Knit Revolution

Migration of the Squeak

Wed, 02 Aug 2006 02:11:13 GMT

I'm migrating.

Blogdrive has been great, and I've gotten lots of exposure from being on their favourites list. I've really enjoyed my time here, but it's time to move on.

If you want to follow me over, feel welcome. Very welcome!

http://monnsqueak.typepad.com/

...see you there!

Sudoku survey... finally!

Tue, 11 Jul 2006 23:41:08 GMT

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=410282324063

Do you play Sudoku?

If so, Monica Atallah, Carolyn Talevich and Kelly
Thomas, all students of Psychology at the University
of Canberra, would appreciate your participation in
our survey, which should take no longer than 30
minutes of your time.

The survey explores the motivations and emotions of
people in relation to their leisure time. In
particular we are looking at why people play Sudoku,
and what emotions they experience during play.

If you are interested in participating, please click
the link below. And if you don't play Sudoku, please
pass this along to anyone you know who does! We need
as many responses as possible.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=410282324063

If you need to log out and resume the survey later,
you may do so, picking up where you left off, by
clicking the link again.

Thanks so much for your time. If you have any
questions regarding the study, please contact
sudokuthesis-questions@yahoo.co.uk

Cheesy weirdness

Fri, 30 Jun 2006 03:41:46 GMT

So I'm looking at this "extra light tasty" cheese.

35% protein; 15% fat; 1% carbs (sugar).

What the hell is the other 49% of this stuff?

*scared*

So Time to clean up this mess!

Fri, 30 Jun 2006 00:24:51 GMT

OK the new look is crap, because I sort of started fiddling with it and never really fixed it up.

I know shit about html and bugger all about template design. So I'm going back to sweet and simple, and resetting the entire blog.

Anyone who wants on to my blogroll, or whose link name isn't right (Emma!) or who would rather be removed etc etc, drop me a line.

So I've faffed around with it for a couple of hours now, and I've had enough. It's simple and a bit boring, but it's legible and practical. I'll pretty it up when my motivation gets back from the Bahamas, where it's been suntanning and trying to get Em's motivation to buy it dodgy cocktails with umbrellas in.

bah

Tue, 27 Jun 2006 02:41:23 GMT

I'm still having issues with photos, this time I'm having difficulties actually getting the photos into the ftp thingy. *sigh*

Anyway, squeak news headlines as follows:

SQUEAK BREAKS OWN KNITTING REQUEST RULE - "We are not having sex", shes states firmly

TUPPERWARE PARTY ACTUALLY ATTRACTS ATTENDEES - Bribed with alcohol and handspun alpaca as the lucky door prize, partygoers embark on spending frenzy

TRIP TO SYDNEY A WILD SUCCESS! - Parties, breakfasts, and walks round the Bay, life doesn't get any better than this

FEATHERS FLY! - Small cockatiel now running the Squeak Household with a claw of iron

ROAST OF DOOM ACTUALLY HAS LEFTOVERS - but somehow the crackling still disappeared in three seconds flat

So, yeah. Thanks to everyone who has brightened my home and my life by coming over and playing and partying and eating and generally just having fun. I will eventually tame the photo thing and post some stuff. Meantime, I'm pulling out the spinning wheel to have a bit of a play before I take off to work. Mmm! Navajo plied handpainted merino!

Days like this

Mon, 12 Jun 2006 23:19:35 GMT

...you know how you have "turning point" days, where you can look back and say, "that is the point when I..."

No?

I do. I have a memory of my first day at university. No, not my current degree, which I'll hopefully be finishing in October. But you don't have another degree, I hear you say. That is correct. Straight out of school, 17 years old and clueless as they come, I enrolled into Newcastle Uni in the Bachelor of Nursing.

I waited around three months, three lovely months of lazing around, not looking for work, just enjoying being not-at-school and doing my artworky stuff and loving it. And I took off on enrolment day, and all was good.

My first day at uni was a disaster.

It took me almost $20 in bus fares, and three buses over a period of about 2 hours to travel the 50km from Cessnock to Newcastle. No student discount for private bus companies, apparently. I remember thinking how much knitting I would get done on the bus; I was at the time working on an aran jumper which I remember frighteningly clearly. Not to mention that I'd better start knitting for money if I was going to be paying this sort of money in bus fares every day.

I didn't know about HECS then. I soon found out. Terror! No one at our high school had told us about HECS. In hindsight I can hardly believe how little information we were given at school about life in general, but to not tell us anything about this huge debt we were going to accrue at university? Hm. Would have been nice to have a little warning, thanks high school year adviser!

Then I was poked full of several needles. Blood tests. Tuberculosis injections. Yay for being a pincushion when you're stressed off your head!

In typical university form, I was timetabled to be in class for every one of the five weekdays, some days for only two hours. Um... four hours travelling time for a two hour class? At $20 a day? My austudy was about $120 a fortnight, and dad was in the process of being retrenched from work. How was I going to afford this?

And then the text book bill. Nursing texts are notoriously expensive, and my texts for the first semester were going to cost me somewhere between $900 and $1,000.

My state of panic rose steadily during the day, and at 4pm or so I hopped the first bus of the three-leg journey home.

Bus number two didn't show, and they only left every hour. When the next scheduled one came along, it turned out I had been on the wrong side of the road anyway, so I missed it too. Almost three hours later, I realised that to add insult to injury, I'd just gotten my period. What?! No public toilets nearby, in desperation I knocked on someone's door to use their toilet. They weren't home, but their young 10 year old daughter was, who very kindly allowed me into her house. I can't imagine what her parents thought if she ever told them. And of course I didn't have any tampons or girly stuff with me, so I scrunched up a big pile of toilet paper and hoped it would hold out for the journey home.

And I emerged on to the street to see the last bus barrelling past me down the road.

Mum drove an hour to come and rescue me, hysterical and tear-drenched that afternoon (well, evening by then) with my toddler sisters squeaking in the back of the kombi.

I decided that I couldn't go to uni.

Dad hit the roof a bit, which was sort of strange; I had no idea it meant anything to him. Mum challenged the decision, only really because she thought that I was making it based on having an awful day.

But really, that day was a huge turning point in my life, because it was the very first big decision I'd ever made for myself. And I stuck to it even though I was opposed. I know that when I have to make a difficult decision, I think of that day, when I made that first life-changing decision on my own, for myself.

And today?

Today, before the day had really even begun, I learned how to say I was wrong, and experienced the enormous relief that came with the admission. And... I took a major step in embracing trust, and faith in people once again. Although they seem to inevitably be very difficult, I am eternally grateful for days like this. Thank you (and you know who you are) x

Drugs and sex

Mon, 05 Jun 2006 08:26:27 GMT

Chatting today with an acquaintance who has also been on antidepressant medication in the past:

Me: well by the second episode they weren't working very well and I had a few really annoying side effects...

She: Oh? What were they?

Me: Well, I chubbed it up, and completely lost my libido...

She: Ergh, me too, it was awful, like "nyeh, not interested", it might as well have been housework.

Me: Yeah, housework - a bit like cleaning the bathroom, I suppose... "this is gonna be smelly and messy, but it's just gotta be done"

Boom tish!

Enabling joy!

Fri, 02 Jun 2006 08:23:58 GMT

My uni friend Rachel, who I (re)taught how to knit, just finished her very first scarf. Woot! It was made from purple handspun and fringed with nifty purple and blue mixed with star sequins. Cool!

She came over today for a casting-off lesson, and we drank coffee and chatted while we cut up yarn and made it into a sparkly fringe, and then tried the scarf on and pranced about the house squeaking with excitement. Yay!

There would be a photo, but someone took off with it this morning. *rolls eyes* ... honestly, you'd think he owned it or something. Hehehe...

Oh, and yes, Lara *blush* they are WoW icons on my screen. How embarrassing. And M-H... *dying of suspense!*

:D:D:D

Busy days...

Wed, 31 May 2006 01:19:34 GMT

...not doing the things I'm meant to be doing. But am doing things that make me happy.

Mmm!

Listing on ebay today. Purrrrrrrrrr. Coloured yummy woolly goodness.

Productivity

Fri, 26 May 2006 04:17:55 GMT

..I've been BUSY!

I handed in my 2nd last assessment for this semester on Wednesday, and have sold all of my current lot of ebay wool. Phew!

I get cold hands on the computer so I made some of these with the cute ball of wool which Mary-Helen and Sandra brought back with them from Singapore:

The colours! MMMM! They're much purpler than the photo suggests, purple just doesn't seem to go well with the camera.

And... this is the kitchen in our new place, at the messiest it's been so far.

... we had friends over for dinner last night (all those dishes!), and it's also crawling with all of my dyeing gear. It's messy, and I love it!

I'll be listing some stuff on ebay again soon, some canary wool, and some spinning sliver, and some of the delightful laceweight Filatura di Crosa Centalovaggi. Mmm. :D:D:D

hm

Wed, 26 Apr 2006 06:24:19 GMT

Please excuse the changes while I rearrange the furniture.

news

Fri, 21 Apr 2006 04:33:26 GMT

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!*

Take one pile of floofy stuff...

Wed, 12 Apr 2006 23:00:08 GMT

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!

Calling all Sudoku players!

Fri, 31 Mar 2006 23:30:20 GMT

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.

Hi, meet Colinette, the new gay dinosaur from Cessnock

Fri, 31 Mar 2006 22:33:58 GMT

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*

Shyness and stuff

Thu, 30 Mar 2006 01:36:38 GMT

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*

People are a little odd here

Wed, 29 Mar 2006 03:09:54 GMT

It's sort of strange, the Canberran standoffishness.

I feel a little bit like I'm living in a strange place where, outside the groups I've formed based on uni friends and knitting friends, the rest of the town seems to be made up of stuffy English-type people ("I would ask that you do not touch me again, madam") and standoffish country types ("well, you're not from around here, are you?")

I just ran into someone that I vaguely know from the choir here. I'm not so sure he remembers who I am, and embarrassingly enough I can't remember his name either. I snuck up behind him and cheerfully said hello, and the response was so cool as to be offended. I asked him how he was and if he was singing this semester, to which he replied, surprised, "with who?"

"oh, I'm sorry", I said, mortified. "I must have mistaken you for someone else, a chorister".

Yes, he is. No, he's not singing this semester. And... no he really doesn't care how I'm going in a new town, or how I'm liking it here. I wonder if Canberra people just assume that you like it here... or is it that they assume that you hate it here and are going to escape at any moment?

I'm so looking forward to Margie moving here. Hm!

Other than that, I'm fine, and may actually be starting to see some nice aspects about Canberra, now that I'm getting over missing Sydney so very much.

Unfortunately, I have very little spare time now that semester has started, what with studying, and having to work 2 shifts a week at a medical centre to pay the bills (don't even start me on that!), so I've not joined any choirs here at all. I just can't afford another night of things to do, since I work Thursday and Friday nights, and Tuesday is now designated regular-study-night.

So, as far as social life goes, it's knitting every 2 weeks or so plus one or two informal parties in between, getting to know my new friends Robin, Esther and Rachel (among others, but these three are definitely my favourites) and trying to get my bum out to the sticks to visit Leigh from time to time (I haven't forgotten you! I have 2 exams next week and will be coming to see you after then)

Anyway, all part of the settling-in process... we'll see how it all pans out soon, I'm sure :)

Places and faces I miss

Mon, 27 Mar 2006 03:35:16 GMT

...and we sat on the front balcony eating portugese tarts (oh, thank you Eva!) and watched Leichhardt flow on by, like we had so many other times before. Hm... Sunday mornings are a delight.

Saturday night in Enmore

Sun, 26 Mar 2006 03:23:50 GMT

... and it was, apparently, international women's day once again!

I missed last year's dinner, which was such a pity. So here's what it's all about.

My friend Ingrid organises a dinner each year for about 8-10 women, and we all go to Enmore to eat delish Turkish pizza and drink wine, and all of us talk for a few minutes about a woman who has influenced or inspired us. It's a fun, lively, and affirming evening, and I always feel so honoured to be a part of something like this.

At previous dinners I've talked mostly about historical figures, like Mary Wollstonecraft and Caroline Chisholm. This year I decided to talk about someone who has become an awesome friend and who has supported and inspired me in so many ways. From the first days when she was a name on an email list and the other person who helped set up the best knitting group ever, to proofreading my first essay at uni, to offering me a haven when I needed privacy away from the demands of share housing, she's become hugely important in my life, and one of a handful of people in Sydney who I miss so much it actually hurts. She represents many of the best points of all of my friends, sharp and smart and funny, a good listener, and never afraid to say what she thinks. You know who you are, and I bet a whole heap of others do, too. *grin*

So here we are, all happily gobbling and drinking our little girly lives away. Yay!

Many thanks to Ingrid for organising this again... you can see her creative work at http://www.ingridlouise.com/

SUMS!

Wed, 22 Mar 2006 22:01:24 GMT

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. :)