Laurabelle's Blog

I have to write an RFP for my systems administration class, and it’s actually rather an interesting assignment. It’s a good exercise to have to do one hypothetically, before actually being thrown at the problem when a real system is on the line. Besides, I get to make up lots of details that weren’t in the assignment, and that’s always fun.

On the other hand, I would much rather make pink pom-poms than write a seven-page assignment. The pink pom-poms are for a friend of mine who, last winter, requested a hat with ears and never got one. Her birthday is next week, but it looks like I’ll have the hat done before class tomorrow afternoon. (The RFP will be done too.)

Saturday Jeff and I went down to Olympia for Mother’s Day. While down there, we made a stop by Capital Footwear, a hippie shoe store where the staff care about comfort and quality and only sell shoes made by fairly paid labor. (For example, they don’t sell Doc Martens any more because that company opened a factory in China and lowered their prices.) I only found one pair that I really liked, but it wasn’t for lack of trying, on my part or theirs; I tried on pretty near every shoe in the store. I think I’ll go back every couple of months, though, and see what they’ve got that’s new. It’s a small, quality business that deserves my patronage.

It’s been a busy weekend, so I’m going to blog about it in installments.

On Friday evening iKnit (the iSchool knitting club) had its first beginning knitter’s workshop. At least, Jenine (the organizer) called it a workshop, but the teaching was decentralized. We had five teachers and three learners, so people paired off one-on-one and the extra two sat by and munched and knitted and chatted. It was great.

This week has had its good points and its bad points. The bad is, naturally, the most spectacular. Seattle got a lot of rain this week, and its impact on the drainage system was compounded by the fact that the rain knocked the last leaves off the trees and into the sewers and blocking them. There was a lot of flooding of roads, including Aurora, which is one of Seattle’s few north-south thoroughfares and coincidentally the one traveled by the bus I take downtown on my morning commute to work. A couple of idiots plunged into a nice big puddle, got water in their engine air intakes, and stalled or even broke their engines. The upshot of all this is that this bus ride, which normally takes me 15-20 minutes, lasted more than two hours on Tuesday morning and made my commute 3.5 hours long. I was not a happy camper.

There are lots of things in my comp sci class that are new to me. There are other things that are old. There are yet more things that are so old, they’ve come around to being new again.

I guess this is my kind of cap.

On a wool-related tangent, Horace has a definite thing for my knitted wool hat. Any time I leave it lying on my bed, he starts making kitty love to it, kneading and purring and generally going nuts over it. (This is okay except that he generally also ends up trampling my fluffy comforter in his ecstasy.) I’m not entirely surprised because Goldie also has a thing for wool, but I do find it rather amusing and perhaps disturbing. Maybe I’ll just give him the cap, because my mother said she’s having a nice new wool one sent to me. Yay Mom! I’ll just have to make sure I don’t leave it on the bus like the last hat I really liked. :-(