Rolling On One

I haven’t posted any knitting reports in a couple of months, I guess. I was busy making a sweater for a baby present. The mother and grandmother have been known to look at this blog, and I didn’t want to spill the beans. By now (actually by ten days ago) the baby has been born, the sweater has been presented, and no beans remain to be spilled. So here’s the story.

Around the end of January I happened on six skeins of a nice variegated DK weight yarn in the closeout section at Creative Warehouse in Needham. They were Karisma Ulltweed from Garnstudio, four hanks burgandy and two hanks beige. I got them, thinking maybe I’d make a sweater for one of Millie’s grandkids. Arlene reminded me about this baby, so I changed plans slightly.

Since the yarn was from Garnstudio, I went to their web site to look for a pattern and found this one. Unfortunately it called for four hanks of each of the two colors, and there were no more of the beige left. I got two hanks of a white yarn “Color Me” from New Zealand, and got to work.

I don’t seem to have a lot of pictures, but here’s one. It’s my first try at steeks and, though I promised myself I could handle them, I was a little apprehensive.

The steeks seem (or is that seam?) to have worked.

Oh! I haven’t seen it in a while. I almost forgot it was that nice!

This is a size 3/4. Since Katherine and her father are both pretty tall, we expect that baby Salima will grow into it in more like two or two and a half years, but it will be a while anyway.

On my lunchtime walk today I saw both pine and palm warblers, and two whitethroated sparrows in excellent plumage. The pine was in a deciduous tree about 20 feet off the ground on what I consider the outbound part of the path (the side nearest the Charles) near where the path turns right to return, flitting around the way you expect warblers to. The palm was close to where the path along the ridge comes back to the main path, between waist level and about eight feet above the ground, wagging its tail and flitting around etc. It didn’t have a chestnut cap, so I’m really saying “palm” on the basis of the tail wagging.

The river has been pretty low lately, nowhere near as low as last August or September, but below the bottom of the broken bridge abutment or whatever that is.

Saturday, April 19, Arlene and I went for a walk once around Cold Spring park. On a trail off the main loop, I heard a rustling in the leaves that for some reason sounded more like a snake slithering away than like a chipmunk jumping away. I looked carefully, and, sure enough, there was a garter snake under the next bush. I was very proud of myself for identifying the sound properly. Now I have to keep a close eye on Cutler Pond.

Just for the record, there was a turtle near Cutler Pond on Wednesday April 2. While I was walking, I saw a woman with a camera intently looking at the swamp just past the end of the pond. I asked her if she had seen anything interesting, and she said, “yes, two turtles.” They weren’t there, but back across the road from the pond, in a small stream leading from the culverts that are the outlet of the pond down toward the Charles. We walked back there and a few yards off the road until she could see the spot where they had been. One was still there, a painted turtle with a shell maybe eight or nine inches long. I was very surprised to see it that early in the spring. It was a warm day, but there had been ice in some parts of the pond just days before.

Last fall I collected some jack-in-the-pulpit seeds out in the woods behind where I work. The directions that I found (on the internet, naturally) for propagating them said to clean the pulp from them and store in a ziplock bag with damp vermiculite in a refrigerator for a few months before planting. The cold storage (it’s called stratification, I don’t know why) time was done perhaps six weeks ago and the seedlings are finally up enough to photograph.

Not impressive yet, but they have germinated.

The bigger woodworking project I did over the weekend was to finish plywood shelves for the baker’s rack and adjust them to fit. In addition, now that I have a light over the little workbench with the lathe and bandsaw on it, I did these:

My second bandsaw project. The first was a whale cutout copied from the owner’s manual for the saw. This is the saw that I got at a yard sale last — when? last fall I think. I’m sure I can find some place on one of our trails that will benefit from a few arrows on the trees.

This turning is intended to make three fishing plugs. This was a piece of scrap cedar. It smelled great while I was working on it (unless you’re a moth, I guess.) I think I turned two beech plug bodies last year and never painted them nor attached hardware, so I’ll have five to do now. There’s lots of ice on the lake so there’s no real hurry to have them done.

We went to the Home and Garden show at Southern Maine University today. It was a nice Maine scale event, a fraction (maybe as much as a quarter, maybe more like a tenth) as big as the Boston Home Show. Just exploring another town past Portland was interesting. We’ve tried to get to Casco from exit 47 on the Maine Turnpike instead of our regular exit 48 a couple of times, and managed to get here after stopping for directions, but I can’t say I know the route. This trip helped me put my schema of that part of the world together a little better so maybe I’ll not get lost next time I try that route.

It was farther to the show than it is from Newton to the big expo centers in Boston, but less hassle driving and parking. Some neighbors of ours who have a window treatment business, Budget Blinds (I think it’s a franchise), had a booth at the show, so we stopped and said hi and they asked us if their dogs were coming by our property these days. That’s an example of the small town-ness of Maine; we’d be unlikely to know anyone running a booth at the Boston home show.

We were hoping to learn something about what plants are reasonable to try to grow here. There were only a couple of garden exhibits at the show. Most of the outdoor type booths were more masonry, “hardscapes” it seems to be called these days, brick and stone patios and firepits and pergolas. There was one nursery booth with a young woman who seemed very knowledgable. Arlene asked about a witch hazel bush in the display and the woman at the booth told us what the cultivar was and that it would grow at that particular location, which is in zone five, but that if we lived a couple of towns north, like Raymond (which is one town south of us yet) we would be hardiness zone four and that variety wouldn’t make it.

So here are a couple of pictures from the show —

We had witch hazel on the mind because this bush was blooming on the campus between where we parked and the field house where the show was:

I loved the “no gasoline!” notice on what you would think was the filler cap door of this electric car. The top speed of 25 mph was a turn-off, though. I guess it’s OK if you’re really only driving in city traffic.

When we looked on the web for information about the show yesterday, we saw that one of the exhibitors was Mainely Ticks. We couldn’t really figure out what they would be selling. I mean, we picked enough ticks off ourselves and Dozer last summer that I wasn’t interested in buying any. We did end up buying two little tick removal tools. I hope we find the ticks before we have to pry them off, but these looked like well designed, durable little gizmos.

Two things we were definitely interested in were on-demand water heaters and standby emergency electric generators. There were people selling those items, so we got some useful information. And in a slightly related exhibit, how about this nice vintage oil truck?

Somehow, probably from an announcement or an ad in Rubberstampmadness magazine, I saw that Meer Image stamp company was doing a project “Stamp Naked” on nudes. We’ve met Steve Van der Meer, the Meer of Meer Image, at stamp conventions; in fact, he’s the person who gave us the name of the place we buy our stamp cushion from. At any rate, I sent him a copy of my “Wardrobe Malfunction” postcard, with permission for him to reprint it as part of the project. A couple of days ago I got a package from him, a “Stamp Naked” rubber stamp as promised to participants in the project. But better than the stamp was the packing material, a piece of newsprint that the stamp was wrapped in. Not any old newsprint, newsprint from a newsprint sketch pad that had been used in a life drawing session. Don’t you wish you could draw like this?

Here’s a picture of me with Anne and Matt’s dog Dozer. Matt took the picture on the 16th, must have been; I’m walking back from the mailbox with the Sunday paper. Dozer likes to go outdoors any chance he gets. The driveway is long enough that by the time I’m back with the paper I’ve been outdoors in more winter than a lot of my coworkers get in three days. Or a week, if they park in a garage at home and drive to the garage at work. The strange orange on my feet is yak-trax, a gizmo made of springs and plastic that stretches over the sole of your boot for traction on ice such as our driveway was made of that weekend.

The F-secure blog had a very interesting piece today about targeted malware attacks against pro-Tibet groups.

F-Secure is a security software vendor from Finland, in the same business as Symantec and MacAfee. I hadn’t heard of them until I ran across a link to their blog several months ago, because they don’t seem to have much presence in the US. I have the impression that their product is every bit as good as those others, if not better, and their blog is the best source I’ve found for news about malicious software.

The blog post says, “Somebody is trying to use pro-Tibet themed emails to infect computers of the members of pro-Tibet groups to spy on their actions.” They give examples: a report from Asia Free Press saying, ““AFP received an email Tuesday from someone claiming to be in Denmark, who had attached a file they said were pictures of Tibetans shot by the Chinese army. When AFP tried to open the attachment, a virus warning appeared.”, an email with a PDF attachment that includes a piece of spyware,
and a Word document, an Excel spreadsheet, and a PowerPoint file which F-secure says contain similar spyware. The malware in the PDF document that F-secure analyzed sends everything typed on the victim’s computer to a server in China.
I guess the first question is, do I believe it at all? I think so; I don’t think F-secure is going out of its way to pick a fight. I do think F-secure is confident enough and believes strongly enough in its mission of fighting malicious software that it will print the truth when it sees it.

F-secure doesn’t say who it thinks is behind the spyware, but it does use phrases like “crafted very well”, “technically advanced attacks”, and “crafted to evade detection by most antivirus products at the time it was sent.” It’s not much of a stretch to think that the Chinese government is behind this; in fact, I find it harder to imagine who else would be (assuming of course that you do believe it at all). I’d rather have spyware on my computer than polonium in my tea, but I don’t like this either.

Probably the best way to fight the threat would be to get many more computers affected than the senders expected, so as to overload the resources for reading and analyzing all the data (wouldn’t you think the reason it’s been carefully targeted is to make sure all the captured data is from relevant sources?), and then for people to send disinformation, knowing it was going to be read, such as emails pretending to go to Chinese officials as though they’re part of the resistance.