Month: November 2005

Just a quick post to show my creeeeping progress on the back on the cable sweater. I made it nearly up to the next set of cables, and then realized that I hadn’t double checked my math and completely stalled. I even have the chart ready! It’s a mere matter of counting stitches, dividing by the repeat and adding two, and yet I’m stuck.

I’m hoping that by posting a picture I can shame myself into restarting… I want to have this finished in time for my trip home to Boston for Thanksgiving. Go, go!

I spent the weekend at Microsoft’s Puzzlehunt, with a group derived from the new Brown dinner crowd. 🙂 This was my second Puzzle Hunt, and added to one Intern Puzzle Day and one Puzzle Safari to round out my total lifetime microsoft-puzzling experience. The idea behind the event is that the winners from last year (the awesome “Everyday Heroes”) earn the “honour” of creating two days worth of puzzles, and roughly 50 teams spend the weekend proving their mental muscle. Lemon of Troy finished a mighty 36th, thereby leaving a safe margin from being forced to write next year’s fun. Despite the reality of sitting in a conference room surrounded by computers eating takeout on a weekend, I had a lot of fun. 🙂

The puzzles are multipart and usually require recognizing lots of different overlaying patterns. This year, there were a few on Semaphore and Braille, plays on the fifty states, ciphers, songs from soundtracks, ingredients from beverages from the Microsoft fridge, word games, scrabble scores, quasi-famous dates, etc, etc. My favourite was a huge 5×5 logic grid based on a map that took me two hours to solve, and then required spelling out the solutions to each to find a location on a another made-up map, then translating that to a real campus location, then bringing the first map to that room and looking at it under the black light to get the answer (“blue screen” :-P).

I know there’s a share of previous years’ puzzles somewhere, but all I could find was year 2.

People on my team were impressed by my pencil crayon skills in solving the following puzzle (they even tacked it to the wall!), so I figured I’d post my acheivement:

The puzzle had three edges with sequences of numbers in colored circles and the center was initially a blank grid of hexagons. The trick was to figure out the pattern represented by the numbers, color it in on the grid, and then realize that they were nautical flags that spelled the answer: “TIROS”. Not bad for 4:30 in the morning. 🙂

Somehow I managed to make it all the way through October and only post once. Thus, it’s time for new resolutions, namely:

1. Post more frequently.

As a sign of good faith, I’ve retroactively posted to update you on a month’s worth of fish&knitting status.

As for the reasons for not posting to begin with, it basically boils down to the three days a week I’m been getting up at 6:45 for my technical writing class at UW and the related work (weak, I know, but my workday before this started at ten and ended at 6:30. It’s an adjustment.). Add in a lovely vacation to Florida (and narrow escape from Wilma. Yay for my parents, who finally have their power back and tarps on their roof.), and that’s all the excuses I have to offer. Other than the bits posted, October consisted of watching a cloudy-topped Rainier over Lake Washington on the 7:30 am bus ride to class, reveling in the leaves changing color, way too many enormous spiders, much pondering over the “right” future career decision (technical writer? fiction editor? teacher? mostly leaning toward the former, but all opinions welcome.), appreciating Weston and Brown, carpooling home with Kevin, reading Les Miserables and John Adams, missing knitting, and the beginning of group dinners with the Brown gang. If it makes any of you feel better, I didn’t buy gas once in October, so you’ve all received more attention than my car has.

(And for those who read this far and expected that the list of resolutions would contain a “2.”, I will simply smile indulgently and leave you with a picture of the shrimp:

and all three fish on the left side of the tank:

No need to overdo these things. 🙂 )

I finally got a step closer to the vision of two 55 gallon tanks, the top one being a fish and corals display tank, and the bottom being a refugium. In one marathon session on Sunday, I moved everything (including 2/3 of the original tank’s water) over to the new sandy-bottomed tank. I am so happy with the result. I flipped a few rocks, and so now we have more space for corals, and with the new tank’s placement in the room, we can now see the view fully from three side, and about a third of the way across the back of the tank. We’ve discovered new clams, new crabs, and an enormous new stinging worm (the source of my endless rash?) since making the switch. (Pictures below, and with my pinky finger for reference. It was about an inch behind the glass, so the comparison is pretty accurate. How does something that enormous go undetected for eight months??)

For those, like me, who find clams much more benign, here’s a photo of one of our four-and-counting new ones:

The yellow encircles the clam, and the green arrow points to one of our SPS guys, who I’m delitghted to say is growing again now that we’ve restarted the kalkwasser drip (for calcium/alkalinity). Also visible are the orange zoos, and Clack who came over to see what the previous flash was about.

I plucked nearly all of the xenia off of the back glass, so now we’re back down to a “small” colony of three trees, plus the pom-pom xenia. The sand looks great, especially with the additional T5 light that Kevin picked up. I need to figure out some sort of veil or sheild to make for our top lights — now that the tank is higher and the tank is more in the center of the room, it’s quite blinding to glance at the tank when you’re sitting on the couch. I’m thinking some fabric and velcro ought to do the trick.

Now that the original tank is cleaned out and dry, I’ll start siliconing plexiglass baffles into the tank to create three sections: one chamber for water to enter from above and run through the protein skimmer, a second to pump it back up to the main tank, and a large space between them for a deep sand bed and plenty of algae.

I’ve been working on the Multi-Directional scarf pattern that I got (for free! whee!) for joining the Multi-Directional Yahoo group. I’m using Ritratto, which I love, but have been having trouble finding good projects for. It was originally intended to be a Tie One On, but the pattern really didn’t work out. Then, I was going to make a waved scarf, much like the amazing one that Jessica had on her blog ages ago. After a valiant effort, it became clear that the color blocks are way too short for that sort of a pattern. Instead of a pretty, lively blue, it looked like a blue fuzzy mess with screaming patches of orange. I should have known better — I’m never a fan of variegated yarn and lace.

So, I switched to the multidirectional scarf, and now it’s flying along (woot, knitting on the diagonal). It’s an extremely satisfying way to knit, though it definitely violates my general rule of never knitting something that I wouldn’t buy in a store.