Monday, February 27, 2006

No coworkers were stabbed

Work

Today we had a mandatory professional development day at work. I get really, really cranky during meetings. Highlights:

10:30-11:40: Sate of the Corporation presentation delivered from headquarters via videotape and PowerPoint. We started late, and consequently ended late. Lunch was scheduled for 11:30. I ran out of yarn at 11:15. The last five minutes of the videotape featured a song, doubtless specially composed for our corporation, of infinite cheesiness. I started giggling. The co-worker sitting next to me thought it sounded like a South Park parody song. After the song and accompanying video of employees receiving awards, it was announced that this year's award winners will get an exciting trip to our headquarters in a cold, midwestern city in December. Well, hell, sign me up for that.

1:30-1:50: Talk regarding how to start professional groups or honor societies. One of my co-workers began a long, rambling, confusing monologue that he thought was funny. I got caught shooting him the look of death.

1:50-3:00: Discussion of how to improve our students' research skills. I had an argument with one of my colleagues because she believes Wikipedia is a totally valid source for undergraduate research projects.

3:00-4:00: Talk on how we're marketing ourselves. One of my coworkers started grilling the marketing guy, and continued being argumentative even after marketing guy answered his questions concisely and completely. I covered the back of my agenda in doodles. (I wasn't knitting because I was sititng in front of the uber-boss.) I listed the buzzwords coming from the marketing folks.

Village
Paddling upstream
Pulling together
Team
Outreaching
Whatever it takes
Make it happen

The day ended 10 minutes later than it was supposed to, and I was bitter.

Knitting

I'm working on baby things. One is still a secret, and the other is a Dulaan sweater. My sister gave me a big bag of Woolease, so I'm stranding it with some mohair and making a top-down raglan using the calculator found here. However, the calculator doesn't make allowances for the fact that kids' heads are disproportionately large compared to their chests, so I started with more stitches and the same needle size I'm doing the body on. The ribbing seems very prone to folding over at the switch to stockinette. I should have just done a roll-neck.

I'm in a brain-freeze about spinning. I just can't decide what to do next. I've got some stuff I dyed in my big New Year's Eve dye-fest, but I've also got all sorts of alpaca, and some pretty commercial roving, and I'm not really sure what else.

3 Comments:

Blogger Dorothy Neville said...

Oh Melinda, I feel for you. Did it help pass the time knowing that you could blog about it?

I am interested in the top-down raglan, having tried to make one of these using the unpatterns from Acorn Street. You start with the collar? Do you do any short row shaping or anything or are the front and back symmetric?

The unpattern has you start with the back and shoulder, working back and forth gradually adding stitches for the front before joining. Collar is knit at the end. As a novice knitter, I made lots of mistakes and the necessary switch from back and forth to working in the round was noticable.

Thanks for the link, it looks like my cup of tea. Looking forward to some pictures of the sweater also.

7:45 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

For some reason, I suspect that the answer to your spinning dilemma is going to be more wool. Baaah! Baaah!

5:04 PM  
Blogger Kathleen said...

I must comment on Wikipedia, the anything goes encyclopedia. Having had discussions with my 15 yo and his friends - who believe the Wiki should be their ONLY source of information... I understand your argument with your colleague - now why someone other than 15 yo High School Sophomores think Wikipedia is totally legit is beyond me. That being said - it can be a good jumping off point, especially if you know little to nothing about a subject because you can farm some really great words to use in other, more indepth academic searches.

6:55 PM  

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