The Plague!

I really hate getting every stupid sickness that floats around. I have the plague now and had to call out today. Awesome. Working in a pharmacy is really hazardous to my health.

I got my study guide in the mail the other day! It's scary. 500 pages of dense mathematical formulas and few explanations. The review chapter is scary and I already know how to do all of it! I need to go through at least a few pages a day, but I don't know how useful that would be when I'm sick. I can barely pay attention to the movie I'm watching because of the gunk sloshing around in my head. I'm watching Ice Age. Yeah. Not exactly a thought provoking movie... I never realized how often I tilt my head to one side or the other until it started hurting my ears.

I'm about half done with the foot of the first Kai-Mei sock. It's really cool how that one lace panel just floats across the top of the foot. I love it!

Mmm... No.

Today is my only day off this week, and my boss wants me to come in for a few hours. Now, I do not work a nice M-F 9am-5pm job with guaranteed weekends off. I work nights, weekends, weekdays, afternoons, and mornings. If I go in today, it is very probable that I won't have a day off until next Tuesday or so. That's two weeks between off days. Mmm... No. Not happening. I need the money, but I need to keep my sanity. Plus, they only want me to come in for 2-3 hours. Nope. Not gonna.

In other news, I ordered my P/1 exam study guide on Friday! It shipped yesterday. Eek! I'm not even registered for the exam yet, and I'm already getting nervous...

I have not had a day off since last Wednesday, so I've not had much time to knit. I did start a new pair of socks with my Malabrigo sock yarn. I'm doing Kai-Mei from Sock Innovations, so there will be 13" of neverending 3x3 ribbing, but hey! They're gorgeous socks!

Tasty Fly!

Has anyone else ever noticed that towards the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Belloq eats a fly? It's during the canyon scene when Indiana Jones is threatening to blow up the Ark with a bazooka. I just noticed it this weekend because I'd never seen the movie on a tv larger than a 19". I laughed even though it should bring back some trauma from finding a fly in my McDonald's french fries when I was about 8 years old (I didn't eat at McDonald's again until I was about 22). NOM NOM NOM! Tasty fly!

Incidentally, the Thai word for 'breast' is actually 'nom'. NOM NOM NOM!

I am having major knitting fail this week. I've frogged more socks that I care to think about, am about to frog another one, and can't settle on one project for more than about 5 minutes at a time. I really hate it when I get like this. I also can't sit still long enough to watch a movie or play a video game. I just end up pacing the apartment, picking things up, putting things down, and trying to figure out what the hell to do with myself.

It called to me.

Not a zombie princess or a sexy pirate. The baking aisle at Kroger. It called to me, and I could not resist. I went to the store for hamburger buns and butter. That's it. I ended up with stuff to bake cinnamon rolls and brownies. Focused grocery shopping fail. I tried to take pictures of the end result, but neither the cinnamon buns nor the brownies lasted long enough. Plus, I didn't want my messy kitchen to end up on the internet (it's clean now though!).

My mother mailed me something like 15 things of flowering tea that she found at a dollar store. Win! Of course, now I have to find a place to store that much tea in my little tiny apartment. I already have an entire shelf devoted to tea. Jason's coffee is slowly, but surely getting voted off the shelf. It's like Survivor: Caffeine Shelf. The tea tribe is going to win.

I'm still stuck on reading trash. I have a feeling it's going to be a while before I can read anything with substance thanks to that sustained torture that is sometimes known as college... Currently, I am reading Club Dead (Charlaine Harris) and Lost in a Good Book (Jasper Fforde), but I am really looking forward to An Echo in the Bone (Diana Gabaldon). It comes out next month. More trash! But this trash has kilts! Everyone loves hot redheaded men in kilts!

Plagiarize! (Only be sure always to call it, please, "research".)

By the way, you can thank Nikolai Lobachevsky for developing a non-Euclidean geometry called hyperbolic geometry. Models of the hyperbolic plane are incredibly fun to knit and crochet. Get enough ripples in there and you end up with something that looks very much like a coral reef.

Sorry for all of the links. I was listening to this song and ended up on a wikipedia odyssey because I wanted to know what else Lobachevsky did.

Can I pay with handknits?

Becoming an actuary is expensive. I need to take at least the first exam in order to get a job, but that first exam is going to cost me nearly $300 for the study guide and the exam itself. Yet another catch-22. I've been finding a lot of those lately.

1. You can't get a job without experience, but you can't get experience without a job.
2. You can't get a job without the required exams and certifications, but you can't afford the required exams and certifications without a job.

Fail. Point 2 could work if you have another job in a different field that actually pays well enough, but I don't. Retail pharmacy is never going to pay enough unless I become a pharmacist. Pardon me while I laugh my ass off for a few moments... At my current job, it will take me 5 years to hit $10 an hour since promotions only give a maximum 5% raise and the yearly merit raise is a maximum of 2%. I was lucky this year and got both a promotion and a merit raise in a week. Fun times.

Enough of that crap. Want to see what I'm working on?

First up is the sock yarn blanket that will never end. The pattern is Barn-Raising Quilt from Knitalong. I have 1.90 squares done and another 40.10 squares to go. US2 needles... Fun. At least the squares go quickly and it's fun to see the colours swirl. Left over sock yarn, so who knows what will end up in here. The first square is Berocco Comfort. The second square is Noro Kureyon Sock.





Second, is an Icarus Shawl. Woo-woo! I have wanted to make this shawl since I started knitting, but could never find just the right colour yarn. This yarn is Alpaca Yarn Co. Suri Elegance in White House on US3 needles. The yarn was originally for a pair of stockings, but I wasn't digging the pattern+yarn combination. This shawl looks like a tangled mess right now, but it will be gorgeous when it's done. I promise.

f(yarn)=knitting+life

It's a new blog! Maybe I'll stick with this one for awhile.

Story time! Do you want to know the meaning of my blog name? No? Tough. It's so nerdy that it will make your head pop. In my head, knitting is all math, but not in the normal sense of counting stitches and whatnot. In math, a function is "an abstract entity that associates an input to a corresponding output according to some rule" (wikipedia.com). When yarn is used in function notation (in my head, of course), an input of yarn gives an output of knitting plus life. But wait! We don't have yarn in the right hand side of the equation! Well, when you remember that knitting=yarn+pointy sticks, then you DO have yarn on the right hand side of the equation and it all works out nicely.

My mom needed a bumper sticker that said "My math nerd's logic beat the shit out of your athlete's brain."

My blog really does't have a point. I like math and I like to knit. Those two things seemed like a good starting point. WIP's to follow later after I get everything set up.