Daily Archives: January 6, 2009

Yet More Wiktory!

The tassels are on. The eight-foot-long Gryffindor scarf is Officially Complete. Proper pictures to come. (Ravelry is down, AUGH!)

A sneak preview:

Because of course the damn cat can’t leave the wool alone, even when it’s all knitted up. What is it with my cats going crazy for wool? (Not yarn, the wool itself. Roman and Maggie once chewed a hole in a pure wool cardigan of mine. Roman was particularly bad, and used to roll and drool all over it.)

Remember, the cat is ginormous. It may be an eight-foot scarf and eight inches wide, but when it’s on HRH it will look like a normal scarf. It will still be impressive, but not as impressive as it is when I unroll it on the floor.

ETA: Ta-da!

And if you know how big HRH is, you know exactly how wide the scarf is:

Mischief managed. That’s one very happy geek man.

Wow

I need to take a moment to say that, this book? Is good. Of course, I’ve only proofed the acknowledgements and the introduction, but so far, excellent. (I’ve found two errors! But it’s the same error twice and involves a missing accent, so.)

I love what almost a year away from something can bring. (Handling those six copyedits don’t count, because I didn’t actually read the book at that point; I was paging through it to get to the queries.) Reading it in its final page layout helps a lot, too. It’s pretty, and it looks just like a Real Book.

That is all. Thank you. Now, back to proofing these galleys.

Virtuous

I have further caught up on the holiday backlog of e-mail and cleaned out most of my in-box, I have yogaed, and I have celloed. I am very pleased to see that my cello skills haven’t completely crumbled in my two-week hiatus. In fact, wow. Positive proof that my two months of lessons have made a definite impact and improvement. The Lee piece sounds excellent, especially considering that this is only the third time I’ve played it. But in the interest of full disclosure and humbling myself, the piece from the Mooney book sounds awful: I can’t get the damn rhythm of “Erik’s Minuet.” I subdivide, I count, nothing works. Argh. It figures I’d stumble on the easy piece and whip through the more challenging one.

Now for a snack (because I had an early lunch before celloing), and then work. I think I’ll do the first half of the proofs today, or however far I get so long as it’s at least five chapters. Drat; I need to download and install Foxit on this computer so I can mark them up if necessary.

And later, when I need a break (and I will, because I remember what page proofs are like) I will sew up the ends of HRH’s scarf and put the tassels on, because I went over to Ceri and Scott’s house last night and Ceri gave me a J crochet hook of my very own. The test tassel I did was too long, so I’ll need to find an intermediate-sized book to wrap the yarn around. And in other knitting news, I did indeed frog those two inches of hat last night; I cast the Softwist yarn on my size 8 Addis instead, and wow. I prefer bamboo needles to metal, and I thought the slippery yarn on the super-slick metal Addis would be a match made in hell, but it’s spookily easier, somehow.

Right; Foxit has downloaded. Time to install and get to work.