45pm. When I told her that the second call was Too Late she apologized and then got defensive: "who goes to bed this early on Friday?"

Please to excuse me while I go pound my head against a wall.

However, the rest of yesterday was fun. I got caught up on Dr. Who (waaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh! sniff!) and bought some supplies for carving a rubber stamp because I'm intrigued by letterboxing. If I'm going to pick up another crafty hobby it should involve exercise, right? And D. and I browsed London guidebooks before going out to dinner. I missed our cozy small town Blackburg fireworks, but since we had thunderstorms here yesterday evening I was not all that eager to go hunt out more kaBOOM.

Books!

(1) Elizabeth's London: Everday Life in Elizabethan London. Gosh, can you tell there's a theme? I'm getting very excited for the London trip in Sept. This one is part of a series that follows the city in different time periods. It covers everything from furniture to gardening to medicine to clothes to sex. It didn't really give me the kind of perspective on the city itself that I'm eager for right now, so I don't know if I'll pick up the other books.

(2) The Harsh Cry of the Heron. This is a sequel to the Tales of the Otori books that I so enjoyed. Even though those were originally marketed as YA novels, the themes here are very adult. It's written in a spare and beautiful style like the rest of the books and seems very Japanese to me (although understand that I don't really know anything about Japan!) Characters we care about are in tragic situations and live with the consequences of past decisions, which made it hard to read sometimes.

Yeah, I read too much.

Bold means I've read, underlined means I love it. I'm going to be pretty careful with the love here: I liked lots of these books.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible Somehow saying I love this in the way I love Austen doesn't feel right.
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte Don't like this one at all.
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell Ditto.
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller -
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger -
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell -
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams -
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck -
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy I found both Anna and Vronsky pretty intolerable.
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden -
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell Another one I didn't like.
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown Hated it.
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez</b>
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery Not quite a book I LOVE, but I sure did enjoy every second and I'm sorry I missed it when I was a kid.
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy -
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood It brilliant, but I didn't enjoy it.
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding Hated it. Can you tell I don't much like parables?
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert -
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth I liked this one very much.
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley -
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac -
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy -
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding -
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson -
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt -
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro -
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White -
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom -
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole -
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory When I was in third grade, this was THE book.
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I’ve been sadly delayed in updating here. Call this the whirlwind summary post, and then I’ll do later more detailed ones on specific things, ok?

Last weekend was great fun. And exhausting! I came back wiped on Sunday and I've been tired all week. I've had some very early mornings at work, so I've been mainlining coffee all week and I will sleep lots this weekend.

I had classes with Annie Modesitt, Jared Flood (better known in blogland as brooklyntweed) and Cornelia Tuttle Hamilton. I laughed a lot, learned a lot, and got to see many of my Bburg knitmafia and also meet some new friends. A few specific things I learned:



A new increase and a new way to handle left-leaning decreases.

A new method for cabling without a cabling needle.

I practiced an Elizabeth Zimmerman one-row buttonhole that I’ve never done before, and got to play around with refining it.

Sudden flash of AHA! when Jared answered my question about how he’s done set-in sleeves from the top down with short rows (ala Barbara Walker) when the sleeve circumference is smaller than the armhole circumference.

Ideas for how to teach people about stitch mount and how to wrap the yarn when making a stitch that will make me a much better and more adaptable teacher;

Playing with a simple chevron stitch pattern to make a really cool mesh-like fabric.

I also learned NOT to have a beer before asking Sheryl to take a few FO pics, as you'll see when I post the photos. But you'll have to wait a bit. After all this busyness, the apartment is an utter pit of mess and doom, the fridge is empty, and I haven't exercised in days. Onwards!

I'm off to Bburg today for Purl Jam, Mosaic's first knitting retreat.

Two days out of the office, beautiful weather, lots of time with my knitbuds, interesting classes, and some yarn-y shopping. Life is good!

I'm taking the big laptop and my camera. If we have wifi at the hotel, I may even be able to liveblog.

Guess what I saw at my local bookstore this weekend? A new book called "Cause of Death" about, well, causes of death. A little googling revealed that I'd missed this article on starwars.com; the author notes that this was a difficult project to finish because you need to use official government statistics to answer the question.

Imagine that!

It sounds strange to mourn someone you've never met. But here I am, saddened by the news of Tim Russert's death. ( Why? )

Happy Birthday to wookiee99! I hope you're enjoying every minute of it.

We're waiting for a thunderstorm line to move through in the next few hours. Cooler air on the other side, hooray!

It's almost been a midwestern spring here; cold to cool and rainy, a couple of weeks of nice weather, and now straight into the upper 90s. I still needed a coat two weeks ago, and now basically it's a sauna outside.

So now that I have lovelylovely central air, I pretty much spent the entire weekend lounging around here and enjoying it. I went to the library, the grocery store, and Costco, but that's about it.

Today was a lonnnnnnggggg day at work, thanks to some anonymous Senate staffer who wants information about one of our research awards. I was grouchy about having to stay late to finish the memo until 4pm, when I heard that a metro car had derailed on my line. It is NOT a good sign when the public transit web site says "Orange Line travelers should consider other modes of travel."

AFAIK, no one is hurt, although people on the train were stuck in the tunnel for two hours before they were evacuated. And oddly enough my Metro luck continues; when I finally finished at 7pm service still was nowhere back to normal, but three trains in a row were headed in my direction and I had no trouble at all.

( Bujold. And knitting progress. )

I'm tired and I wish I could go home, but unfortunately I have a Work Dinner starting in an hour. Unfortunate because tonight I'd rather eat scrambled eggs in my pjs.

A few updates: last weekend various friends were in town to celebrate slyvermont's 50th birthday. While we were at it we also celebrated dmlunsford. It was lots of fun, especially because while the papers were full of stories about groups of women seeing Sex and the City, we were off to see Indiana Jones.

I'm deeply grateful to econopodder for last night's rescue. We had a bad thunderstorm/tornado line come through in the late afternoon, and as a result there were power lines on the Metro tracks that got in the way of my commute home. Just as I was trying to figure out the best way to cope with the resulting mess, I had a phone message. She was in the neighborhood with her car; her dance class was cancelled and would I like a ride home? So I got home in 30 minutes rather than, oh, 2 or 3 hours.

And a few more ( books! )

What's been missing from my life? Pirate Economics!

Peter Leeson over at GMU has a new book coming out with a fabulous title: The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates. More about the book here. Fascinating stuff on pirate ships as democracies.

He's also got a working paper available in pdf.

I’ve been waaay behind on keeping up with my reading. But I like reading about what other people are reading – it’s been a good way to find out about new books. So here goes once again. ( clickity )

I'm just back from a weekend trip to Bburg for Commencement. Here are S. and I at the reception after the department ceremony, dressed in our Hogwarts best. I had a lovely time. It was bittersweet, of course, since it reminded me of how much I miss teaching, but graduation has always been one of my favorite things about academic life. It was good to see everyone, and despite my fears I didn't blubber during my speech, and I got to spend some quality time at Mosaic with my coffee and knitting and friends. We had splendid weather, and it all reminded me of how much I love Blacksburg in May.


Here are a few links from things that happened while I was gone. My colleague G. travelled to Germany for his uncle's funeral. I knew the funeral was going to be An Event but I didn't know why. Wow. It's G's father's sister's husband, but I still have to get him to tell me more about the family.

Wondering about the econonomics of gas taxes? Colbert explains it all. And Scott Adams of Dilbert fame has decided to start the Economics Party.

Ahhhh. First weekend in May means Maryland Sheep and Wool! I didn't go last year of course, so this year was really sweet. knitecon flew in on Friday from Chicago for her first MS$W, and Friday night was dinner and chilling at my place. econpodder did a valiant job trying to explain 3 years of BSG during the episode. Not the easiest assignment!

So the short version is simple. It was a beautiful day, I bought too much yarn, knitecon bought yarn, econopodder came along, the weather was glorious, we got to spend time with the Schweighofers, I ran into Gina and Cher from Blacksburg, and I (of course) slipped on some gravel and fell, so I also got to visit the first aid truck and am sporting some scrapes and bruises and a sore wrist. Could have skipped the first aid truck but at a livestock fair it seemed like the better part of wisdom to let someone get me properly cleaned up. And the ice pack was nice!



We left early on Saturday; my travelboss tendencies were out in force. Believing in Early Starts is a family trait; my sibs and I all inherited it from my dad. Besides, while the fairgrounds don't officially open until 9am, this is just a sort of myth. Getting there at 8:15 means you can avoid the 45 minute traffic jams on the way into the parking lot. You get one shot at avoiding the world's longest bathroom lines, everything isn't jammed beyond belief and the vendors are pretty much all set up and happy to sell.

However, even then there were at least 40 people in line for tshirts and a longgggg line of people clutching armfuls of STR waiting patiently outside The Fold's booth to pay. (STR = Socks That Rock, a wildly popular sock yarn that's hard to get on the East Coast except by mail).

Here we are enjoying our morning:

You'll note that L. and I are not carrying enormous bags, because we have not yet started buying things. We fixed that quite quickly, of course.

We shopped, we gabbed, we found Lynnanne and Pete and heard about the current adventures of their bunnies. Here we are eating lunch:

Do not believe anyone who tells you that the food at the festival is lousy. It's wonderful. You just have to like lamb. (And fair food like ribbon chips with cheese and sour cream and bacon bits.)

After eating lamb, D and L took pictures of sheep:
.
Then they went off to see border collies being smart while sheep were dumb. I went off to do a little more shopping, but sadly met up with the aforesaid gravel. So I changed my mind and headed over to our meeting point, strategically located near the Brooks Farm booth.

Here is L encountering Brooks Farm:

She is grinning like a woman who is about to buy an armful of glorious hand-dyed green merino.

Me, I was chilling out and enjoying the yarn fumes:


So what did I buy? Pics and descriptions will go up tonight or tomorrow morning on my Ravelry page. The short version is Handmaiden (a skein of Swiss Mountain Cashmere and Silk and two skeins of Casbah), two skeins of fingering weight merino from Neighborhood Yarn Co, a DC area indie dyer, wonderful shearling slippers from Shepherd's Flock, some lace weight merino from Tess, and my big purchase, a sweater's worth of gorgeous natural chocolate brown yarn Cormo cross yarn from Alice Field. Translation; soft, luscious rare-breed yarn sold to me by the shepherd, who regularly wins prizes for the quality of her fleece and who clearly adores her sheep.

All this yarn-y goodness was followed by beer and burgers at my neighborhood bar, where they obligingly turned one of the huge TVs to the Derby for us. I just wish that had ended more happily.

We were pretty subdued when we went back to my place, but spilling all the yarn out on the floor and gloating did help. D. eventually headed home and I went to bed, leaving L. to plot the future destiny of that green merino.

"Here are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish." ( Answers behind the cut. )

Happy happy Birthday to cyndisuesue! Enjoy every minute, and plan on froofy drinks when you're here next month.

My sister arrived on Thursday and will be here through Monday. So far the visit's going better than I thought it might -- I can get very easily irritated with Sue, but I seem to be doing better at keeping the Big Sister Tells You All crap under control. Or else just being on our own without the rest of the family around is keeping some of the dynamics under control. Probably some of both.

Lots of errands to tackle today, so I should get going. I promised I'd drive Sue out to the Manassas battlefield (she's a Civil War buff) this afternoon, so I need to make the most of the time to myself today. There's just so much scut to being an adult!

Meanwhiles ( fast bsg reaction. )

We're in the changeable part of spring now, when the weather is different every day and the trees and such are bursting out so fast I notice changes from day to day. The spring panel meeting was Thursday and Friday last week, so my desk is piled with work. My sister arrives on Thursday, just in time to join everyone piling onto Metro after the papal mass at the new baseball stadium. Since Sue tends to be pretty vocal about how she is NOT Catholic, that could be interesting.

I'm behind in updating on my knitting. Two weeks ago I finished the Nantucket jacket. ( Details behind the cut to spare the uninterested. )