Some time ago I signed this pledge to post today about women in technology.  Thanks to the pledge, I now know that Ada Lovelace was the first programmer, something I’m ashamed to say I didn’t know before!  I had heard of Lord Byron, Ada Lovelace’s father before, but not Ada herself.  So I just wanted to pop in here quickly, say hi, and tell you all to read the Wikipedia article about Ada if you have never heard of her before.  I’m teaching a course on communication science this semester and I wish there were more women’s contributions to the development of this field I could talk about.  Of course, there are a lot of women doing great work now, but that is research that typically falls outside the scope of this undergraduate course.  I don’t think it has to be that way, but unfortunately students in this class don’t have strong science backgrounds and seem to view this class as difficult and boring.  I hope I’m doing my part to change that perception.  All the students in my class are women and I’d love to see them not shy away from the more technical aspects of communication disorders!

PS – I hope to return to talking about knitting here soon.  The truth is that I can’t remember the last time I knitted.  My work/life balance got seriously out of wack last semester, which lead to a lot of grouchiness and no knitting.  I’ve made some adjustments to my schedule and I’m a lot happier for it, but haven’t picked up the needles yet.  I’ve been itching to get back to it, however, so that is a good sign.  I just need to wait for spring break so I can rummage through my projects back in Houston!

I know it’s pretty dark and not a very good picture, but at least it shows the dramatic change in paint color and some of our books (that have been packed away for a year) in bookshelves to the right.  There is still a lot of paperwork to toss or file away and I’d love more (or new!) bookshelves, but it’s a start!  I also may organize my stash in the office closet, but that will have to wait until Christmas break at least.

I haven’t taken an “after” shot yet, but there have been some major improvements, let me tell you.  Most of the boxes, which you can see a little bit behind the chairs, have been unpacked.  After two years of not knowing where anything was (i.e. in Louisiana, Texas, or Detroit) or if it was packed or not, things are starting to return to normal.  (Not that I always find what I’m looking for…some things still are in Detroit or have mysteriously vanished.)  This is one of the major reasons that there has been a lack of knitting here and in everyday life.  This won’t turn into an organization blog, but there probably won’t be much knitting for awhile.  I’m relocating all of my supplies to one place, Houston, and will probably post more about my efforts to organize my stash, ongoing projects, etc.  I’ve always wanted some nifty shelving full of yarn like you might see in a yarn store!

Cookie sitting on her favorite thing, a blanket.

I’ve avoided posting this (and posting in general), because it’s been hard.  Cookie is the first of “my” pets to die, although we have had family pets die before.  Cookie had been pretty sick for several months and we first noticed that she seemed to be losing weight.  In the picture here she is pretty plump, so at first it was hard to tell.  The vet then told us her kidneys were not working well (as sometimes happens to cats) and that we would need to give her fluids to help them function.  That seems to work well for awhile, although Cookie hated it.  Cookie kept losing weight and at times couldn’t even eat.  She wasn’t a very affectionate cat, but she started to sit on me or my husband whenever possible.  Maybe she was just cold or maybe it was comforting for her.  When she finally couldn’t eat or go to the bathroom anymore, we knew that we couldn’t let her suffer further.  Just before my birthday in June we had her put to sleep.  Both my husband and I were surprised how hard it was for us, although we knew it was for the best.  I still feel guilty, but we did not want her to slowly starve to death.  The loss has gotten easier with time, but we still miss her a lot.  I was lucky enough to have her for about 8 years since I rescued her off of the streets in Detroit, although the last 2 years were spent mostly with my husband.  R.I.P. little Cookie, you were a very sweet kitty.

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose (I tried reading this in German too, but gave up.)
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary (The heroine annoyed the hell out of me.)
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies (I might finish this once we unpack all of our books.)
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
(Honestly, I don’t get what the big deal about this book is. Wicked, not The Canterbury Tales!)
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel (I loved this, my husband hated it. And he’s the historian!)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons (Oh, the shame!)
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces (Had to read this once I moved to Louisiana.)
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel (Loved this book, although it freaked me the hell out.)
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye (I wanted to smack Holden the whole time I was reading this.)
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Kind of a weird combination of books, huh? I don’t know if you can tell from the list, but I’m really into 19th century lit (especially the gothic stuff) for some reason…

There has been some knitting, surprise, surprise. (Maybe I need the relaxation.) Since I don’t have much else besides sock yarn here and I wanted to quick gratification, I cast on for a sock with my stash of Wolle Rödel Sport & Strumpfwolle in a dark red tweed. I started out with a twelve stitch pattern from More Sensational Knitted Socks, but it just wasn’t working for me. Because of the large stitch pattern, I was kind of between sizes and maybe shouldn’t have chosen the smaller number of stitches to cast on. Plus, I wasn’t finding the pattern (Stansfield 304, I believe) all that relaxing to knit. I was clenching my teeth for all the M1 and M1Rs. (I know, I have issues.) So I frogged it and started the Stansfield 196 instead….ah, much better! I find it relaxing, pretty nice looking in the yarn I chose, and going by very quickly. No pictures right now, since my husband has had the digital camera in Houston since we started house hunting over spring break.

If you’ve stuck with me thing long, however, I do have another picture to reward you!

Here’s a shot of what will be (knock on wood) our master bedroom. See what I mean about the paint? I don’t have a problem with brown walls, but this is kind of dark and I think our dark-stained dressers might just fade into the walls if left as is. Isn’t that a kind of crazy corner? I’m thinking we’ll have to actually have a sitting area there. I’m having trouble concentrating on the last papers/exams I have to do this semester, since I keep decorating the house in my mind…

PS – If anyone has any advice on painting, or nice neutral colors to use on walls, I’m all ears…

You can substitute just about anything for “the internet” for me. It always seems like the party is going on elsewhere! *sigh* I’m a little worn out and sick with a sore throat, so I have to rest up this weekend. I have lots to post about, including an end to the sockapalooza saga (I haven’t even posted pictures of the socks I received yet), but that will have to wait for a bit. I just didn’t want to let February pass by without at least one post!