scifiknitter

I have a second blogging gig these days. I'm now writing for lungcancer.net, a new website that is building a community resource. The organizers have reached out to several notable lung cancer patient advocates, and I am proud to also have been asked to write for their site. In April 2017, the American Lung Association sent me to Washington DC to represent New York State for their annual Advocacy Day project. Lung cancer patients, survivors, and caregivers from all 50 states gathered to go to Capital Hill and lobby our Senators and Representatives. We all asked for the same two things: increased funding for the National Institutes of Health, and quality and affordable healthcare for all Americans. We also had a heck of a good time. Here is a link to the post I wrote about my experience for lungcancer.net: Lung Cancer Advocates on Capital Hill: A Report on the American Lung Association's Advocacy Day "What is it like to lobby Congress? You want to make ...

Parents are always happy when their kids end up liking what they like. One of the joys of 2009 for me is that my daughter has taken up knitting. In her case, she is focusing most of her efforts on the art of the sock. A. has always been a person to dive into a pursuit completely, so she probably already understands sock patterns better than I do. I recently gave her some patterns. I look at them and say "ohhhh, pretty", she looks at them and says "this one creates a men's size with a cheat, this one needs to be resized...". After 25 years of knitting, I am learning from my daughter. A. is interested in how sock yarns are dyed. While sock yarns do come in solid colors, there are lots of multicolored yarns out there as well, some of which create patterns as they are knit. Because she wants to take control of as many aspects of a pursuit as possible, and loves finding a cheaper way to acquire materials, she became interested in the idea of dying her own sock yarn. ...

Cat Bordhi's book New Pathways for Sock Knitters is a feast of possibility if socks are your thing. She features eight sock architectures, each interpreted in several different ways, and each that solve the essential engineering challenge of the sock in a nontraditional way. The challenge of the sock? The leg and the ball of the foot are about the same diameter, but the sock needs more fabric at the joint, where foot and leg meet. Traditional sock designs add and then subtract the extra fabric at the ankles, in a triangular wedge called the heel gusset. One day, Bordhi rotated a partially completed sock around her foot, and noticed that the gusset form could be put anywhere on the foot, and the engineering still worked. The socks I blogged about recently, her "Spring Thaw" socks, adjust the sock width on the sole. The pair I just finished, "Tibetan Socks", make their adjustment on the top of the foot. These socks are knit with a double strand of sock yarn. I cho...

Back in December, I got me a pink RAZR cell phone, when I lost the detested whatever it was in a snowbank some where. I immediately discovered, however, that the selection of ringtones on the phone was terrible. There weren't many to choose from, and they were very uninteresting. I remember the good ol' days when cell phones came with lots of ringtones. Then the phone companies discovered they could make money by selling ringtones. My theory is that they have decided to not supply interesting ring tones on the phones so that people will be driven to buy them. Well, I got me a techie daughter as well as a computer, a cellphone, and iTunes, so AT&T will not be making money on me. Last night I learned how to convert m4a files to mp3 files, and how to use Bluetooth to upload the files from my computer to my phone. I searched for suitable files by sorting my iTunes library by length of song, and choosing tunes that were less than 40 seconds long. I do not currently have a music ...