Backtrack

On the 12th (Worldwide Knit In Public Day, in case you're not a knitter), we were in Kunming to meet our guide. Our hotel was near a famous park called Green Lake Park, and we spent the afternoon walking around there.



You can't exactly tell from our pictures how crowded it was, but the park was pretty busy. It was really relaxing just to walk around, people watching and listening to all the musicians.







We spotted some knitters, but our attempts to explain WWKIP day and take a picture with them met with failure. (Oddly, the guide wasn't interested in trying to explain it to them...)

We saw one knitter a half hour or so after we'd accosted her, when she'd caught up with her friends and was sitting down to knit with them. We waved at each other--and then I suspect she told her friends all about the crazy Americans who'd wanted her to look at their knitting!

So I had to knit alone on WWKIP Day:

Biking in the Rain

We're back at home. Technically, we got back nearly four days ago, but I managed to race in a regatta in NJ during that time, so I still feel discombobulated!

The biking part of the trip was mostly great--although it rained every time we got near the bike, which was a pain.

From Nanjing, we flew to Kunming to meet up with our guide, then on to Shangri-La (formerly Zhongdian, renamed in 2001 for marketing reasons, according to Wikipedia... I thought it was weird that somewhere was really called Shangri-La). I've been describing where we were as "Western China" for weeks now, but now that I look at a map, it's not really west at all. More central. Between Myanmar, Vietnam and Tibet. Good thing I wasn't flying the plane.

Anyway, the first order of business in Shangri-La was assembling the bike. After much work, we turned these...





Back into a bike. It took long enough that we didn't bike much the first day--just few km out of town in two different directions to see a village and a Buddhist monastery.



Biking started in earnest the second day--a planned 105 km/64 mile ride to a town called Baishuitai. Over three mountains. We biked diligently till lunch time (50 km over Mountain #1), but by then it had started to rain and we ended up riding in the truck (which followed along in case of bike crisis and to carry the suitcases) over Mountain #2. We got back on the bike in the valley and rode over Mountain #3--a total of 70 km, rather than 105.

Luckily for Kevin, the guide didn't tell us till we got to Baishuitai that no one in any of his tour groups has every ridden that entire ride...and that he's only done it himself a couple of times. If I'd known, my contrariness would have kicked in, and we'd still be biking up those mountains, if necessary!

Interruption

We interrupt our regularly scheduled knit-blogging for some travel posts, unfortunately without pictures because blogger is blocked in you-know-where. (Although do you think they'd post if I emailed them to the same address I send posts to?)

(Actually, a quick knitting thought first: I'm still waffling about the pockets. The combined suggestion that I add buttons first, then think about it, was very good--and them my mom emailed that maybe I could make and sew on just one pocket, then decide, which appeals to my waffle-y nature. Waffling about pockets will recommence when I get home.)

Anyway, the trip: getting out of town was little uncoordinated--my rowing club hosted a race the day before we left, so we both spent all day there instead of packing. Then the plane was late leaving NYC, which made it late to Beijing, which meant that we missed the flight to Nanjing (where the work part of the trip is). So Air China put us up in a hotel overnight, and we got to Nanjing about 12 hours later than planned. It was fine for us (and we were very glad to be at ground level for a while, after the 13 hour flight to Beijing), but the poor conference organizers had to juggle a packed schedule to fit Kevin in later than originally planned.

I'm so glad we're (mostly) calm travelers. There was a pair of passengers on the plane who also missed their flight due to the delay, and one of them ranted at the ticket counter people (who had nothing to do with the delay!), thought the air line should have held their connection, thought the bus to the hotel smelled, was cranky checking in, and is probably still complaining. It rarely helps, and just makes things more stressful.

So at this point, we've conferenced for 2 days, eaten enough for a month, and are about to set out for a couple of days of sightseeing in this region with the hosts and the other participants. On Saturday, we (and our gigantic suitcases of bicycle) fly west, for the biking portion of the trip. I suspect there won't be much email access in the hotels once we leave this area, although who knows?

Speaking of eating enough for a month, most of the meals (not breakfast) have been fancy banquets. We all sit around a big table and the waitstaff brings course after course of tapas-size portions. But those little portions add up when you can eat them all (we told them I'm a vegetarian, and all of the restaurants have brought out a vegetarian option for each of the courses without raising an eyebrow--sometimes it's just more of the veggie part of the regular dish, sometimes something completely different. I was especially excited to finally try soup topped with puff-pastry. I love puff pastry!) Last night, someone thought we were almost finished.... but it turned out the meal was only half over (you can tell the end is near because all the meals so far have ended with greens, then sweet melons and other fruit, then rice or noodle soup).

Anyway... must pack!

Pockets?

I finally have a whole day at home to write. And technically, I guess this is writing, but not the writing I should be doing. Opps.

But while I'm here, do you think I should add pockets to my Manu cardigan?



They're really cute pockets, see? (You'll need to scroll down.) But someone commented on Ravelry that the cardigan really highlighted her pear shape, and I'm not sure I want that--and I think the pockets would make that effect stronger--they're a little poofy, and right at hip level. I already shortened the sleeves so they wouldn't end right at my hips (and because I was concerned that fullness at the wrist would look funny, since my fabric is less drape-y than the original).

But it would be really nice to have pockets!

I'm definitely going to add buttons, just as soon as I find some good ones (I have wooden buttons that I really like, but they're brown, and I'm concerned that I'll get weird about wearing brown with black).

The other change I made was to the pleats--as the pattern was written, they folded in the same direction all the way around, but I wanted mine to mirror each other on the right and left. To make that happen, I needed to add a pleat (so there would be an even number of them), but there weren't enough stitches for that. So I made 6 of my pleats 2 sts smaller (in the folded under section, not the part that shows), which saves enough stitches to add another pleat.

(Is that really how pleats is spelled? Weird!)

Here it is:



Although you can't tell here that it's symmetrical, I promise that it is!

Anyway--pockets? no pockets? One pocket? Special detachable pockets so I don't have to make a commitment either way?

Not as Bad as Expected

(This post has been carefully designed to bore everyone--knitting to bore my family, rowing to bore the knitters... and probably my family too. And I'm going to talk about cupcakes again, now that you've finally stopped craving them. I'd recommend just skipping ahead to the end for a link to Baby M photos on the photographer's blog. Although, there's a cupcake hat there too, sorry about that.)

I'd been dreading the finishing work on Manu ever since I read the pattern--it's all i-cord, and I abhor i-cord (this is a sub-component of my hatred of knitting-on edgings... even though they turn out to be not so bad once I'm actually working on them). But by Friday, I'd finished up all of the other knitting (well, not the pockets, which I may leave off), and it was time to i-cord. And it wasn't really so bad--I finished it last night (Sunday), without ever feeling like it was consuming my weekend.

Which it wasn't: in between working on the i-cord, my boat went to its first race of the year, which also turned out to be not as bad as we'd expected. We spent all week almost bailing out (ha!) and thinking of reasons why we should just skip the whole thing, but the handy thing about racing as a team (it was a 4+, so there were four of us plus the cox) is that probably you won't all want to stay home at once, so you can talk each other back into going.

My least favorite moment is pushing away from the dock--it all seems kind of unreal till then--as though maybe you're just hanging out with some nice people (all dressed the same for some reason), and the water is pretty and I don't really like the beach but parks next to the water are nice and the grass is green and the sky is blue and clearly I didn't row in college because the weather in the early spring in New England is really gross, but masters race in the summer and fall, so the sky really is blue... and then you're carrying a boat down to the water but I don't really connect that with racing because I'm thinking about not tripping or running the boat into anything (like the side of a building). And then suddenly it's too late to back out, because you've shoved off from the dock (it would be too embarrassing to stand up and dive overboard!).

Anyway... we came in second, and now we can be less nervous next week.

At the race, I worked on a sock, then a bunch of the afternoon was also lost (at least from the perspective of the i-cord) because Kevin and I went on a bike ride. We're going to China in a week (remember, if you mention any previous trips which might or might not have been to China or somewhere near by in the comments, I will have to kill you... I will say that we're going because Kevin is giving a talk, and we told everyone--all 1,330,141,295 people!--that I'm a vegetarian), and after the work part of the trip we're going to bike in the western part of the country. Anyway--we upgraded our tandem to one that comes apart and packs in 2 suitcases, so we needed to break in the new bike.

Then on Sunday, Sunflowerfairy and I went up to the MA Sheep and Wool Festival, and I worked on the sock on the way--so that was more time away from the i-cord. But it's done anyway (except I suspect that the pockets, if I make them, will be be-corded), and the moral of the story is that i-cord isn't as bad as I think.

If you lived though that, look: a baby in a cupcake hat!

Bad Auntie

Thanks for all the happy birthdays. I spent half of my actual birthday on the train (not so bad, I finished a sock and took several nice naps), but for my birthday, I went to DC to see my new niece:



(Photographic proof that yes, M does fall asleep on everyone but my sister/her mother, just as A suspected.)

A finished her WIP as planned (a week ago last Thursday), but I was less efficient--she requested knit hats and I only started the first one, a cupcake hat, on the train on the way down. Which meant I was finishing it up all the way there:



And then it was laughably huge (even though I used a pattern intended for a newborn, got gauge, and followed the directions exactly.... although now that I think about it, the pattern didn't give any finished measurements, so possibly the designer has as vague an idea of the size of newborns' heads as I do?). So I knit a second smaller one while I was there, which will just barely fit till mid-afternoon today, as long as M's hair doesn't grow too fast.

But the cupcake hat served its purpose--M wore it for her official newborn pictures (with a professional photographer--I'll link when the photographer posts them on her blog) yesterday morning, M's big sister E spent the whole weekend saying "cupcape," and we had cupcakes for my birthday.

Growing On Me

Still writing madly. And reading madly, which has at least let me work stockinette. I've knit the body and half of one sleeve of Manu (a cardigan--imagine a maroon rectangle, with some barely perceptible shaping, please), and one and a half socks.



The yarn is handspun, a superwash BFL and sparkle mix, and it's growing on me--I liked it as roving, liked the single, like the 2-ply, then disliked the knit fabric through most of the first foot (something about the contrast between the solid sections where both plies were the same color and the heathered parts where they were different colors bothered me...). I'm feeling more kindly towards it now--and I can always give it to someone as a present (hopefully someone with a short memory, so they won't remember reading that I decided to give the socks away when I didn't like them!).

I'm also feeling conflicted about Manu, but I need to take pictures of the partial sleeve to explain why, so that will have to wait.

Hey, Kevin and I finally got our acts together this year in time to register for the Five Boro Bike Tour (thanks to a rowing friend with a better memory than us!), and did it last weekend. It was mostly fun (and the weather was just about perfect--a little warm, but not too bad with the breeze from biking), but crowded. The city closes down 40+ miles of streets for the ride, so it was neat to see the streets filled with bikes, but all those bikes meant everyone basically had to stop for every hill, and almost every turn, for the first 6 or 7 miles (which took us an hour--that's just about the speed I could have run that distance!). I had a depressing moment when I realized the whole thing would take 6-7 hours at that rate, and then things opened up enough that the experienced/fit cyclists could speed up. Further back in the mass of riders, I believe you end up biking slowly the whole way.

And I've been rowing a lot, although I'm not sure it's doing any good. I had a dream the other night that I followed the coach around (to the gym, to the grocery store, when she tried to pick up her child at school... I don't even know if she has any children), wanting to know what the point of rowing with your feet out of the shoes is, anyway? Dream-me kept sitting down on the floor and pretending to row, pulling my feet in because it's hard to slide your seat forward when you're just sitting on the ground and waving my arms around like they were oars. She finally got away while I was sitting down and couldn't jump up fast enough to catch her.

Awake, I feel like I'm rowing weirdly. I'm trying to believe that it feels strange because I'm more conscious of what I'm doing and apparent weirdness is the first step to some kind of improvement... but it's just as likely I'm over-thinking and making things worse. Big shock that I'd over-think, huh?