Weaving in ends

Things are ending this spring. There is a theme of finishing, and in keeping with this trend, I finished knitting/seaming my first sweater last Friday. I'm happy with how it came out.



The pattern is called Hild, from Elsebeth Lavold's Second Viking Knits Collection. In the end, I customized it, so be warned: if you knit it from the pattern you won't get the waist shaping or the wrist motifs.



I followed that up on Monday by taking the final exam for 6.046, MIT's Introduction to Algorithms class, and that's another project I'm happy to be done with. This spring was the last time I could have taken it; in future years it's being split into an undergrad class and a grad class. That's probably a good thing, given how much material was covered in 6.046 and how little code we got to write. It's a tradeoff; I really wanted to hit the more advanced material, but I'd have also liked it to be a slower class, with more implementation and more reveling in the awesome 'puter tricks we were learning.

Anyway, two sizable efforts are over! And I also accidentally killed our semitropical plant by putting it out on the porch. Life is simplifying itself.

Tale of two kittens

Once upon a time, in the year 2000, there were two kittens who came packaged together. Double double your refreshment....



They were like furry little cat larvae, so we called them grubs. It helped that they looked kind of grubby sometimes, and they also went grubbing around in things when they weren't asleep in a pile.



Besides, we needed a collective name for them because sometimes we couldn't tell them apart. It didn't always matter WHICH grub did something. And they were usually together anyway.



They got names of their own, and they grew up and apart, as kittens do. But not very far apart.



They cleaned each others' ears, and they had weird fights where they'd stop and groom each other for a few minutes before fighting some more. Apart or together, they plotted strange things and they remained grubbishly inscrutable.

The Force never seemed quite as strong with Igor (named for Stravinsky) as it did with Ralph (named for Vaughan Williams), and Igor got lymphoma this spring. We said goodbye to him today; the final vet visit out of quite a few. Igor had a peaceful last week, but he hadn't eaten since last Saturday, so the one thing we could do for him is spare him a final decline. He died in our laps... I kept petting his body for a few minutes after his heart stopped.

We are still a good family. We still have each other, we still have these kitties:



We're even still a DITCH... that's a Dual Income, Two Cat Household, for those who don't know.

Still, it feels wrong to only have one grub.

How Not to Blog

Garfield minus Garfield posted an excellent sequential-art essay about blogging today:



Working on a blogging platform is so very meta.