Well, my advisor contacted me today. It was both a relief and immensely frustrating. The good bits are that our funding from the FAA has come through and that there is enough flexible money that it can cover me going to Portland for workshops on multivariate analysis. Of course without this technique I could collect data until I am dead and have no idea what to do with it or what it means. In this light the trip seems not entirely optional, but I guess they could refuse to pay for it and expect me to figure it out from books. I'm telling you right now that would not go well. This bright side quickly devolved into frustration as we tried to work out the details of the trip (registration, costs, transportation, lodging, etc). What could have been a conversation of about a minute and a half turned into a day of emailing. Brian would tell me to find something out, I would do so in 30 seconds, email him back, wait two hours for a response, and the cycle would repeat. Since meeting in person is so clearly superior (a suggestion that has been summarily ignored in all emails), I find this to be incontrovertable evidence of an elaborate conspiracy designed to distract me and keep me from getting an actual degree. After all, email does not in any way require the existance of a living, breathing human being, and especially not a specific one. [Technically, I think that his wife is taking advantage of his flexible summer schedule to work more leaving him with the kids, but I see no reason to focus on such reasonable answers that in no way revolve around me.] To top it all off, he suggested I put the qual off until spring. No!!!! I will not have spent all of this time studying for nothing! And don't say that it would just mean I have several more months to learn the material all the better. Any human being would stop studying immediately and all would be forgotten. You would too. A slightly more rational reason this would be the wrong thing to do is that Mark is moving to Georgia in the March, and if I fail the qual I am going to stop at the masters and go with him. I don't want to stay here alone, and possibly having committed to an apartment lease, until May only to fail.
[This is a very long post, so I feel it necessary to include at least one photo, but nothing is particularily visual today. Therefore I give you... "Pillow." I love the scalloped button edge and the stitch which sadly I cannot get a good detail photo of. This pattern is from Simple Knits for Sophisticated Living, and was knit out of Caron acrylic. Surprisingly, it made a very cushy case that even the most anti-acrylic Purlygirls liked the feel of. Go figure.]
As for more crafty pursuits, I met up with the Seattle Stitch 'n Bitch tonight. This is always a fun group as it is people that I don't see very often, and there are always new faces. We had to meet at Essential Baking because the Stuff Cafe was closed for repairs or something. I absolutely love EB, I was just looking forward to checking out the other place as I have never been there. I didn't accomplish much as I was having major focus issues. In addition to becoming very caught up chatting and ceasing to knit in order to gesture, I screwed up about the second row I knit there, didn't realize it for a while and only finished tearing back when it was time to leave. I did, however, solve the Tricot Mystery. The back-front will from here on out be known as the front. This is very exciting, as it means that my instinct for the pattern was right. Usually I just think there has been a mistake, "fix" it, and then need to redo acres of a pattern. On the other hand, this was not the sort of pattern mistake that interrupted my knitting at all. It was just a swapped heading, so there was no trauma, headaches from finding potential solutions, or searching the web desperately for errata. Ah, the perfect pattern error; all ego and no agony. My new goal is to finish this by Thursday so I can bring it to Scandanavia. I'm not sure why, but wearing my new self-knit sweater there is much more exciting than the thought of wearing it on this side of the Atlantic.
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