Please excuse the changes while I rearrange the furniture.

:D

We have a little house!

And we're moving into it on D's birthday - 5th May!

There WILL be dinner parties! There will be Roasts of Doooom!!!!!!!!!!

*squeak!* and *poing* and *yay!*

I'm cold!

This godforsaken icebox of a town had a bit of a cold snap last week, and I've been (brrrrr) cold. Cold cold cold! So I started making some thrummed slippers.

I didn't know it was thrumming, until the lovely Penny pointed it out to me, but I knew what it was and how to do it.

Take one pile of soft and yummy floofy goodness...

...torn into thin strips. It's roving, or tops, or whatever the hell you wanna call it. Today, it's floof. (Rhymes with roof)

Start knitting the floof, just like yarn (demonstrated here by my... err... beautiful assistant)

(look at that technique!) LOL

Then you get a lovely thick knitted fabric like this:

Now you get tiny bits of floof...

...and add them in to your knitting.

(shown here with white so you can see what's going on if you've not seen this before)

Thus it begins.

I will add more photos to bamboozle your dialup later on!

But are my feet warm yet??? *sigh*... no... but maybe soon. Hm!

For those of you who don't know, I'm a 4th year psych student, and this year, along with two other people, I'm doing my thesis on Sudoku... or more specifically, people who play Sudoku. *grin*

The thesis is to be done in 2 parts - firstly we run a few discussion groups where we ask people why they choose to play, what they find so appealing about it, and what they get out of it (if anything). Then we are formulating our own scale (questionnaire) and will be administering it via paper and the web to as many people as we can, and then run factor analysis on it (oooh, cool and magical statistics! I love it!)

So... two favours to ask.

Firstly, I need a few volunteers to help me out with the discussion groups. I have a few possible names on my hit list, but if anyone in Sydney or Canberra is interested in helping me out BIG TIME, I would be eternally grateful and do just about anything you ask in return. We ran our first focus group and it was lots of fun and very successful, and the people who participated not only enjoyed themselves, but got fed and pampered along with the deal. Nice!

So, anyone who'd be interested in that... it would be extremely cool to hear from you - if you don't have my email or phone number, use the contact button on the left hand side of this blog.

Secondly, I need some technical advice. The questionnaire probably won't be written until about June, but I need to look into the possibility of it being administered via a web form... otherwise there is no way we're going to get enough sudoku players from our pool of first year guinea pigs err psych students - we need minimum 100. 100 would be almost impossible if we only use the 1st years (as is traditional for this type of research), but anyone who's ever received an email forward knows that 100 is a very modest target if done via the web. Hm!

I'm thinking of using the form script that this guy has up for (almost) free on http://www.formmail.com... my only question is that I'm wondering if this sort of thing is going to be secure enough. How would I know? And I need to know... otherwise the ethics committee will knock the proposal back - and I've heard they're VERY fussy. So does anyone know about this sort of stuff? If I want to use a form, (and this guy's product seems cool and easy-to-use), how do I assure an ethics committee of the security and anonymity of data submitted through that form?

Would love to hear from anyone in the know!

I'll be talking more about this later, I'm sure.

Heh... Adele said yesterday in my comments:

"If scientists are now naming wool, do knitters get to name stars (or dinosaurs, as the case may be)? At least they'd get proper names instead of reference numbers."

Funny you should mention that, Del. It seems that only certain people get to name dinosaurs, and if you have enough money, you probably could. After all, a fairly recently discovered dinosaur was named for (or by?) QANTAS...

http://www.alphalink.com.au/~dannj/qantas.htm

Hrm. Don't you think it would have been a flying dinosaur? Oops, I mean, flying reptile? *ducks*

I'm blogging today in reply to two questions posed in the comments section of yesterday's post.

Yes, I agree. There are many shy people in the world who come across as standoffish. I have a hard time convincing people of the fact that I used to be painfully shy, and I was! And so I think this makes me a bit impatient with people who are shy and never break free of the shackles that come with that most restrictive of personality features. I suppose I come across as rather unforgiving, too, but in actual fact I do empathise with people who are shy and may appear standoffish. But in my defense, (defence? Hm) I do make the effort to talk to these people, as I did yesterday. It was his very cool response that threw me. I do like to think that I make the effort to connect with all people, though, therefore allowing shy people to have their say as well - sometimes it does take someone else more forward to make that first contact.

However, I had heard that Canberra is quite cliquey. Maybe it's this pre-planted notion that is making me very sensitive to this sort of incident, because really, on the other hand, I have actually met quite a few warm and receptive people who I'm forming some lovely friendships with here. And maybe everywhere is like this... after all, it's been ten years since I moved cities, and maybe it's just easier for a 21 year old to break into social circles than a 31 year old, when many people by 31 have established social groups and aren't very interested in spending the time to expand them. So, fair point, and point taken.

Portugese tarts! Have a look at http://grabyourfork.blogspot.com/2005/01/sweet-belem-petersham.html ... This little cafe, Sweet Belem, is just up the road from where I used to live on Stanmore Road, and sells DIVINE tarts, also called natas, or pasteis de nata. Scroll down and you'll see a picture of them, too. Oh, and you can feel yourself gaining weight just LOOKING at them. But oh, what a way to go. Mmm!

Finally, Catherine asked how David was doing, and the spinner's guild.

David's great... he's currently rehearsing for his next musical/play type thingy, it's called Tarantara and is about the life of Gilbert and Sullivan. He has the part of D'Oyley Carte and he has to grow a beard for it *shudder*... well, I prefer the beardless David, and am not too keen on beard rash, but he does look a bit cute with it starting to change the look of his face. Hm!

I didn't end up joining the spinner's guild. The meetings are generally at people's places, and they are invariably quite a way out of town. So, on the motorbike this is a bit of a mission, and I'm not keen on doing in the cold, AND of course I can't put my wheel on the back of the bike so I'm stuck with spindling, which I don't always want to do. So while I see Leigh on occasion, I probably won't join the guild at this stage. Not to mention that the second that this semester started, suddenly I was completely time-poor once again. Ewk!

So... that's all the latest. I made a new colourway the other day, and it's just divine! David named it this time. He first suggested "Neon Flux" but then thought of "Supernova", which is just perfect. The deep purples, gold and oranges of a supernova are all there for the edification of whoever is lucky enough to win the auction on ebay. You know it's luuurv when you let him name your wool for you. *hehe*

OOh!

I'm finally making progress on the SUMS cap.

You know how there's a saying, that if you want something done you give it to someone who is busy already? So, so true. Now that semester has started, I am finally becoming a bit more efficient again. Although I think I needed the mental rest of doing very little except hang around for a few months.

Behold! The ninja-needled cap of DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

Och, I'm a dagge! But a dagge getting back on her feet, one day at a time. :)