Thursday, June 27, 2002

I got up early to blog. Y'all should be proud of me. Not that there's anyone out there, as I haven't been posting regularly so the slight few who ever did read this have probably dropped off now, off to bigger and better blogs...

Ah me. I'd google myself to see if I come up high, but I think that would be self-destructive. There are 2 areas in my life right now where I am consciously avoiding 'checking' myself because if it were a)negative I'd be all bummed and then my efforts would drop off or b)positive I would be all self-satisfied and, you guessed it, my efforts would drop off. So now you know how crazy I really am. That's why I don't have a counter on this yet, because I would be obsessively checking it every day, and after what I thought was a particularly good post, I'd be disappointed when the numbers didn't spike. Oh, the other area is how much I weigh. I am contenting myself with simply noticing the bones and muscles arising from the depths.

On the biking note, Saturday we went to visit my Dan's folks and his dad trounced us on our 34 mile ride. Agh. I am a wussy wuss. I was dying. I'm just proud that I made it through the whole ride, although I couldn't keep up for the last 8 miles. I just didn't have anything left to push with. Yesterday was our 'going hard' day- on our training schedule Wednesdays are the push hard day, and so using our slick heart-rate monitors (especially mine which reads out a percentage of current heart rate/maximum heart rate) we pushed hard. Man, it's amazing how you can sort of happen to get up to 80% but you could never accidentally fall into that 85% zone. Puff pant. This weekend hopefully we're going to my parents and we'll have to find a route there for our Saturday 39 mile ride. My dad will be like, you never visit and now you're out on your bikes the whole time!

Progress on the EZ sweater- miserable. Blah. Who knows, I may frog it all! To a knitter this is like standing on a bridge saying "It's not worth it anymore! I'm going to end it all!!". If I were a clever EZ heroine I would magically add some creative solution and salvage it all, but I don't know... See, this is why I knew I should never try to make a sweater- I'm too much of a perfectionist and by the time I can tell if I like it, it's done, and then it's too late. Boo hoo. I really like the colors, the wierdly curving decreases actually make it sort of form fitting but the sleeves! the sleeves! they are too wonky. No really. Besides it's 85 degrees out so I'm not really inclined to put it on and look in the mirror and ponder escape routes. It's really too small and for some people this would be fine, but I don't like restrictive clothing, let alone clothing which has sleeves that have wierd bumps in the seam. I should just do it over, maybe in the 21" width instead of the 18" width and not do the tricky changes that make the seam lay behind your shoulder line but just leave it so there's big sleeves and THIS TIME I will not have funky curving decreases. Man, I knew those things would be the death of me.

Oh, and here's something I've been thinking about- you know how everyone is freaking out about copyright issues and how there's that something something Media Act they're trying to push (Hollywood, that is) and how The head of Turner Broadcasting calls it ``theft'' when you, the viewer, decline to watch the ads he wants you to view.? Anyway, copyright is a big issue these days. But some have pointed out that this sort of strains the creative process. There is no public domain in which much grist for the mill, so to speak, lays dormant and accessible for others to springboard off of. This is why I enjoy knitting. Because you are always free to alter the pattern. I suppose some would say that then you could 'copyright' that new design. Hm. Well, I am pretty confident that most of us would not go that far, because, as a knitter, we are part of something bigger than just ourselves. I think that most knitters realize that somewhere, sometime in the past, another woman or man, when faced with the same problem in knitting, has practically and creatively invented a solution. Now, I won't argue that there is innovation, and that some really creative people have looked at something other knitters have used one way for years and years and applied it in a new way for a different purpose, and I those designs should be credited. Agh, I guess I am just worried that what has been for so long a wonderful sharing and creative boomeranging field will become stagnant if we all hug our 'inventions' to ourselves. That's why the internet is so cool, becuase we can share solutions and new ideas amongst ourselves. Anyway, I found a website that addresses this issue in part; Creative Commons. Whoops- just looked at the clock. More on this later.