Bonus post!

I'm on call for the ICU today, and managed to get home at around 4:30. Since my last few weeks have involved staying super late every night, it's almost like having a mini vacation (granted, most vacations aren't at risk of ending suddenly when a pager goes off). So I feel bound to post more vacation photos. Our second day in Rome, we noticed these signs on the road to the Coliseum. We assumed that the run must have been first thing in the morning, since it was pretty hot during the day. But instead, it turned out that they ran the race at night. It turned out that the couple we were meeting for dinner had to wait a good 15-20 minutes for the pack to thin out so that they could cross the road. Pine Cone Court at The Vatican. That globe is titled "Beauty" - the big stone pine cone came from a fountain built by one of Augustus Caesar's generals. You have to wonder if someone intended that Beauty should seem so out of place here. So does this qualify as Holy Water? Door to The Pantheon - probably one of the most impressive buildings we saw. *************** Yesterday The Gamber took Somerset to the vet. Greedo thought it was safest to lay low, just in case. Somerset hasn't regained much weight despite being on the thyroid medication for almost 2 months. This might be partly due to the fact we can only give her 1/4 the dose, or she starts puking. It's a topical medication that we put in her ear - she doesn't like it, but it's better than trying to give her a pill every day. So the next option might be an iodine injection. Unfortunately, if we go down that route, she might need a daily dose of thyroid hormone. Which would likely be given as a pill...

Build it and they will come*

As promised, more pictures: This is part of what remains of the palace that Augustus Caesar built on top of the Palatine Hill. Scrabble, anyone? Yes, that's THE Senate. It's kind of sad that most, if not all of my knowledge of Roman history comes from having watched the HBO series (that Marc Anthony was dreamy...a cad, but dreamy) Legend has it that if a liar puts his/her hand in the mouth of this thing, it will get bitten off. Our tour guide said it was probably a sewer hole cover at one point in time. Surprisingly, there was a long line of people waiting to stick their hand in the hole that nasty stuff travelled through. Somehow, I imagine that these City employees don't find cobblestones very charming and quaint. *So this weekend, The Gambler and I took a short trip to Ottawa - he fenced in a tournament, and I managed to catch up with some Ottawa Knitters. Nancy, Leanne, and (blogless) Linda joined me for a fun afternoon of drinks and chat. We covered all of the big topics - Famous Internet Knitters, religion, ravelry, sex, brownies, and politics. I told them about my latest hobby - starting up Ravelry groups and then abandoning them setting them free. At one point, Leanne declared her love of grafting. Then she said the fateful words - "We should start a Grafters for Obama Group". So I did. Yesterday evening I started it up (it was an excellent opportunity for me to avoid working on a talk I have to give in 2 weeks), and made the 4 of us charter members. We are now up to 11 members; only 5 of us are in on the joke as far as I know. I don't know whether I should laugh or be scared...

Rome, if you want to...

We had a great holiday. And then I went back to work. Needless to say, I still haven't recovered from last week, so I haven't finished uploading all of my holiday photos onto my laptop, let alone sorted them out and uploading them onto Flickr. So here is a half assed limited selection: The Trevi Fountain. Legend is that if you face away from the fountain and throw a coin into it over your shouler, you will return to Rome some day. In actual fact, there are so many people crowded around it that you'd probably take out someone's eye. The closest I got to a yarn shop in Rome - this was a Diesel display window on the Via Corso. The Gambler went inside to check - no yarn for sale inside. It's good to cover all of the bases. What really struck me the most was the fact that this is both a modern and an ancient city. This little enclave was at the edge of an archeological dig just down the road from the Coliseum. Are the tiles 40 years old or 400? I have no idea. The Coliseum. What remains of it, that is. Turns out that recycling has been all the rage here for some time. All the marble was harvested years ago - some of it used by the Christians for their churches, some burned to yield lime for cement. More to come. I promise. Really. On the knitting front, I decided that post holiday ennui was best addressed by casting on for a new project (Although I was technically on call the day after we came back, the weekend was super quiet, so I spent some quality time with the cats). I visited Acorn Street Yarns in Seattle just after the Sea Socks cruise. They had a bin full of mini skeins of Jaggerspun Zephyr Wool-Silk laceweight yarn. Brenda Dayne had been wearing a Modern Quilt Wrap on the cruise, so I sat down on the floor and selected about 14 different colours that I thought worked well together. Turns out that the pattern only calls for 9 different colours - so I narrowed it down to these ones to use for The Zephyr Quilt Wrap: I tried to organize the colours that I selected from darkest to lightest, and to do the same with the colours that the pattern calls for, and then replace them in that order. In retrospect, I don't know if it makes that much difference - I think that she distributes the colours pretty evenly throughout the schematic. It was very fiddly to start - between the laceweight yarn slipping off of the relatively large needles, and trying to weave in the ends as I changed colours, and the squares being very distorted initially. It didn't help that the first 4 squares were the small ones. But now I definitely have the hang of it. It's one of those "just one more square" type projects that is hard to put down.