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Given that a horde of knitters are coming over tonight for a yarn swap and space will be at a premium, I finally finished porting the files from my old computer so that it could be recycled.

My grandparents gave it to me when I went to college, thus making it the first computer that I didn’t share. It’s lived in three different states. It was my communication link to friends and family through college, during my first job in Boston, and through switching coasts and moving to Seattle. It’s seen zillions of emails and the creation of a blog. It wrote (sadly not without substantial late night help) 8 semesters worth of papers and coding assignments. It’s held ~1700 mp3s, 5 versions of tetris, an old version of SimCity, and the ever-important Snood. It withstood the beginnings of my computer-tinkering, accepting a new hard drive, cd burner, and OS. It was the last thing I disassembled when moving, and on arrival was generally reassembled before I finished unloading rest of the boxes from the car.

With this in mind, I’ve been putting off the final port of files, and the inevitable dumping. Last night, as its hour drew near, I was feeling very sad about abandoning it after its seven years of service. But then I turned it on and sat through the 8:12 minute boot, and the freezing explorer window, and listened to the loud fan, and remembered why I felt it was time for it to go. So, here’s one last picture for posterity:

RIP, computer.

(PS, I was also holding off after reading quite a few articles about how many of the “PC Recycle” centers here actually just sell the trashed computers to China, where they are burned, which leaches all sorts of terrible chemicals into the atmosphere, ground and water. A bit of Google-work later, I was happy to find the Take It Back Network, which provides a web of locations that will take computers, monitors, printers and peripherals, usually for a nominal fee, and dispose of them responsibly and locally/nationally under US environmental regulations. Even better, Staples provides this service nation-wide, for those that aren’t in the Seattle area.)

I was very amused to find this postcard in our mailbox yesterday:

One of the more amusing/endearing parts of dating someone who went to MIT was learning about the hacking culture there. Hacks are anonymous, clever, and non-destructive pranks, ruled by a code of ethics. (Perhaps some of you heard about the recent cannon.) Attached to the back of the postcard were two magnets, one with a police cruiser and the other a cow (this was the only cow link I could find, though they did put a plane up there).

Many of them are impressive for the quality of the work, while others are just quite funny and clever. I love this airplane (click through to the instructions for removal). Kevin has a particular fondness for this boat.

Yay for funny dorky culture. 🙂

We had an amazing sunset a few nights ago, with blood red clouds stretching from the horizon to overhead. I tried to take a picture from the upstairs window, which turned out blurry and pink:

then from my parking spot, which was less blurry but still pink:

Mildly thwarted, I turned to go back in the apartment and saw that the sky was reflected in our neighbour’s window. The flash didn’t go off this time, and the colors are actually true:

Rather end of the world…

I’ve started a new project! It’s the Twist Front Top (scroll down) from Adrienne Vittadini.

The yarn is called Handwork Cora… I found it on Elann for $16.92 including shipping and handling last spring when I was still feeling broke from my work sabbatical. It’s a Cotton/Acrylic blend, and feels a bit odd, but it’s machine washable and I love the color (and only $16!) so it’s fine with me for this project. The pattern didn’t really show for the first few rows, but the further I get the lovelier it looks. Four-row-repeat lace patterns are so addictive. 🙂

PS, in other knitting news: remember Janell’s sunset socks? She’s clearly been living in the Pacific Northwest too long — she overdyed them a cloudy grey. 🙂

In another major step forward for the apartment, Kevin spent all of two weeks ago sanding, staining and varnishing his bookcases, and now they’re gorgeous and done! There was just enough time before our out-of-town friends showed up for a long weekend to air out the apartment, truck them back downstairs and fill them up with the stacks of books.

He started with some unfinished pine cube shelves from the furniture store next to our fish store (so convenient!):

After two coats of stain, one coat of varnish, and four days of semi-ventilated fumes in the apartment (we were both thinking that having a garage would be nice…), here they are drying in the sun:

My only contributions to this project were carrying them upstairs and setting up a work area, then carrying them back downstairs when he was done, so I’m appreciating all of his work. Here’s the lovely view as seen from the couch:

Now that room is a funny combination of really nice, matching, stylish furniture (the new couch, bookshelves, and my pretty wood end tables), college furniture (lots of particle board office furniture that’s seen one too many moves), crazy electronics (kevin’s computer, newish huge tv and xbox) and large item storage (yoga mats, empty poster frames, camping gear and sundry).

The shelves are a huge step in the right direction.

Really not so attractive:

vs. a protein skimmer cozy!:

The protein skimmer is essential to the health of our tank, as it removes nastiness and waste from the water, but it sits in the middle of our living room. Unsheathed, I don’t think it adds much to the character of the room, so a little hat for the collection cup was in order for when we had company over. A bit of Cascade 220 later, voila!

Not the most interesting or involved project ever, but it will perform a great service. It also reminded me how much I don’t enjoy being a monogamous knitter. After the Olympics, I launched into a clapotis, and have just been plugging away on that. I think it’s time to branch out a bit. 🙂 Ought to make for more varied and interesting knitting content on the blog, too. 🙂

Since I’ve been posting about the rest of the plants (yay and thanks for the comments), and since it’s still raining so the color bursts appeal to me, here’s my planter on the front porch:

It’s been going strong with various assortments of plants since we first moved here in August ’04. (Here’s the earliest photo record of it on the blog.) The evergreen (looks like palm fronds), elephant ears (flat, broad red and green leaves to the front-right) and now-unidentified light green variegated trailing plant are still originals. I put in new bacoba (pretty, tiny white flowers) two months ago, and the red snap dragons have been in for a month and are now gorgeously blooming.

The drama, though, is due to a few bulbs I stuck in here way back in February. I think they’re called Zantedeschia, but there may be a more common name. The label, with picture, was this:

They lay dormant for months but recently have taken off. The tallest sprouts are well over 8″ tall in less than two weeks, and with their forked tops are quite striking.

There were three bulbs, which didn’t seem like much at the time, but given that just one bulb has put up six shoots, I’m now glad that there weren’t more in the pack.

I’d love if they’d bloom in time to complement the red and gold snap dragons, but since the package puts them at mid-summer and the snap dragons have been blooming for three weeks, I’m trying not to count on it.

The elephant ears have also sent up a bud.

I remember the flower being pretty garish last spring, so it will be interesting to see whether this year’s plant assortment is a better foil for it. (It’s also interesting that last year’s blooms arrived a month-plus earlier. I wonder if that’s due to the weather or if something else changed?)

Since it’s worked before when my plants have perplexed me, I thought I’d host another Q&A, where I pose confused questions, and the gardening experts out in the blogosphere tell me how to fix my problems. 🙂

I bought a hyacinth a few months ago on a whim, and it looked very pretty on the window sill for quite a while. By last weekend, though, the leaves were shedding and it was looking pretty dead, so I decided to reclaim the pot. I was completely tickled to find out that the bulbs had been actively spreading:

Instead of the five bulbs that I expected, each large bulb has 3-5 little offspring! Very cool. The only problem is that I don’t know what to do with it now. There’s a pretty serious root structure, so I just put the whole thing in a short vase of water for the moment.

I don’t have any yard to play in, so I can’t just plant it out back, and my pots and sunny spots are at a premium, so I’m not going to use one on a non-blooming thing, even if it’s cool. If I cut off the roots and put it in a dark, cool cupboard, could I replant it next winter and have it rebloom? Should I gift it to someone with a yard? Perform a random drive-by planting? I’m at a loss.

Question two continues the bulb theme. I was picking out an onion for dinner from the bowl on the counter when I came across this confused specimen:

I really enjoyed planting the garlic that sprouted a few months ago. Does anyone know if planting an onion would have a similar effect? And do you know what it will produce? Just a stalk? Oniony flowers? Baby onions? This guy has quite the lust for life, so it seems like planting might be in order, but I don’t really know what it would entail. Thoughts?

I’ve been meaning to take a picture of the chives for a few weeks now, because the one flower has been persistently blooming. Somehow the thing is still going, so I was lucky enough to remember in time to get a shot:

Isn’t it pretty? I had no idea what to expect, and I’ve been enjoying seeing it whenever I go out to the back deck.

In other back-deck plant news, my strawberry plant survived the winter and is now positively laden with flowers and tiny green strawberries. Neat! My indoor plant is slowly labouring over one misshapen berry, so it’s nice to think the other plant might yield some. I was going to go pull off one dead leaf, though, when I noticed foam all over the plant. I’m suspecting that some insect was here:

Do any of you know what is causing this? And any idea why? And most importantly of all, any idea of what I should be doing to fix it, or whether I can just leave it alone and the plant will continue unphased?

UPDATE: It looks like I have an infestation of aptly-named spittle bugs. (See the second and third paragraph here.) According to this and several other similar sites, I have to remove and squish them or the fruit will be tiny and the plant stunted.
:-/ Good to know.

The protein skimmer cozy took a bit of a detour. I decided to use the Traveling Leaf pattern from Knitting on the Edge, but after the first eight rows, things looked a bit wrong:

Compared with the crisp neatness of the original pattern, clearly something went awry:

Slightly closer inspection revealed that there were some knits where there should have been purls and several cases where they told you to use color B when they must have meant A. There’s probably errata on the net somewhere, but I just went to work with the crochet hook, and managed to repair it to this state after an hour or so:

Much better, but now I’m irritated with the whole book. The good news is that now I visually “get” the pattern so I don’t have to look at it anymore, but my tension is off for the “leaves” and the lack of attention to detail by Ms. Epstein and her editors has made me cranky. I’m not giving up on the project since I’m only a few rows from the end of the color and the all-black stockinette round-and-round part will be fun and quick to finish, but still. I bought the book this winter, and it’s very lovely, but this first pattern from it makes me wonder what the point is in showing pictures of patterns if the instructions are a disaster?