birthday socks

Adjustments for two-at-a-time circular

(some of this was copied from notes on paper about two months after I finished the socks. YMMV.)

Heel flap

After the last row of the last leg pattern repeat:

(SL1,K1) across first 32 stitches of sock A
Turn to wrong side, SL1,P31
Continue to sock B, SL1, P31
Turn to right side and (SL1,K1) across same stitches.

Repeat for same number of rows/slipped stitches as in written pattern.

(Also going with (SL1/K1)* instead of SL1/K31 for right side because I like it.)

Heel turn

(something about this didn’t go quite right, but it’s now been two months, so I’m not sure what! here’s what I have written down in my notes, tho)

Turn heel B as per directions
K across
pick up 15

Turn heel A as per directions
K across
pick up 15
Row 1 lace
pick up 15

Sock B row 1 lace
pick up 15

Gusset

not sure where the break is in this

A: K to last 2 – K2TOG – Lace pattern – SSK – K across
B: Lace pattern – SSK – K to last 2 – K2Tog

save vs maudlin

(that’s from a tweet. when I get back to a regular computer I’ll embed it. I’m not sure I can do that on ye olde Transformer.)

I told C last night that I was working the nostalgia out of my system so that we could take a vacation together and just have fun here. And I kinda mean that. This particular trip has been all about: OMG HOMELAND. (Props to GA for the word “homeland” to refer to SoCal. “Hometown” is kinda fuzzy when you’re talking about a region, about multiple damn near overlapping towns, etc., etc.)

I thought I’d have more to say about GTA (I’m working on an essay) with this visit, and that’s true, but only up to a point. Because I’m realizing that the places I think of as the homeland aren’t really in GTA. Yeah, the wide bright streets. Yeah, Old Town’s acquired a certain poshness that seems familiar. But not so much the vibe that I wrote about in my last blog post. Jacaranda, lantana, jasmine, deodar, oak, olive, lemon.

Maybe it’s that I so often experienced it at human walking scale, and I am again now. I decided against renting a car, and instead got a multi-day transit pass. Which: best $25 I’ve spent since I’ve been here. And I’ve walked so much, at least 5 or 6 miles a day, and yesterday ELEVEN MILES. My calves!

But it’s not just that, because I had weird GTA echoes while I was in downtown. Dunno. I may have to let that simmer some more before I can really write it.

Relatedly? – Yesterday I went to Mountain View Cemetery. (Go with me.) On the one hand, when I was a teenager, I hopped the fence with Raul a few times to hang out in the graveyard. (LOL goth-ish early 90s teens. Also: “Hang out.” Snerk.) On the other hand, my great-grandmother is buried there, and I’d never actually seen her grave. It’s a lovely cemetery, lots of old (for SoCal) stones, big trees, and the staff was very helpful getting me the location of Great-Grandma Kellogg’s headstone.

Afterwards I was going to catch the bus to Eaton Canyon, but I’d just missed it, so I started walking. (Did I mention 11 miles?) I saw an adorable little house for sale…half a mil. !!!!!! And then the Little Red Hen Coffee Shop, which I felt like I’d heard of but maybe had never been to? And the reviews on Google were good, so I darted across the street.

Digression: I had seriously forgotten how absurdly wide even the side streets are around here. Then the main streets: I swear I’ve been on highways up north that were narrower.

I tweeted about this yesterday, but eventually I mentioned that I was on vacation, but from the area originally. And then I said that I couldn’t believe I had never been in before. (Because it was so delicious! Perfect bacon. Great pancakes. Water infused with lemon & mint. If you are in the area: GO NOW.) The woman looked at me and said “Your parents took you to Fox’s, right?” Which was….

Fox’s is a similar tiny joint probably a half-mile away, but on Little Red Hen is on the west side of Fair Oaks, and Fox’s is on the east side of Lake.

“Yeah, they did.” “Y’all didn’t cross the color line.”

Nope, we didn’t cross the color line. We lived in the zone where the color line was probably blurring in the early 80s; when I think really hard about my neighbors, about the places where I walked, about the houses around us, we probably lived right on the edge of the color line. But when it came to going out and being in a culture, we stayed on our side of the color line. (When we didn’t go all the way out to IHOP on Sierra Madre Villa.) We went to the breakfast joint with ketchup, not the one with hot sauce. The one with watercolor prints of lakes and mountains, not prints of Malcolm X and MLK.

I think I just gave her a crooked smile, and she shrugged, and I complimented the food again, both of us acknowledging: because racism.

With words I was brought up to believe color-blind was a thing. That you could just treat everyone equally. And at the same time

I’ve got so much going on in my head right now. The girls who threw my viola in the street when I was 12, and Edith, no more than 10, yelling at them to leave me alone, and one girl trying to choke her out. Mom calling the sheriff, and the dean, and that girl getting called in. I was mortified. MORTIFIED. I heard in high school, that she was still afraid of mom, and at the time I thought it was mostly because Mom is, well, a person of intense presence.

But now I’m connecting it to hearing a couple of black guys in my AP English class talking about being hassled by the sheriff up in northwest Altadena where they lived. (Altadena was and is unincorporated, so it’s patrolled by the LA County Sheriff’s Department.) I have to wonder if that girl’s fear was something else entirely.

I’m thinking of talking to people I know in Oly about my teen years, about the gang fight that got broken up by the police that I missed because I was working at the library; about being bused to a different neighborhood in high school (“as a black kid”, because I could definitely observe the difference between where I lived and where I was going); about being a numerical minority most of my school years. And then thinking about how I moved to such a white corner of the country, and after the initial alienation of college — which was mostly about class and money — how I’ve come to feel entirely at home there. And not really liking what that says about me. Which then feels ridiculously vain.

I do like Olympia for itself, I like the northwest for the weather, I like my town for its scale and its flora, for being able to bike to the river, for The Mountain in the distance on a clear day, for the friends I’ve made and the work I have.

But now I have some other things to put into perspective.

All of this is still pretty incoherent. (The related to GTA part? A section in the aforementioned essay-in-progress about music and race and time.) I’m glad I have the time and solitude to process it a little bit.

[I was gonna write about some other memory stuff, re save vs maudlin, but this is what needed to be said. Maybe later?]

layers of place and time

So yesterday I relocated from downtown LA to Pasadena for the vacation part of this trip.

If being downtown was like being in a place that felt familiar and totally alien, this last day and a bit has been….

Overwhelming.

But that’s a cop-out, because downtown was overwhelming. This is different.

Today I went up to Altadena, and I got off the bus not at the library where I was going to meet a friend, but at my old bus stop from when I was in high school. Some of the big trees are gone, some of the small trees are bigger. The house across the street with the old woman with the pit bulls who watched us when Dad went to the hospital (and never came back) is a different color and has a two-story addition in the back.

The orange tree in front of my house is half-dead, and whoever bought the house isn’t really taking care of it. The yard’s gone wild, the paint is peeling. But the railings on the stairs up to the front porch are the same. I almost went to the front door, because I could see a truck parked in the back at the end of the driveway, and I almost just walked up to the rose garden in the side yard, because the roses were in bloom. But there was a big group of Jehovah’s Witnesses doing their routine, and I felt shy and anxious. So I kept walking.

When I got to the end of the block, the smell of the deodar cedars — I’m assuming that’s what it was — hit me all at once. It flooded my whole face. All the memory, not anything specific, just full-body sense memory.

A few months ago, I found out that a house in that neighborhood had been built for and lived in by Saul Bass, which was neat to discover. So today I took a picture of the front, because all the pictures I saw online were of the interior courtyard, the part I never knew existed.

I saw my sister’s best friend’s house, and as I went to take a picture of that, an old Volvo drove through the shot. That was exactly the car they owned when we were kids, Mrs Mieselman’s car.

And then I walked into the library parking lot, like I did every time, from when I was old enough to walk the few blocks to the library. They’re having the Friends of the Library book sale this weekend. And that too was a full-body sensory memory, the parking lot full of folding tables and boxes and books. I could see my mother picking out stacks of romance novels to take home for a dollar a bag. I almost just sat down and cried, not out of any particular emotion but maybe all of them at once? Instead I walked through the aisles of fiction outside, into the lower level, and up the stairs to the community room.

Again: the smell of that room. And layers of memory. (I played Glenda in a tiny production of The Wizard of Oz when I was 10 or 11. That stage is still there; the curtain is still the same color.)

Little details: they’ve cleared the shrubbery out of a corner and put in benches. They took out the hydrangeas. The stair railings and carpets were different.

And then as I was about to dive into looking through the books, I turned to see someone I haven’t seen since I was in college, and then only very briefly — although at least then we made up for a dreadful falling out that happened our senior year of high school. We had made arrangements to meet up, so it wasn’t like it was a surprise.

But. I hadn’t expected the delight. Hugs and grinning and we wandered around the library a bit, again things the same and things different. Talking and walking. I hadn’t realized how much I missed us being friends. We wandered all over, had lunch, and after a while it wasn’t even so much catching up — although plenty of that! — but just hanging out, like when we were 13, but completely not like when we were 13.

I guess that’s what it is: I’m feeling parts of myself that I had forgotten, and experiencing them in visceral ways, sensory ways, while still being who I am, which is as different from then as this place is different from then.

code sprint thoughts

I spent Friday morning/midday at the Mentored Core Sprint. It was a weird mix of extra-hand-holding and being thrown in the deep end, at least for me. I had 99% of my environment set before I got there or in the first 10 minutes: I already have a Git client (yay Tower!), and since I was up at 5:15 am AGAIN that morning, I went ahead & installed MAMP, then installed Drupal 8, so when I got to the sprint (early, see also 5:15 am) all I had to do was clone the main Drupal repo in Tower, install Chatzilla, and rediscover that my nickname was already registered. (Thankfully using an old default password.) I couldn’t get xdebug working, but got told that wasn’t strictly necessary.

But then…I don’t anything about applying patches. I don’t have object-oriented programming experience. I do some PHP, and I can usually work my way through it, but I’ve realized that in the Drupal parlance I’m a site builder, not so much a developer. And I was in a giant conference room with probably hundreds of other people, and really really really nervous about doing something wrong.

What I probably should’ve done was find the documentation team and offer my wordsmithing skills.

What I actually did wasn’t too bad, though. I found a bug in Views tagged “novice” that actually just needed someone to see if a bug was still a bug. So I walked through the steps — which also meant creating a new content type and fields in Drupal 8, and getting the hang of a few different parts of Views that I haven’t used much — determined that the thing seemed to work as intended, and posted some screenshots to the issue. I’m pretty proud of that, TBH. It was an environment that managed to simultaneously trip both my “student ahead of the class” thing and my “fake programmer” anxiety. And yet I did a thing, on what was marked as a Major bug.

After all that, and a little lunch, I was all the brain fry (did I mention 5:15 am?), so I did a little work-related stuff. But before I took off, I went to one of the organizers to say thank you. Because whatever was not quite right for me, it was pretty amazing that all of this was happening. She asked what I’d done, and I explained it, and she wanted me to get up and say something. Which OMG NOPE. Still, she gave me a couple of stickers, which ok, I’ll take that.

With that, me and my luggage were off away from DrupalCon. It was a good week. I feel like I managed to balance on-time and downtime, meeting people, catching up with people, seeing a few sights, and knowing where my boundaries were. I only went to two parties, and that was PLENTY. (It’s kind of reminding me of some SxSW experiences, and I feel ambivalent about that. I really wish there had been a game night or something. If I go again in the future, I WILL organize one this time.) I learned a bunch, and also created a bunch of mental bookmarks: things I need to come back to and explore in more depth on my own.

D&D & Drupal

list of urls, query path to scrape data, migrate for pathfinder!

migrate & spotify

marvel character database, star wars character api

D8 has symphony’s DOM parser

3.5 SRD MySQL data dump

Pathfinder has it as CSV.

isotope module (for hiding & showing?)

wacky dice stories.

elasticsearch

[context: at some point Google Site Search is probably going to be prohibitively expensive. is this a good alternative?]

Lucene is an underlying search technology, from Apache, in Java. Same as Solr.

big diff from Solr is that it’s clusterable? is that something that matters for us? I’ve no idea.

also, I have no goddamn idea what they’re talking about now.

solr-vs-elasticsearch.com

“if you just want to search all your nodes, use Solr” ok then. (esp better integration with Search API?) so there’s that, I guess that’s the super-short answer to my question. not that there’s not super-neato stuff in Elasticsearch, and who knows, maybe by the time we price out of Google Site Search (does _that_ work with Search API) it’ll be ready for prime time.

Documentation

Someone from Evergreen should go to Write the Docs?

(these are notes on phone.)

I think there’s a lot to bring from this to documentation of things at work. The idea of curation, pruning, caretaking of articles. Everything has an owner/editor, at least.

Edit as pull request.

in SoCal, no longer of SoCal

The obviousness of inequality is grating on my soul. I’m not saying anything new or particularly insightful here, but holy moley the fancy hotels and condos, the expensive cars, and then 2, 3, 5 people curled up asleep or hunched over in wheelchairs or just standing and staring into space. One stupid art-couch in a boutique window could house a person for a year, I’m sure of it. What the everloving goddamn is wrong with society.

And man, at the same time, I’m sitting at the fancy hipster coffee counter in a converted open warehouse space, drinking a $6 mocha, and enjoying it. Enjoying the music, the taste, the ridiculously good-looking people working the espresso machine. I had a tiny gelato (OMG BLOOD ORANGE) from a little place in yet another in-the-middle-of-revival building (arcade?) yesterday, and on the same block stores that advertise buying gold, but with the dirty half-faded sign in Spanish.

So there’s a part of my head that’s reveling in urbanity, holding the contradictions in perfect balance, aesthetically appreciating all the things about the city: what’s different, what’s like I remember. And there’s a part of me that’s just: nope nope nope nope. [noptopus.gif] The part of me that’s acclimated to a smallish Cascadian city, I guess.

I’ve got another day or so in downtown LA before I relocate to Pasadena for the rest of the trip. We’ll see what that’s like. Downtown was always terra incognita to some extent: we came downtown for specific things, museums usually. (I’ve half a mind to make a trek out to the Natural History Museum.) But Pasadena/Altadena, that was HOME. You know those places where you can close your eyes and even though it’s been a decade or two decades, you can see them perfectly 3D in your head? That.

:deep breath:

flavors of svg

I’m in this one for Justin, mostly, and to see what modules and things we should be going with.

svg is just ridic cool.

inline svg — could that be added via embed entity (or whatever that’s called) — I hope I’m not getting too far ahead. TBH, this part is all about all the different methods of adding SVG to a page, nothing yet about Drupal specifically. (something called svg injector?) And I’m pretty sure Justin already has a preferred inclusion method. If I were on a regular computer, I’d go look at how the SVG for the logo is included.

oh, the media queries for showing different versions based on the sizing of the bounding box is quite fascinating. I wonder if he’s thought of that.

[look up jolly icons. those are cute.]

grunticon

oh wait he did like a whole day workshop on svg, yes? we’ll  have to compare notes.

also grumpicon (best for one-time use)

this svg sprites thing is what we were trying to do in Cascade?

I’m so glad I got to test-read Shelley’s book all those years ago. it gave me this great view into what was possible.

you can ctrl+c SVG from illustrator into a text editor.

still no Drupal mentions, except a quick mention of some navigation in a .tpl as markup, which I don’t think is what we’re after.

revisions everywhere

undoing delete?

problems with concurrent editing

the issue of distributed content generation

….

demo of a module for D8 — I’ve already forgotten the name. [nb: Multiversion]

tree showing split “revision tree” when editing in two sites that are supposed to be in sync.

[so is there a D7 contrib module that works like Cascade’s Recycle Bin? because we use that all the time.]

the speaker’s notable modules are UUID & Deploy? which I should probably look at both.

oh wow this gets complicated fast. and this might be going over my head a bit. :\

some in-session researching:

how does Deploy play nicely with Workbench Moderation? Does it?

for Recycle Bin like functionality: see Killfile?

this is all quite high-end (the advanced level was quite correct) but it’s fascinating.

{oh I just heard Greg.}

this question: ow my brain.

forward revisions? O.o — oh, like Scheduler, or Draft in Workbench Moderation.

Right now I feel like I’m gonna need a week with a whiteboard and a brand-new Drupal installation.