Pac-Man meets Zork, and another pseudoscientific personality quiz

The "autolook" and "autonibble" features are a must when playing Pac-Txt. I'm looking forward to Ms. Pac-Txt, Joust-Txt and Centi-Txt.

I can't seem to resist taking these quizzes. The results of the Personal DNA quiz:

See the Full Report

Thanksgiving

Now that Thanksgiving has passed, I can start drinking out of my favoritest Christmas mug, which features an old-fashioned Santa, a gnome, fairies, and various woodland creatures. It's really more of a Yule mug, given the iconography. One of the fairies is giving a carrot to a little bunny at the very bottom.

Thanksgiving dinner was very good this year. We had turkey, gravy, stuffing cooked inside and outside the turkey, Robin's cranberry sauce (can you post a link to the recipe? ), cole slaw, mashed potatoes with chive cream cheese, peas, butternut squash casserole, candied sweet potatoes, and rolls.

For dessert we had pumpkin pie (it was very good, I'm just not a fan of pumpkin pie) and pecan pie. The Bourbon Pecan Pie was IMO the best I've made; the recipe is here. It uses dark corn syrup and dark brown sugar and was very very...DARK. (Yes, I used frozen pie crust. Pie crust is not my forte.)

During the festivities I blindfolded my mom so I could dress her up in her Secret Project to see how long the sleeves needed to be. This worked out really well, especially since mom was able to point out exactly where she wanted the sleeves of her "giant sock" to end. While hanging out at my parents' I also knitted up another washcloth using my favorite pattern...if only I knew someone who likes these things!

And now for a relaxing day of eating leftovers and Christmas shopping online in my jammies.

Zeno's Sleeve Paradox, aka "Sleeve on the Edge of Forever"

I think at this point Mom probably suspects that she's not getting socks again, so I don't think I'll be giving anything away with the title. She should still avoid clicking on --> this link <--, which shows proof of Zeno's argument that it's impossible to finish knitting a sleeve because the distance to the cuff approaches infinity. I can't blame the Sleeve Pixies for unknitting it overnight, since I still haven't decided where to hang the fairy door and I'm not sure how else they'd get in (unless the cats are letting them into the house in exchange for Pounce).

I've been pretty disappointed in the last couple of books I've read by authors whose work I've really liked in the past. There's a very limited number of authors whose work is on my automatic "buy" list, and I think it's just been trimmed by two.

Lois McMaster Bujold's newest fantasy series starts with Beguilement, which is a slow, formulaic and generally sub-par romantic fantasy. I'm getting really tired of a pattern in her books where a middle-aged, battered soldier-type gets paired up with a nubile young thing half his age; some women DO prefer younger men. I can only assume this theme reflects some fetish on the author's part, but it's getting old. Old and decrepit, like her male leads.

Margaret Maron's new-ish mystery Rituals of the Season just flat-out sucked. I love her books because they're set in a fictional county just outside the Triangle, and the local references are fun (Larry Stogner and Crabtree Valley Mall have had mentions), but lately she seems to be completely obsessed with pointing out the race of every character that wanders into view, appropos of nothing (ie, "When I got to my own courtroom, I was dismayed to find another white officer of the court and his wife standing before me"; "The white bailiff started to put himself between the young man and the bench, but I waved him back".) Woe betide any African-American characters popping into the plot; they're subjected to a paragraph-long description of their exact skin tone, hair texture and wardrobe. The book switches jarringly between first and third person viewpoints, and I just didn't care who the murderer was. I guess the majority of series novels eventually dribble off into rehashes and sloppy writing, but it's disappointing.

Pretty swift

After reading a bunch of reviews of yarn swifts in the Ravelry forums, I decided to buy the tabletop Mama Bear Yarn Swift from The Oregon Woodworker. It took about a week to arrive, and I put it to use immediately (I actually ran out to meet the FedEx guy, if truth be told).

I'm really pleased with it so far. The pegs give a great deal of flexibility in accommodating hanks of various sizes, and there's no danger of this type of swift falling over or collapsing like an umbrella swift can (so I hear). It sure beats the hell out of draping a hank of yarn over my office chair and kicking it around while trying to work the crank on the ball winder. I can wind up a 420-yard hank of sock yarn in just a few minutes, and it's fun to watch it whirling around.

In other news, I hit a milestone in the Secret Mom Project, but since it gets dark so early now, I wasn't able to get a decent picture. It's turning out well, but will need some blocking (as most of these types of projects do).

I think I'm in love

With the Mini Cooper Clubman. Also here.