Waiting and waiting some more

On the knitting front, there's been a lot of entrelac and animal knitting.

The entrelac piece is a Dreambaby DK vivid yellow blanket for a coworker who is expecting her 2nd son.

I gave her the choice of either a knitted toy or the blanket and showed her a sunny yellow colour experiment I'd worked up in sadly discontinued Paton's Look At Me.

No, that's not a weird blocking moment, the entrelac elements are not the same size. That's not a mistake, it's by design based on an earlier experiment in trying to make some not otherwise working out hand paint yarn to work and play well with a stitch pattern.

As the blanket progressed, and as the baby's gender and final name decision came into play, it struck me that a blanket plus toy was in order -- enter the duck featured in Knitted Toys by FionaMcTague.

But that needed a bit of tweaking since the whole knit a bunch of pieces and sew them together is not big on my list of love to knit styles.

Some time after I started down that path it became clear that I was going to be just a bit short of yarn so the inner duck is stuck in this mode until reinforcements arrive from Plymouth via Turkey.

Mom-to-be got a big kick out of back-ordered yarn needing to come from Turkey and clear customs before finding its way 'cross country to finish off the duck.

Another one of those long way 'round to get here things is another bit of today's news. When Ruth dies back in July, I decided that I'd finally get off my bum and try for my long term goal ofgetting my master's. Not wanting to be surprised by any lurking financial issues from forever ago, I decided to get an answer to that issue by getting student transcripts.

As it turns out, there was a gotcha but not from the expected source. It was a very old memo in a very old file that needed clarification. When it finally got cleared up, I was elated but also freaked out because I only had a few weeks before the application deadline ended.

So I faxed official transcript requests, filled out an online application that makes but little sense when your 20+ years out from your last higher educational experience, and then waited.

But again. there was a gotcha. One transcript request was lagging and my application was stuck in "incomplete" and when my credit card statement didn't show the charge I jumped into action.

Lots of (thank gods for free long-d) phone calls and voice mails later, and today the transcript is on its way and again I go into wait mode.

In 1752, this date did not happen in Britain

No, no, really, they made the shift from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar.

In 1752's Britain, the 2nd of September was followed by the 14th of September.

People rioted because they believed that the government was stealing time (as opposed I suppose to everything else) from them. We our rabble especially when they are roused.

Some years back, when the rest of Britain was ringing in Gregorian 2000 (aka Y2K), I remember reading that a small village in Wales had finally decided to make the leap from Julian to Gregorian. I appreciated the abundance of caution they took in not leaping to change just for change's sake and making sure that that whole Gregorian thing was going to work out.

In walkaboutaboutknitter's 2008 blog calendar the A-months seem to mysteriously vanished but no one rioted.

Walks were taken, knitting was done, events were attended, weird health things happened, friends visited, but blog entries just died on the vine -- in August as in April.

One of the many things that hit the needles in August but has also had a bit of a stall is a 3 out of 5 sides pentagon piece inspired by a ravelry forum hit to my positively polygonal web page. I played a little bit with a Barbie sized top down version adapted from my geometric centre out pentagon.

That play with pentagons got bumped for non-bloggable (aka secret squirrel) knitting and current baby boom knitting with entrelac, ducks and fishies playing starring roles.