Cousin It.

It makes me feel old that people only relate this pic to the dead girl from The Ring.
Happy HNT.

Told ya she was a killer

I knew it was all too easy to be true. Disaster finally struck my Quenn Anne's Lace. There was a whole group of stitches in the wrong place, a mess so big I didn't even understand what was going on. I tried fixing the stitches one by one and only made things worse. I tried dropping the cluster 1 round but the problem was either 4 or 5 rounds below. 

So I was getting ready for 1 day of tinking when I decided to drop everything till the point where I was sure things were right.

Eu sabia que tava tudo muito fácil pra ser verdade. Finalmente um erro grande apareceu no meu xale. Tinha um grupo inteiro de pontos fora do lugar. A renda simplesmente não alinhava do jeito que os outros grupos alinhavam, e tava tudo tão errado que eu nem conseguia ver onde o erro estava. Eu tentei consertar derrubando e refazendo um ponto de cada vez, mas só piorava tudo, porque o problema começou 4 ou 5 carreiras abaixo de onde eu estava.

Eu já estava me preparando pra desfazer as 5 carreiras ponto por ponto, 1 dia inteiro só desfazendo, quando eu decidi derrubar tudo que estava errado e tentar refazer só essa sessão.

I turned my nerves into jelly, got a headache from this car that passes by my street each 2 minutes playing jingles for a political campaign, got interrupted by my clueless flatmate 5 times, but 15 minutes later, all was well again!

Foi um drama, carro de som passando com propraganda política o tempo todo, minha colega interrompendo o tempo todo, mas eu consegui consertar o problema! Em 15 minutos!

Killer Queen

My Queen Anne's Lace shawl is officially cleared of all charges of causing me allergies. I still don't know what is making me sick, but it's not the silk yarn. I can go on and finish the shawl now.
Using surface area, with number of rounds as the value of the radius, I calculated that 10% of this shawl was knit in hospital waiting rooms already...

Oi, gente, meu xale foi finalmente inocentado: não é o fio que tá causando alergia. Aliás, ainda não sei qual é o problema da minha garganta, mas alergia não é. Pelo menos agora eu posso terminar o xale em paz. Eu calculei a área total e o que já fiz, e até agora 10% do xale foi tricotado em salas de espera de hospital...

Anyway: Happy HNT.

Till the end

A half-hearted post with an old photo, but that's just to show that I'm still around. I've been sick for the last 3 weeks, and getting worse since last week, but today things start to look better.

That's a project I haven't worked on for some time, but it's not abandoned at all! I'm actually way more advanced on it than the photo shows. I'd say I have 80% of the top knit, but the last 20% require some mad maths skillz and I didn't feel like thinking about it yet. But the pic from the beginning looks better than the ones I tried to take later.

I don't know when, but I'm going to finish this sometime soon.

Misquoted song of the day: Até o fim.

Quando nasci veio um anjo safado / when I was born a naughty angel

O chato do querubim / that damned cherub

Que decretou que eu estava predestinado / who said I fated

A ser errado assim / to be wrong like this

Já de saída a minha estrada entortou / from the beginning my path was twisted

Mas vou até o fim / but I'll go on till the end

Happy Half-Nekkid Thursday.

Führ mich ans Licht

We had a short power outage last night.  The darkness all around makes what is in the light all the more visible.

 I've been counting the days from last thursday. I guess I like the stage after all. =D

So, quoting Xavier Naidoo out of context:

Zähl' ich die Tage  /  when I count the days

Ich erhebe die Klage  /   I raise the clamor

Führ mich ans Licht  /  lead me to the light

Ich enttäusch' dich nicht  /  I don't let you down

Happy Half-Nekkid Thursday!

Finding forgotten stash

I don't remember buying it at all, but yesterday I found Madame Bovary's ovaries on my shelf. I remember a fast reading of the first chapter in a bookstory once, but only that it happened; not what was written.  I'm curious now. At the time my interest was picked, I was reading The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. 

Ovaries is supposed to be a funny critic of literary classics under a sociobiology lens, and sociobiology is so often taken as a kind of apocaliptic beast. I mean, there are hordes of studies pointing out to evolutionary pressures influencing genetically human behavior, but yet just as many people go against the whole idea from the start, because apparently influence & innate tendencies = determinism, the end of free will, eugenics & politically incorrect. Now I'm having trouble putting the right words out there, but the way I see it, explaining how things came to be in one way or another isn't the same as justifying these things, and even less the same as saying things ought to stay the same. And saying a theory isn't right because you don't think it's pretty isn't refuting. It's sulking.

I believe in Biology. I also believe in Morals, and I think the human brain, created by evolution, is capable of recognizing moral principles and acting accordingly. I know that not everybody agrees with what principles are the right ones (hello, understatement), and that the standards changed along History, but as a whole we're better off now, concerning human rights, for example, than 6 thousand years ago. 

I don't know if this is because cultures are making it up as they go, creating "better Morals" with time, or if the cultures always had a sense of the Golden Rule and just evolve to apply it to a larger monkeysphere. 

I guess that goes into Philosophy. Are Morals an entity independent of humanity, and we recognize it (or not), or is it a cultural creation? Is the universe good, bad, indiferent, or not even there at all? And there come Kant, Schopenhauer, lots of asian religions and the Matrix. I confess, I never really understood the philosophers...

HNT - All buttered up.

Playing with butter isn't something I do everyday, but sometimes it's all good.

Happy Half-Nekkid Thursday!