Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzing!

I heard my first cicada today.  To me, the sound of cicadas is the sound of heat.  That and crickets.  And there’s this bug that makes a sound on hot nights like one of those rattles that you spin.  Like these (sorry, I could only remember the French word for them.  It’s crécelle, in case you were wondering).  Anyway, I have no idea what that is.  Maybe it’s a toad and not a bug?  I get a lot of toads in my front garden.  And since you can’t search Wikipedia for sounds yet, I’ll probably never know.

Today, the kids started their day camps, so I had the morning off to do what I wanted.  It was nice!  And I get to do it again nine more times!  And it also means that the dreaded Kureyon Socks will probably get done, since that’s the portable project, and I’ll have lots of coffeeshop time to do them in.  But I don’t like working on it.  I feel like it’s a drag every time I pull them out.  But I bought this yarn in a moment of weakness at Shall We Knit after the Woolly Thoughts workshop I went to on Mothers’ Day, so I feel this is my punishment

I started a new project for Spinrite - a baby blanket and puppet/washcloth.  They’re in Bernat Cottontots, which I’ve worked with before.  It’s nice.  Fluffy (for cotton), not too splitty.  Kind of like cotton batting held together with a cotton thread spiraling around it.  And it’s crochet, so it’s just zooming along.

Back to compulsively looking at the house temperature reading.  I haven’t wished I had AC yet this summer, but tonight might push me over the edge.

Milestone!

I’m getting my weekly CSA box today, and I’m out of lettuce!  Woohoo!  I don’t have a lettuce surplus this week.  I’d like to thank Larry and Bernice,  who helped make this possible.

And I have dinner guests tonight.  They’re getting salad too.

Strawberries

The neighbours are out of hibernation, it’s hard to run the vacuum cleaner because the dampness makes the carpet all heavy, I have more lettuce and greens than I know what to do with, we’re eating fruit other than apples, and the kids are constantly filthy and covered in bug bites and scrapes.  Yep, it’s summer!

We had our third annual strawberry picking session this morning.  What a haul!  We picked 24 pounds of strawberries (that’s not quite 11 kg) in half an hour.  Crazy!  And we apparently found the section where the giant strawberries grew:

For scale, that’s my hand in the picture.  The strawberries weren’t all like this, but there were a fair number of these monsters.  They are delicious and sweet.  And I managed to deal with all of them in one day!  I have made 5.5 litres of freezer jam, and cut up about 11 litres to freeze.  We ate a lot of them, too.  I will probably get another box or two from the supermarket and my CSA box, but I’m getting to be all strawberried out.

Note for next year:  use the ‘light’ pectin.  I had one package of that left from last year, and bought a pile of regular.  The light stuff allows you to use twice the fruit and 75% of the sugar.   You get a slightly smaller yield per batch, but you use up more fruit, so more of the jam is berries, and less goopy (albeit delicious!) matrix that holds it all together.  It’s all good, but the light pectin is better.  Though I should probably do some research and get some recipes that don’t use any added pectin.

I finished a project for Spinrite:

The yarn a Berroco yarn not yet available to the public, made of cotton and corn fibre.  I liked it!  It’s soft, though since it’s about 10 plies it’s fairly splitty.

I’m making slow progress on the pull for Zebula made from the Phildar I bought in France.

That’s the first sleeve.  I finished the second sleeve last night.  It’s fun to work on, and goes along surprisingly fast, considering it’s worked on 3.0 mm needles.  The colour changes keep my happy, plus it’s such a cheerful colourway it’s hard not to love it.

School’s out for the summer.  Zebula passed SK and will be in grade 1 in the fall (I can hardly believe it).  I’m glad not to have to adhere to any real schedule, though both kiddies will be in day camp starting a week tomorrow.  But it’s nice for now to hang out.  Ask me how I feel about the lack of schedule at the end of July…

Vive la France!

Warning: Largely consists of a detailed, giddy and sometimes self-indulgent description of my vacation. You have been warned.

I had a nice trip! It was a great balance of being alone with Dr. Thingo (which we haven’t done for an extended period of time for about five years), being social, and being by myself.

My shuttle got me to the airport three and a half hours early. I got through check-in and security in about seven minutes. So I was at the gate for a while. Good thing I had my knitting! The flight to Paris, and train ride to Annecy were uneventful, and I much preferred the latter. Trains are the only civilized way to travel. They’re quiet, bright, comfortable, easy to move around in, and quiet. Planes are noisy, cramped, uncomfortable, have bad air circulation and are noisy (really, I think the reason why flying is so exhausting is because of the constant noise). Add to that all the nonsense you have to go through for security these days, and flying pretty much sucks.

I am blessed with a constitution that doesn’t really get jet-lag. So, if I’m good, and don’t sleep too much during travel, and make myself stay awake until it’s bedtime at my destination, I’m pretty much good to go after one good night’s sleep, both coming and going. That was the case this time again. So I got to take advantage of Annecy right off the bat.

I ate like mad. First off, let me praise French petits déjeuners. They’re wonderful - typically, half a baguette, a croissant, butter and jam, coffee and orange juice. Yeah, that’s right, a whole day’s worth of carbs in one meal! Is it any wonder I love it there!

Oh, and the coffee. The coffee alone is a good reason to go to France. Everybody pretty much uses pod espresso systems, but it’s universally good. There is no bad coffee. Anywhere. Which makes me wonder why they bother with the ‘complimentary’ instant coffee in the hotel room. Really. You can go ANYWHERE and get fabulous coffee (and if you’re not into espresso, get a ‘café américain’, which is an americano - so espresso lenghtened with hot water). There is no such thing as bad diner coffee in France.

I ate chicken innards, raw beef, cheese, fish, quail eggs, duck, cheese, cured meats, delightful starches, cheese, sweet and savoury crèpes and occasional vegetables. Did I mention cheese? Many restaurants offered a cheese course with their prix fixe. We drank lots of wine and fizzy water. We sat outside to eat. Oh, and French pizza! I had two during my stay in France. Both with an egg in the middle. An egg! They crack an egg right in the middle before they put it in the oven. It’s fantastic! And neither had tomato sauce. One had onions and three kinds of cheese, bacon, and said egg, the other had grilled eggplant, ham, mushrooms, cheese, and the egg.

Really, I had no bad food in France. Not even anything I was indifferent to. It was all good. Including the fruit I bought at the market. Which, incidentally, happens three times a week in Annecy, with a selection of fresh produce, meat, fish and cheese that would make your head spin.

Dr. Thingo and I also did some sight-seeing - we visited the local castle (whose name escapes me), built in the thirteenth century. We walked part of the way around the lake (it’s pretty big!) and went to the Imperial Palace. We wandered. We hung out. It was nice.

While Dr. Thingo was doing conferency things, I wandered around by myself. I bought a couple things at the market one day. I visited the local Phildar store and bought a couple of pattern magazines and went back the next day to get yarn for a project for each of the kids.

I read Water for Elephants by Sarah Gruen - highly recommended, and Les yeux jaunes des crocodiles, by Katherine Pancol, bought in France when the Gruen book got finished way ahead of schedule, and which was also excellent) I knit a little. I took a gazillion pictures.

Then, on the Friday, Dr. Thingo had to head out to Hungary for another conference, and I went to Paris. Another civilized train ride. I found the apartment I would be staying in. (This in itself is miraculous as I have perhaps the worst sense of direction of anybody in the universe, except maybe for my mom. Paris’s metro kicks ass!) The apartment, though teeny-tiny (those of you who ever spent any time in my roach infested apartment in Ottawa will know what I mean. It was probably a little smaller than that, though better organized). I made my itinerary on the Friday evening, and Saturday, I walked all over Paris.

When I first set off Saturday morning, I found another market - so immediately decided I’d make my own dinner that night. I bought fruit and veggies. The most remarkable about that transaction is when I wanted a melon (kind of like a cantaloupe, only about the size of a large grapefruit. Perfect as a large-ish snack for one). I asked the lady for a melon, and she asked me when I wanted to eat it. Today, I replied, a little hesitantly. So she gave me one that she thought was appropriate, and it was perfect. PERFECT! It was ripe, delicious, melony goodness. I want to know how she knew. Anyway, my dad has since told me that his habit, while in France, was to buy one for today, and one for three days hence, and they were always just right. The same philosophy of ‘when would you like to eat it’ apparently applies to cheese mongers. I’m so used to the north-american strategy of ‘go to the hypermarket and buy a week’s worth of underripe food at a time to stock your gigantic fridge’ that it kind of threw me. But I loved it.

I took my purchases home and set off again. I took the metro to the Arc de Triomphe:

then walked to the Eiffel Tower:

then along the Champs Elysées, to the Louvre, walked around there for a while (the Louvre, let me tell you, is a hell of a big house. And what kills me is that Napoleon obviously didn’t think it was big enough and had a whole new section added to it. Hilarious.), had lunch nearby, found La Droguerie and had a look inside:

I walked down to Notre Dame, found an appropriate metro station and took it to the base of Montmartre and walked up the hill to look at the view and the teeming hordes of people, and walked back down. Took the metro back home and made myself dinner. I didn’t go into anything, which is why I could do it all in one day. I would love to spend a couple weeks, with four days in the Louvre alone!

Paris is beautiful. It’s incredibly green! None of the buildings in the central part of town is more than seven stories, so it never feels crowded. The streets are narrow, and I didn’t see anything remotely resembling a parking lot. It’s a lot smaller than one might think - I could conceivably have done my itinerary only on foot, though it would have taken much longer. So, since the buildings are fairly short, the trees all tower over them, so it’s very green, and never feels all concrete and metal the way most big cities I’ve spent time in feel. Even Seattle, which is pretty green and lush doesn’t feel this nice.

And let me just say this here: yes, I was unapologetically a tourist, gawking and taking pictures of everything. I don’t care about looking aloof and cool and trying not to seem like a dumb tourist. It was beautiful. And I don’t care if you think the Eiffel Tower is a dumb, cliché landmark, it’s pretty. So there.

I went home the next day, during another uneventful flight back. Well, mostly uneventful. We landed in Toronto, and just as we were about to pull into the gate, a crazy thunderstorm struck, leaving us stranded as the outside workers understandably went inside, rather than risk getting struck by lightning. There were 100 km/h winds buffeting the plane. It was crazy. So we were all stuck in the plane for an extra 30 minutes or so until the storm blew over. Which would have been fine, except that I’d finished my shawl on the way, and had just finished my book as we were landing. So I just stared at the rain until they let us off. Then I got my bags (after a cursory conversation with the Canadian customs dude) and went home. Having been up for 21 hours by the time I got there, I crashed, but woke up the next morning feeling pretty damn good.

So, that’s it! The kids were returned to me Monday night, and we’re back to the normal routine. Dr. Thingo should be here in an hour or so, back from Hungary.

Random observations:

• European geeks don’t look like American geeks. They all have nice shoes.
• All Parisian women are gorgeous, and wear scarves.
• The very young looking guards in the train stations, airports, and major landmarks carry sub-machine guns. Yikes!
• George Bush was visiting Paris the same day I was. He got more press than I did.
• I wonder if the people in Annecy ever take the view of the mountains for granted.
• The metro in Paris smells better than the TTC in Toronto.
• The cost of living is higher in France. Food, however, in its elemental form, is about the same price, but the minute it’s processed, or served to you, the price goes way up. So if you cook for yourself, it’s pretty cheap. Rent, however, is crazy.
• Restaurants open for dinner around 7:30 pm. If you walk in at that time and ask for a table for dinner, they will look incredulous (”Really, you want to eat now? But it’s so early!”)
• There is dog poo everywhere.
• The pizza delivery guys drive scooters.
• Many, many people bike to work, even guys in suits and ladies in heels.
• Poppies grow wild in the fields.
• I saw two castles on the way to Annecy from Paris.
• French people think my québécois accent is cute, but apparently acceptable, as they did not try to speak to me in English (in case you don’t know me, French is, in fact, my mother tongue. I grew up in Ottawa)
• French kids are allowed to be part of the rest of society in a way that North American kids are not. Consequently, they behave very well in restaurants.
• People grow plants and veggies as much as they can - in gardens, backyards, and people have lush container gardens on their balconies in Paris, adding to the total impression of greenness.
• I didn’t gain weight during my trip. Must’ve been all the walking, cause I sure as hell didn’t stop myself from eating. Though I didn’t snack much, because the meals were very satisfying.
• Football is HUGE! You don’t even have to watch the game yourself to know what’s happening. Everybody else is watching, so it kind of becomes part of the collective subconscious (Euro 2008 is happening as we speak…).
• A glass of wine will cost you less than a half-litre of mineral water.

Ok, that’s enough of that for now. I’m sure I’ll think of more later, but I can only bore you with this stuff for so long. I’ll put more of the gazillion pictures I took in Flickr at some point and give you a link to it, in case you’re interested.

Here’s the swallowtail shawl I made on the trip:

It’s a tad small, but will make a nice scarf. It knit up incredibly fast, and only took up about 20g of wool. Oh, and here’s a completely unplanned but à propos observation about the border:

Tiny, little Eiffel towers.

See ya!

So, I’m off to France this afternoon. I’m packed, the house is clean (well, as clean as it ever gets around here), the garbage has been taken out, and the cat-sitters have a house key. I’m not getting picked up for another 4.5 hours, though, so I’m just sort of pacing, looking for something to do. So here I am, blogging.

Sang a pretty good show yesterday. I didn’t think it would fly - it was a comedy show, so the audience will either think we’re trying too hard and politely sit there, waiting for it to end, for the love of god. Or, they’ll actually laugh. And it was the latter! Some lines, which had become kind of commonplace from having been rehearsed over and over got some huge laughs. It was like doing FASS in school, only with way better music and singers. The show was short, which is probably a really good thing for a comedy show, or it’ll turn into a SNL skit, and just keep going long past the point where it stopped being funny, and then you have the first kind of audience again… But we did well! And I know you music snobs out there are pooh-poohing the idea of us doing a novelty/comedy show, but it was a lot of fun to do! It’s nice to lighten things up once in a while!

Oh, and I can’t believe I almost forgot this, I got to knit. On stage. During the show! One of the bits was a ‘choir meeting’ and we were encouraged to bring something to keep us busy. So there! Sanctioned knitting on stage during an actual performance. First and last time, I’m sure.

Unfortunately, I was a little heavy-hearted for the dress rehearsal in the afternoon. I had left, and said goodbye to the kids. They left to go spend the week at grandparents’/uncles’ houses. This is the first time I’ve left them for more than a couple nights, and it actually made me sad. And I didn’t want to make too big a deal of it, so I wouldn’t upset them, but I was surprised at just how sad it made me to leave them for a week. Also, I was worried that Vorlon, who is only three, and probably didn’t realize fully that neither Dr. Thingo nor I would be with him on this trip, would spend the whole six hour drive crying for his mommy. Turns out the fears were totally unfounded. Apparently, they behaved admirably in the car, with a minimum of fuss. Which is a relief.

I’m bringing this as a vacation project:

It’s going to be the Swallowtail shawl. The yarn is Malabrigo Laceweight, purchased at the unfortunate Cloth and Clay closeout. I started it out, since I didn’t want to deal with the fiddly bits with the crocheted start in the airplane (and all my hooks are metal, and I didn’t want the overzealous airport security dudes to have a reason to look through my stuff - note the newly acquired Harmony wood needles, to further put the odds in my favour. Would it be bad if I told the overzealous security dude that I’m more of a threat to the airplane without my needles than with??). I *LOVE* this yarn! Maybe it’s the contrast with the Kureyon sock yarn, but it’s soft, and sproingy, and light, and wonderful. I can’t wait for the plane ride!

Oh, and in gardening news, the mock orange right next to my front door is in full bloom, and the smell coming and going from my house makes me ridiculously happy. It’ll be all done by the time I get back, so I should just go and sit on my front step and inhale deeply until Elbie comes to pick me up for lunch.

Aaaaah…

Fabulous weekend! We ate pretty much solid from Friday night to Sunday afternoon - that’s what you get for getting five moms in one cottage. We washed it all down with a pretty steady stream of wine and gin and tonics. We sat on the beach, we read. We took walks, both on the beach and in the woods. We slept in. It was great!

I did all those things, and knit some too:

The book is Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles, by Margaret George. Fluffy, but not too fluffy, except for the size - it’s roughly 1000 pages.

And, apparently, I needed to loosen up, because I have finally made most of a workable garment out of the hated-no-more Kureyon Sock yarn.

Which just goes to show you that G&Ts are even more useful than just as a cure for malaria.

Here are the ladies, returning from a long walk. The cottage we were at is the brown one. It was lovely. Very comfortable and cottagey. Note the ostentatious new cottage under construction on the left. While it was huge and had beautiful lines and a fantastic kitchen and everything else (we snooped, it’s true), it just doesn’t seem like a cottage to me. Heck, I don’t even think I could handle it as a house. We’re such slobs, that huge space would just pile up with an incredible amount of crap.

I have to get ready for my big trip this weekend, but I have a concert on Saturday, so I have rehearsals for that to deal with too. I’m filled with excitement about the trip and anxiety about the kids (I know, I know, they’ll be fine, but I worry anyway). I made a list of all the stuff I had to do, and really ought to be doing them, but am feeling strangely unmotivated.

Oh, come to the show (see link above)! Mention the “friends and family of the choir” offer, and get in for only $10! It’s a funny one - a huge departure from our usual serious religious stuff.  Plus, I have a one-second (spoken) solo!

Random and Disjointed

1 - I unraveled the Kureyon Socks.  They looked dorky (not the yarn’s fault this time.  All mine.)  So I’ve started over, and they are my size, so far.  Who knows how they’ll end up.  I’m going away this weekend to a friend’s cottage with a bunch of other friends (and no spouse or kids), and I’m still waffling as to whether to bring the socks, or start a new project, because just the thought of these socks makes my blood pressure go up.  Sheesh.  Mind you, knitting while drinking wine might make me not care.

2 - It’s raining.  Which is good for my garden, don’t get me wrong, but not so good for the laundry I hung up.  Because, of course, Environment Canada said the forecast for today was “Sunny.  High 22 degrees.”  The forecast has now been changed to “Showers.  High 22 degrees.”  I wish they’d ascertained that before it started raining.

3 - Yes, I’m going away for a weekend of debauchery with some friends.  Which I feel vaguely guilty about, since I’m leaving my kids next weekend for a week to go gallivanting off to France.  But Dr. Thingo will take care of things just fine in my absence, and, as I told him, this is payback for all those summer conferences he goes to, in particular the two consecutive weeks’ worth he attended while I stayed home with a toddler and a two-month-old three years ago.  I’m vindictive that way.

4 - I’ve been cycling long distances (ok, 15 km at a time, but still) a few times in the last week, and except for the tender butt, it feels good!

I have to go buy some wine.

Happy birthday, Vorlon!

First, my little boy has made the ‘official’ transition from toddler to preschooler. Yes, Vorlon turns three today, and so has evolved from this (at a day or two):

to this (at three, minus two days):

He is ambivalent about his big-boy status, but is happy with all the attention.

And for knitting, my hatred for Kureyon Sock continues. The gauge has dropped back to 8 st/in while I was merrily knitting along. But there’s no way in hell I’m starting over again. So, if you have size 7 (women’s) feet, pipe up, and the socks are yours. Grumble.

Thank goodness for Blue’s Clues

The first long weekend of the summer is over. As far as the weather goes, it was a bust, except for part of Saturday afternoon. We rented a car for the weekend, so obviously we went out for Dim Sum for Saturday lunch. Then I took the kids (so Dr. Thingo could get some work done) to a local nursery to get this year’s crop of annuals. I put them in immediately, since it was nice out by then, and I didn’t think the weather would hold. Here is, as it currently stands, my front yard:

All that brown is where the grass used to be. There are now perennial herbs, annual herbs (except for the Basil, which I won’t take out until the frost risk is much lower), and some butterfly-attracting plants, for which I got a kit at the nursery. I’ll probably be doing a lot of weeding this year, but I quite like it. Here’s another view:

Those are the annual herbs, and the last tulip in the back.

I also got the tomato bed ready:

Tonight’s low is supposed to be 1 degree Celcius, so I won’t put the tomatoes out today, as I meant to. On the far right, you can see the snap peas slowly crawling up the mesh I put up against my railing. Also, there’s that big patch of saxifrage that was put in there by the previous owners. There used to be two giant yews in this bed (you can see the stumps still), and I guess they put the saxifrage in there so it would eventually take over as ground cover. It makes pretty red flowers later in the summer. I keep meaning to take it out to make more tomato space, but I can’t bring myself to do it. Maybe next year.

Sunday, we went to Toronto to go to a Stragglers party at Jorge’s, whom I haven’t seen in a long time. Since before his now 14 month old daughter was born. It was a fun time, and there were some kids there almost exactly my own kids’ ages, so I hardly saw them all afternoon. Everybody wins! Incidentally, the mom of one of those kids made the best cheesecake I’ve ever eaten. I wonder if I can get the recipe off her.

Yesterday, we didn’t do much of anything, as the weather was surprisingly blustery. The kids did go play outside later in the afternoon, but I put a video in after lunch and let them watch a big pile of Blue’s Clues while I worked on this:

Cute, eh? It’s the purse on the front of the current issue of Threads magazine. I picked out the fabric with Vorlon on Friday (”Do you like dis fabwic? Dis fabwic? Dis fabwic?” Len’s Mill is a pretty big place…). It takes just a few hours to put together, including the cutting of the fabric, the second guessing of instructions and picking out of seams, the looking up of errata that aren’t there and that I could have avoided by just reading the instructions through carefully before I started, and the finishing. Fun to do. And I love that polka dot fabric. I might have to get more to make some kind of garment.

And I am knitting! Spinrite sent me some yarn. By mistake. It was supposed to go to another homeworker, but since it’s easier to email me the pattern than for me to send the yarn away to its intended recipient, I inherited the project.

Gilded rib-cage, it’s called (heh). It’s made out of Bernat Bamboo, which is nice and soft, but sheds like crazy. I made another similar, but crocheted, garment out of the same stuff last year. Nice pattern, works up quickly. And, for the first time in ages, I’m working on straight needles, because I don’t have any 6mm circulars. It took some getting used to - the weight distribution is totally different.

And I have started (and restarted, and restarted…) some socks out of the Kureyon Sock yarn I bought after last week’s workshop. I HATE THIS YARN! Sure, it’s pretty, but I can’t get an accurate gauge swatch to save my life, and then the gauge changes while I’m working. I started off wanting to make the Coriolis pattern from New Pathways for Sock Knitters, toe up. I started off with 3 mm needles, got 7 st/in in the gauge swatch and it turned out to be 6 st/in in real life. So I decided to go with it, ripped it back to fewer increases and kept knitting. I saw that the texture was nearly invisible and the fabric was too thin (I should know better than to use a one-ply for something textured). So I decided to do the Topstream socks from the same book, ripped it back completely, and did a swatch with 2 mm needles. That was too firm, and it was 9 st/in, which is crazy. So I settled on a 2.5 mm needle, swatched and got 8 st/in, started the sock again, and realized about 3 inches in that it’s really 7 st/in. So I have ripped back to get the appropriate number of increases for my foot size. This is nuts. Luckily, the patterns are totally customizable (Cat Bordhi is a genius) but I have to redo the calculations every time, which is a minor pain in the butt. The yarn is so contrary, it even eluded the autofocus on my camera:

I hope this one sticks. If not, I’ll just make the socks as-is, and find somebody they’ll fit on. Sheesh.

*ETA:  I just realized that the view I’m using in wordpress is screwing with my pictures and truncating the last little bit of them (on the right), so you can’t see the snap peas crawling up the mesh in the picture. I’ll figure out how to change it later.

Knitting and Math. Best Mothers’ Day ever!

Not only did Zebula give me this kick-ass necklace for Mothers’ Day, but I got to spend the afternoon at a Woolly Thoughts workshop. Pat and Steve, who are the founders, are former maths (yes, with an s. They’re Brits) teachers. They do all kinds of cool things with garter stitch and colours, all modular. These ideas and techniques have been used to teach math and geometry to school-age children, apparently to great success. It’s technically easy, but the results are wonderful. Plus, I got to hear things like “closed Sierpinski Peano curve” in a knitting workshop. I’m full of ideas now, to use up the stash. I already made Zebula a Barbie blanket from the knitting I did in the workshop.

The workshop was hosted by Karen, of Shall We Knit, in a coffeeshop a few doors down from the shop. It was a nice space, and the coffee was good. We got to go to the shop afterwards, which was great a) because I’d never been and b) I could get a copy of the Woolly Thoughts book. The store is fabulous. Just what a yarn shop should be. Big work table in the front, well-arranged and displayed yarns and great book selection. Prices were clearly displayed, and many of the yarns had either swatches, or garments nearby, so that you could see what things looked and felt like. I’m glad it’s there. Though it’s 22 km from my house, so a pretty substantial bike ride, if I want to go that route.

I’m off to go finish my Mini-Clap, and do some more work on the Q socks. Maybe some coffee too.