The first thing I knit was a red scarf, made from angora yarn which was extremely fuzzy and the very devil to work with. Like most projects I embark on, it took me only a few hours to make the first 90%, and then four days to do the remainder.

I’ve been knitting for around seven years now. You’d think, after seven years, that I would be some incredibly bad ass knitter with amazing skills, but you would be wrong. Like most things I take up, I knit intermittently, when the feeling strikes me, so I might spend 40 hours knitting one week and then not pick up the needles for three months. But I really do like knitting, when I do it.

I started knitting because a friend of mine was working on a scarf and it looked interesting, like a hobby I might enjoy.

“Can you teach me how to do that,” I said, and she got out a pair of needles and some worsted weight yarn and spent 15 minutes explaining how to cast on and chuckling as I ended up with a huge pile of tangled yarn which her cat promptly attacked. After about three hours, I managed to cast on a small row of stitches and knit a little sample. The stitches weren’t terribly even, and the whole thing was a bit damp from the cat chewing on it, but I had knitted something. Then she showed me how to purl, and another three hours later, I was onto shaky rows of ribbing.

With my newfound skill, I decided to knit the aforementioned red scarf, and I equipped myself with the necessary needles and yarn. My father chuckled when he came home to find me knitting on the couch, but within a few months he was trying to enlist me to repair his holey sweaters and knit socks. (I have yet to attempt socks. They scare me.) I also began to acquire yarn, and needles, and now I have a big trunk full of knitting things, which is rather nice, as I have lots of yarn to play with when the mood strikes me.

There are a couple of reasons I like knitting. I really enjoy the sense of producing something, starting with skeins of yarn and ending up with a hat, sweater, scarf, shawl, gloves, whatever. I love watching the project develop, feeling it get weighty in my hands. I also really enjoy making things for people, and I find that knitting is sort of like a form of meditation, for me. It’s an art which requires patience and an attention for detail, two traits which I do not have. I always feel like my personality improves when I’m knitting more frequently, because it forces me to be more slow and thoughtful.

A lot of work goes into a knitted garment, as anyone who knits knows. For those who don’t, have more respect for the hideous sweater your grandmother gives you every year, I tell you what. A sweater is a serious investment, let alone something monstrous like a throw. When you have cats, knitting gets much more challenging, since they will contribute to the project, whether you like it or not.

Knitting seems to be the hip, trendy thing to do these days. I am far from a hip, trendy knitter. I don’t make skull sweaters, or artfully color-coordinated scarves. Most of my projects are actually kind of lopsided and malformed, due to my inability to follow directions with any degree of complexity. I think that it’s good, though, to test my patience and abilities with projects which I often wind up tearing up. The meditation and the benefit are in the act of knitting, not in making something which someone else might recognize as a garment. And I would like to point out that I was knitting before it was trendy. So there.

Every now and then, I come up with something which looks rather nice, and I usually give it away. A few times, I’ve been commissioned, so to speak, to work on projects for people, and I’ve had fun doing that. By no means do I fancy myself a real knitter, casually producing epic and amazing projects, although I do admire the serious knitters of my acquaintance. The process is the product, and I rather enjoy that. I like to take a break from my often manic and panicked personal existence to focus on the feeling of yarn in my hands, a developing pattern taking shape while Loki steals my skeins of yarn.

Some day, I might even finish that fern lace scarf I’ve been working on for two years.

LOLcats make it into the Wall Street Journal.

Cork or screwcap? It’s a thorny issue.

How did Countrywide end up loaning so much money to so many people? Through a business philosophy bent on profit above all things, that’s how.

Wireless 911 calls are overwhelming the 911 system. Need help? Find a landline.

Wildfires in mainland Greece are getting out of control, and threatening the country’s cultural heritage.

I had to go to the laundrymat today, because my payload of filthy clothing had gotten quite large, thanks to my grubbing around in the garden for two days in a row. Whatever wasn’t covered in dirt was covered in Cephalexin, thanks to Mr Bell, and a friend happened to be going, so I piggybacked with him and we cruised on over to Lucy’s.

What is it about laundrymats that is so…sad, and desperate?

After all, a laundrymat is a place where you go to get your clothes clean. Clean clothing is exciting, and happy, and I love the feel of things fresh out of the dryer. So, you would think that the people in a laundrymat would be happy and excited about the clean clothes ahead, thinking about sliding into freshly laundered sheets and being able to wear a favorite shirt again. Instead, everyone is uniformly pissed off and grumpy.

Going to the laundrymat is also rather more efficient than owning your own washer and dryer, since you share machines with many people. This cuts down on overall use of resources, which is always a good thing, in my opinion. However, most people who go to laundrymats are in the lower classes, and I don’t see any resource-conscious eco-types using the laundrymat facilities. No, they have oversized houses with dedicated laundry rooms, and they can use their Ecover laundry soap and not mingle with the likes of us.

Laundrymats also always seem surprisingly dirty and unfriendly, to me. Cracked, dull linoleum and tired looked machines, a bulletin board covered in ancient notices and a screaming toddler writhing on the floor. That sums up the laundrymat, for me, although I hear that there are hip, fun, clean laundrymats where you can do things like eat dinner while your clothes wash, or use a laundrymat wifi system to while away the time you spend there.

There’s always a surly staffer who glares at you when you accidentally slam the dryer shut, and a muttering old man in the corner who smells like pee, along with one harried looking yuppie-type who wishes that ou was somewhere else, and takes it out on everyone in their vicinity. A pile of old newspaper and copies of Watchtower is mounded on a table, and you poke listlessly through it to see if there’s anything which you could tolerate reading.

Perhaps it’s because most people view laundry, at heart, as a chore. Chores, be default, cannot be enjoyable, so why would you bother making a laundrymat into a nice place to be? People are going to come either way, because they need clean clothing, so it doesn’t seem terribly important, really, to expend any effort on the facilities. All of the laundrymats here are uniformly dull and tragic, and going to them is manifestly depressing. I’m tempted to start laundering my clothes in the shower or something just to avoid the experience.

Or perhaps I should start a rival laundrymat which is fun to be in, like a restaurant with washers under the tables, so you can eat awesome food while doing your laundry. Since I’ve been longing for 24 hour Indian food and a laundrymat that doesn’t depress me, maybe I have found my calling…

Developers promise big things and they don’t always deliver.

A lot of young people are caring for disabled family members. That’s a tough way to spend your teens and twenties.

A void of cosmic nothingness has been found. A Wrinkle In Time, anyone?

Thousands of teachers and education professionals remain unpaid in LA County.

Even the Golden Gate Bridge gets banner ads now. When will the madness end?

30% of the weapons sent to Iraq have been “lost.” So…where are they?

Sexually Oriented Business ordinances are completely insane. Hooray for puritanism!

It’s toxic substances week here in the hobbit house, perhaps because as I was grubbing around in the garden the other day, my neighbor casually leaned over the fence and said “you know, they used to repair cars here.”

“Ah,” I said, smearing black sludge across my nose.

“So, you know. I mean. There’s…stuff. In the soil?”

“Ah,” I said again.

And then I went back to stubbornly pulling out the most extensive root system I have ever seen. I think I pulled roots out of China. Seriously.

At any rate, I started reading Parts Per Million on Monday, and then on Wednesday I picked up High Tech Trash, and I got a library notice today saying that my copy of Five Past Midnight in Bhopal was in. Although, given the state of the hold shelf, anyone should checks the “Smith” shelf at the library probably also knows that. That’s right, Department of Homeland Security. I ordered Five Past Midnight in Bhopal, and I just might read it.

What brought about this slew of books about pollution?

I’m not really sure, actually. I picked up the first two when I was at the library on Saturday because they were there and they looked interesting. And then I was researching Bhopal for unrelated reasons, and Five Past Midnight came up, so I ordered it, in accordance with my new policy of ordering every book that seems interesting. Pollution is an intriguing subject to me, especially pollution by evil corporations, and my role in that pollution as a consumer.

The first book is about Beverly Hills High School. Apparently, there are oil wells right next to Beverly, and some people have a problem with that. (I can’t imagine why.) The book focused on a lawsuit which ultimately got thrown out of court, and it was a bit meandering and poorly organized, unfortunately. It left me with a feeling of general discontent and dissatisfaction. Not because I think it’s ok to have oil wells next to a high school, but because the author didn’t seem to have her shit pulled together, and as a result, the book felt weak.

One thing about the book that I found interesting was the collusion of the school district with the oil company to try and get the case shut down. You’d think that a school district would, I don’t know, protect teachers and children. But apparently I am wrong. I also thought it was interesting to note that a lot of school districts get offers of shitty, contaminated land to build on, and then people get sick, and people are surprised by it. I should think that it’s a no brainer to find safe land to build schools on, but this is not the case in a country which places little value on education. Bummer.

The second book is about, er, high tech trash. Basically, it’s a discussion of the pollution caused by the tech industry, which uses huge amounts of resources and generates tons of waste. A lot of this waste is handled poorly, and it contaminates the environment to the detriment of human, animal, and plant health. This book felt rather poorly edited to me, as I noticed an alarming number of grammar errors, but in general it was fairly strong. I think it would be a good primer for someone who isn’t aware of how much waste is generated to make electronics, and it puts forward a great case for handling e-waste properly. Unfortunately, the author waxed poetic about the miracles of nature a bit too much for my taste, and it kind of put me off.

I haven’t read the book about Bhopal yet, but I assume it’s going to go into the details of the disaster, and talk about pollution in general. Hopefully with a focus on companies operating in third world countries, which tend to have less stringent environmental regulations.

Reading so much about corporate pollution has been interesting, especially since I’m writing on a device which generated tons (literally, tons) of waste before it got to me. I think that it is a good idea for consumers to think about the massive amounts of waste which we are generating with our disposable culture, and that it might, perhaps, be time for us to rethink the ways in which we use the environment and handle our trash. We are literally trashing the planet, and while it will eventually recover once we go away, it’s not going to be a very fun place to live for us and a lot of animals in a remarkably short amount of time. Unfortunately, we live in such a consumerist culture that it’s hard to know how to break free. Will we, or are we going to end up trapping ourselves in our own garbage? I think it’s rather telling to note that many visions of our future include huge piles of garbage, don’t you?

NOW Magazine opines that the question of whether or not organics are worth the price is not worth debate. I would add to that; the question should be whether non-organics are worth the price, in terms of environmental costs.

Let’s see some blood on the campaign trail, if people are seriously going to start campaigning over a year ahead.

The state budget is signed, and there are a lot of contentious cuts in it. 300 million from MediCal? Yikes.

Will war crimes trials ever happen for Guantanamo prisoners?

The Jesus phone has been cracked, paving the way for it to be used on other networks. About darn time, and Apple should be ashamed of themselves for locking it to ATT like they did.

More American women are dying in childbirth, which may be a result of several factors. Of course, this will contribute to our generally low rating, healthwise, among developed nations.

I hung out with Baxt and Petey today, and took advantage of Petey’s car to go to the nursery to pick up some plants. After dragging them to half the nurseries in town, shocked by the price of ground covers, we finally ended up at Fiddler’s Green Nursery, where I picked up a lemon verbena bush, because it smelled so good, along with a flat of Corsican mint and another of blue star creeper. The Corsican mint smells delicious, and it will grow into a big soft squishy mat which will be nice to walk and lie on. It will also exude its awesome odor in the summer, part of my goal to make the garden smell good.

The blue star creeper is another ground cover, with small blue flowers in a big dense mat of greenery, and I think that it will look really good once it spreads out. I also picked up some lantanas, which should spread out and get nice and shrubby. Behind the lantanas, I planted a lavender shrub, so my garden should smell really, really good in the summer. The peach tree pooped on me while I was working; I think the fruit needs a few more days to be perfect.

While I grubbed around in the garden some more, wincing at my sunburn, Baxt worked on a project and Petey and I chatted. It was a very mellow sort of day, and I actually rather enjoyed it, although I think I may have made my sunburn a bit worse. The garden looks really good now, and I can see my scheme taking shape. In a month or so, the ground covers should have spread out a bit, and the garden will look more green and lush, which will be excellent.

We also took Mr Bell to his ultrasound appointment; Dr. Jordan couldn’t find anything, which is a good thing. He strongly suspects that the problem was a sterile inflammation, although he wants to run a urine culture next week, just to be sure. Mr. Bell’s pee problem has been frustrating, but I’m glad that none of his tests so far have revealed a serious problem. I still maintain that he secretly has a crush on Dr. Jordan.

He and Loki have been keeping a close eye on the gardening and the work on the fence. They should count themselves fortunate that they are not being pressed into labor.

Violet Blue comments on Burning Man, adding a few survival tips of her own.

Our security system is broken, says Bruce Schneier. For once, the TSA is actually listening.

Can you eat fish ethically? Paul Johnson says yes.

Old people have sex, too. Who knew?

Santa Rosa gives up on planting trees downtown.

Art from Hurricane Katrina is featured on the Washington Post website for the two year anniversary. Much of the art deals with the animals left behind, and proceeds from the sales of the art will be donated to animal rescue, which is awesome.

The garden has been kind of on hold at the moment, because the fence around it needed to be repaired, and it seemed silly to plant a bunch of stuff for workmen to trample. This has been very frustrating, because I’ve been itching to work in the garden and I have not been able to. So I was very pleased, today, when I noticed that preliminary work was being done on the fence.

I decided to clear the reeds out from around the fence, because while they look nice, they would inhibit the work. And I was planning to tear them out anyway, as part of the grand scheme. Six hours later, I staggered into the shower and watched the water run black. I’m not quite sure what happened. I just…started working, and then worked a bit more, and suddenly the whole day had gone by. And black goo is pouring out of my nose.

The garden looks awesome now, although I haven’t planted anything yet. But I have ripped out essentially everything, and I planted the Japanese maples which have been bursting their plots, so you can see the promise and potential of the garden, even if it’s just a mound of smooth dirt at the moment.

It was a lot of work. I will seize pretty much any opportunity to not actually work, so it was fun, but it’s the end of the day now and I am exhausted. We also made some small changes to the layout of the gate, so I had to lay out a new brick path from the new gate to my porch. That took quite a while; I will not make fun of people who lay out their own twee garden paths any more, I assure you.

I have many grand schemes for the garden, and I think that it is going to start looking rather awesome pretty damn soon. I plan on the installation of numerous aromatic plants, so that it will smell good, especially in warm weather. Here’s hoping that my notorious black thumb doesn’t wreak havoc.

Pigeons are up to no good, as I always suspected. Apparently they are capable of breaking bridges with the power of their shit.

A nurse writes about her experiences working in Abu Ghraib.

How green is green burial with a coffin shipped from China?

Cormorant vomit is a more fascinating topic than one might imagine.

Bacn is sweeping the Intertubes. It’s not quite spam, but it’s not personal mail either. Fight the scourge!

In shocking news, proper nutrition does not actually cure AIDS.

Iraqi Christians seek refuge in Sweden, but find that life there has its own difficulties.