Hi!

Time has gotten away from me. It really seemed that one day I was checking in on Livejournal when I had a free moment ("I'm compiling!"), the next I was only finding time fortnightly to peek at the journals of people I (a) know in real life and have gotten email from recently (boffo, electricia), (b) am subscribed to elsewhere (perich), or (c) am just curious what their view of news I follow is (jonquil, gfrancie). I have been terribly neglectful of everyone and everything else, since November at least.

I still read tons of blogs, but mostly via Bloglines. I have become completely obsessed with knitting--I must be subscribed to 80 knitting-related blogs now. That takes up a lot of my not-at-work reading/watching time.

I have been knitting, too. I'd like to say a post with my latest knits is forthcoming, but yeah, my blog posting suffers even more from my apparently fuller schedule than my blog keep-uppage does. Unless it's microblogging!

Like half the free world, I've mostly been using Twitter to keep up with people--and to share my own stream of inanity, of course. Find me there under the usual handle, kirinqueen.

I've also been using Flickr a bit more regularly, so that I can keep my Ravelry projects page updated. I'm more of a crafter than a writer or a photographer, it would seem.

(Wow, that photo of me is old now. Not that I look different--except my hair is longer, but geez. Maybe I can update that while I'm hanging around here.)

I am so behind on Livejournal. I think I need to cull some of my feeds here and in Bloglines. I can't keep up anymore. (How the hell do you do it, hober?)

To mark World Diabetes Day, I took inspiration from the Word in Your Hand project. The circle represents connectedness or unity or blahblah; I'd like it to remind you to give a hug to a diabetic you love today.

I set a crazy fundraising goal for the 2008 JDRF Walk for a Cure, $3000, but you all, my family, and my coworkers ended up contributing $2540 $2640--85% 88% of that! Absolutely fantastic! Thank you so much!

Edit: I forgot the $100 Lindsay raised with her awesome beer auction on Halloween.

Happy Halloween!

(I am the Queen of Awesomeness; Ted is Fraa Erasmas of the Concent of Saunt Edhar from Neal Stephenson's Anathem.)

Today is the 250th anniversary of the birth of Noah Webster, the original champion of American spelling. He wrote the first dictionary of American English in 1806. Speling of the colonial Era was a wilde beest indeyd¹ before Mr. Webster's efforts to tame it, and while not all his suggestions were taken by American writers (or at least those writing formally; "tho" for "though", e.g., has yet to be accepted in style manuals), he was successful in simplying American spelling. And grateful may we be for it! But this is tangential to my main point.

To celebrate the book of words, I would point you to lexicographer [who we like to joke is my doppelgaenger, what with the same first name, linguisticky² profession and enthusiasm for skirts with pockets] Erin McKean's Dictionary Evangelist blog. Her writings on words can also be found in numerous journalistic articles, as well as in a Google talk and a TED talk.

You can join me and Ted in celebrating Dictionary Day by adding the words you enjoy to Wordie. [Edited to add: Or not! Wordie won't load for me this afternoon.]

¹You may notice that the same word may be spelled several different ways in the Onion sheet, which is indeed how people wrote back in the day. Good times, eh? Like I say, let us give thanks for Mr. Webster's works!
² Here is where I remind you that language is far more than a bag of words. If it were, then we could communicate with each other by random throwing there out words ordering no to regard with them. Our Dictionary Evangelist knows this, of course, but I couldn't figure out where else to say this without getting into a side discussion, so here we are. Linguistics is about words and their meanings, sounds and their meanings, how words combine with each other to comprise larger units of meaning and communication, how the brain works with different linguisticky tasks, etc. etc. etc.

Hello friends! I am again participating in the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation Walk to Cure Diabetes being held in San Diego (at UCSD) on Sunday 26 October. I am building a team of my coworkers and anyone else who would like to support this cause by doing a little 5K with me. If you are interested in

• joining me in walking,


• donating to the JDRF, or even


• forming your own team,

please visit this link. (Actually, I think you have to create a new account and sign yourself up as a team captain to form your own team.)

In the days leading up to the walk I would like to do a series of posts where I talk a little about my day-to-day with diabetes, tell my big Diabetes Stories, and answer any questions you may have.

Thanks for reading!

A couple of weeks ago I finished this sweater with yarn given to me by valdelane and zare_k for my last birthday. The pattern is fun and easy, but as written it work out a bit roomier than the photos would indicate. Many Ravelers warned of this, but I did not heed them. If I had, I would have knit the second half of the sweater in the extra small size, rather than the small.

Even so, I'm very happy with this project. The yarn (Lion Brand Organic Cotton) is super soft, and I love the color. The openness of the sweater makes it comfortable in the summertime despite the bulkiness of the yarn, as long as I'm not running around in 80F+ temps and 90%+ humidity. :)

My expression is one of skepticism that Ted is photographing the sweater and not my face. :p

(12:03:56 PM) kirinqueen: I got it out! I got it out!
(12:04:00 PM) kirinqueen: (that's what she said)
(12:04:18 PM) kirinqueen: the vent will need to be cleaned of a bit of chocolate
(12:04:27 PM) kirinqueen: but only a little

Dear Lazyweb,

Is there a way to convert Excel highlighting to a value so that when I save an Excel document as a comma-separated value file, the information conveyed by the highlighting is preserved? I have this file where I'm only supposed to look at the rows with the first field of the row highlighted in purple, and those rows are only 30 of about 600, but I haven't found a way to sort by highlighting, or otherwise make the highlighting actually useful. Do you have any tips?

Thank you,

EO'C

Edit: I get this when I attempt a sort on the column I added with "P" for purple highlighting "This operation requires the merged cells to be identically sized." WTFFFFFF. (Which merged cells? Why are they merged?)

A theme: songs that sound really cheerful, or like love songs, or are billed as children's songs, but are actually about murdering someone. My examples are "Banks of the Ohio", "Mack the Knife", "Weile Waile". Can you give me some more?

Another song that I find upbeat sounding as long as I don't pay attention to the lyrics is MGMT's "Time to Pretend", which is about life as a rockstar on drugs, including the dying of an overdose.

I guess conversely are the songs that sound really unhappy, but whose lyrics are actually joyful, but that's like half the tradtional Irish love songs out there.

So here's something I don't get. What is the deal with Miracle Whip haters? So many people's only response to the words "Miracle Whip" are "IT'S NOTHING LIKE MAYONNAISE, HOW DARE YOU TRY TO TRICK ME?!" I mean, I agree, it's nothing like mayonnaise, whatever its label claims, but it's easy enough to tell the difference, the same way you can tell the difference between margarine and butter. But I don't hear anyone but serious (non-vegan) cooks say "WHO the HELL uses MARGARINE?" And even then, it's only under certain circumstances (like making cakes and cookies).

Full disclosure: I'd mostly use Miracle Whip and mayonnaise interchangeably, but I would never tell anyone that they are interchangeable if they'd only tasted one or the other. Also homemade mayonnaise is like 1000% better than the kind that comes in a jar. And it's pretty easy to make.

Well well! Three posts in as many days!

Hey linguist friends, did you know that there was a literary contest that directed competitors to form a story making Chomsky's famous nonsensical sentence "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" sensical? This was the winner:

Thus Adam's Eden-plot in far-off time:
Colour-rampant fowers, trees a myriad green;
Helped by God-bless'd wind and temp'rate clime.
The path to primate knowledge unforseen,
He sleeps in peace at eve with Eve.
One apple later, he looks curiously
At the gardens of dichromates, in whom
colourless green ideas sleep furiously
then rage for birth each morning, until doom
Brings rainbows they at last perceive.
-- D. A. H. Byatt

I wonder if there are "horse raced past the barn fell" or "kicked the bucket" jokes out there, too ...

Hey look! There's a person under all that knitting! This meme brought to you by the regression I'm waiting to finish running. I got it from blergeatkitty.

You know how sometimes people on your friend's list post about stuff going on in their life, and all of a sudden you think "Wait a minute? Since when are they working THERE? Since when are they dating HIM/HER? since when???" And then you wonder how you could have missed all that seemingly pretty standard information, but somehow you feel too ashamed to ask for clarification because it seems like info you *should* already know? It happens to all of us sometimes.

Please copy mine below, erase my answers putting yours in their place then post it in your journal! Please elaborate on the questions that would benefit from elaboration! One-Word-Answers seldom help anyone out :)

( some general me stuff )

Look at what I'm knitting right now! I am completely in love with these socks. zigeunerweisen gave me this Rowanspun DK ages ago, and I couldn't decide what to do with it for the longest time. On our last trip to Seattle, I got a grey "Mocker" style Utilikilt, which naturally inspired me to make myself a pair of kilt hose, and this lovely tweedy gray coordinates quite nicely with the kilt. The leaf pattern going up the back of the sock comes from the Harmony Guides Aran stitch dictionary. The rest of the sock is 4x1 ribbing. I'm contemplating something much more design-y than I've ever done, namely, splitting the leaf pattern and making it go sideways around the cuff. We'll see if I can pull it off.

I recently lost my external pancreas, which held all the diabetic supplies I keep on me at all times: a bottle of insulin, vials of unused and used test strips, a glucose meter, batteries for my pump, an infusion set, antiseptic wipes, lancets. Since I knit it on a lark and in a dearth of materials, I'd been meaning for a while to make a new one that looked more pancreas-like. Plus it's an excuse to knit what amounts to a toy, even if its contents are more serious.

So re-inspired by some knitted anatomy images after Kerri linked to them a while back, I picked up a skein of a nice buttery yellow 100% cotton yarn, took a look in my Aran stitch dictionary, and got to work.

The new pancreas has approximately the same volume as the old one, but I worked it from the bottom of the fatter end up so that I could run the flap along the long edge. The long flap makes it a little more likely to spill its contents than the old one. I wanted to add a little interior pocket to hold syringes, and I thought that was the best way to do it. It's made with box stitch, which is basically 2x2 seed stitch, and which I thought looked the most like the pancreas in the knitted anatomy. It still doesn't entirely have the right shape, but it is definitely more pancreas-like than Pancreas 1.0. The two buttons on the flap give the pancreas something of a face, which made some friends think it needed a name--of course something beginning with a "P". I was originally thinking something like "Percy" or "Panky", until Game 6 of the Stanley Cup on Wednesday, where I saw the name Pierre and knew that had to be it.

I haven't had a chance to take a listen to entries on this new Flickr video group Word Time, but it looks like it might be a good potential resource for folks interested in English language dialect variation:

Members of Word Time share the variations in our pronunciations with weekly lists of words.

--via mental_floss

Project Spectrum is an effort organized by Lauren Weinhold of Lolly Knitting Around, in which a two-month period is assigned a set of colors that you can use as inspiration for crafty projects. This year's (almost-)quarterly colors are grouped according to the classic elements of fire, earth, water, and air. The fire projects of February and March were those made with red, pink, and orange. April and May are the earth months, with green, brown, and metallic colors. I learned about Project Spectrum through zigeunerweisen, who has demonstrated great thoughtfulness about her projects and how they relate to the colors of the moment. Thus far, I've worked on projects with no thought toward how they might fit into whatever Project Spectrum color theme is happening. It is a coincidence that my works of this month have aligned with Project Spectrum, but I am happy that they have. (Of course, I am an earth tones kind of person, so the odds are pretty good that I'll have something earthy on the needles at any given time.)

( adventures with Project Spectrum 2008 )

The message I have been trying to preach as a someone who has become a better diabetic over the years is that measuring your blood glucose more often is THE way to manage/improve your diabetes. But I've been assuming that your doctors tell you what to do with those numbers--isn't that their job? Amy at Diabetes Mine made me realize that they don't:

I think I've told this story before, but I keep flashing back to that old college friend of mine who was diagnosed with Type 2 last year while I was writing my book. He's an educated guy who runs the IT department of a small private university. He called for a tip, embarrassed. Turns out he was sent home with a glucose meter, but given no idea what it really was supposed to do for him.

"I keep getting these numbers, and writing them down. They're mostly pretty high. So what does it mean? What do I do with this information?"

I nearly screamed into the phone.

Clearly, glucose testing does absolutely NOTHING for you if you don't know what to do with the results. It's just a bunch of useless numbers that your doctor may or may not scold you over. And why would you even consider it when you read all these reports about how testing's going to lower your quality of life?

I think all the glucose meter companies should get behind this one: we need a national awareness campaign about Glucose_meter1what the heck to do with your glucose meter (other than stare at it and get depressed). Let's push the education agenda, rather than just new models with fancy features.

Most of us Type 1s are all over it, since we have little choice. Allow me then to provide a couple of very basic tips -- straight from our book -- that you all might like to share with any diabetic family or friends who haven't gotten a proper education about translating meter results into better health:

* test before and after specific foods or meals - you can gauge how that food effects you, and maybe cut down on it, quit it, or plan to eat it before exercising (to offset the BG spike).

* test before and after exercise - to gauge how that activity effects your blood sugar. You may not need a snack every time you go for a walk after all, for example.

* test at same time(s) every day - look for trends. Are you always high after dinner? Always low before bedtime? Now adjust your food or medications to compensate.

* remember, your A1c tells you how you're doing overall, but doesn't tell you diddly-squat about your day-to-day routine. Only individual daily glucose results can indicate whether you need to consider changing your breakfast menu and/or scheduling your exercise for a different time of day.

* by the way, it might help to think of it as “Glucose Checking” versus “Testing.” It gives you information, not a valuation of your worth. No need to feel that you have to “pass” every diabetes-related test you take.

From Perich:

Free exchange is pretty objectively good, if you know the theory behind it. If you have something I want and I have something you want, a trade profits both of us even if no one creates anything new. In fact, no one can come up with a better way to make as many people as wealthy as possible than by allowing them to trade freely with each other. Just as pointing out gaps in the fossil record does not discredit evolution, pointing out the side effects of profitable behavior - pollution, monopoly, etc - does not discredit free trade.