Fingerless gloves, a wedding, and a robot

When I first started this blog, I intended to use it to keep track of my knitting projects. Of course, I didn't post a single thing about knitting or anything else until we got back from our trip and I found that I was addicted to blogging. But, hooray, I'm about to post my first knitting entry! There will be other elements, too, for the craft phobic, don't worry.

When we travelled through Idaho on our way to Vancouver, Erika cut my hair. We decided to do a work trade, in return I am knitting her a pair of fingerless gloves. You can see the pattern here. I'm using a different yarn that I'm pretty smitten with: Smart Superwash wool from Norway. It's inexpensive and really nice to knit with. The mittens are funny because you begin by knitting each finger tube separately. Before you join them, you have five 1" long tubes sitting in a row on the table in front of you. They look silly.

I'm only partway done the first mitten, but i'm pretty pleased with how they are turning out. I had to modify the pattern to make them a little smaller, though. I'm only knitting one row between each decrease row for the thumb gusset. I'll let you know how it turns out.



My first weekend after a full week of work is approaching. I'm looking forward to it. But I'm enjoying being a working girl. I still haven't figured out this Business Casual thing, but I don't care too much anymore. I'm enjoying waking up early and feeling like I've accomplished something by 4pm. I like being the breadwinner.

My new job is working out pretty well. I'm the tech writer for an engineering firm. They write a lot of building code reports, and many of the engineers at the firm speak English as a second language. They make a lot of mistakes. It's a good thing I get some strange kind of satisfaction from correcting other people's spelling and grammar. And I do. I don't know why, but I do.

This past weekend Douglas went out to NC for Dean and Annette's wedding. He said it was absolutely glorious, and I'm very envious that he got to go and I didn't. But I'm really glad that at least one of us was there to witness the moment and celebrate with them. Here's my favorite picture from the event:



And here are Douglas and David and Anna, looking blissed out:



The NC mountains are absolutely heavenly in the early fall...

Right, and the robot bit! Earlier this week I needed to find some engineering articles for a report, and they were only available at the UBC library. So I trekked up there to find them. Actually, I was going there anyway for my friend Gina (now Master Gina)'s defense party. Anyhow, I went to Main library, expecting to be sent to a different library where I would have to sift through stacks of musty bound journals. I asked the reference librarian where to find my journal, she looked it up on her computer, and told me it would arrive shortly and I could come back and pick it up.

What?

After much confused questioning, I discovered that all the journals are now kept in robot accessible storage, and that the thumping noises I could hear issuing from behind the smoked glass wall behind the librarian were coming from the robot. The robot that was finding my journal for me, and bringing it to the reference desk within 5 minutes.



Wow. Things, they do change. The picture kind of scares me - how much room is between the stacks? and how tall are they? What happens if the robot drops a book?? Is it lost forever? It doesn't look like there's enough room for a person to go in there and retrieve it!

But the Blue Chip cookie I had tasted exactly the same... 8) (Bev and Hanna still run the place, I was told).