A nostalgia moment

Back when I was in grad school (that phrase makes me feel so old, as if the rest of this doesn't....), I was incredibly excited to get my first graphing calculator, a TI-81. It meant that someone could analyze graph behavior, or explore how changing different constants changed a graph, without all the tedious making of tables of values that were then transferred to grids, hopefully without too many mistakes. It meant so much more time could be spent on thinking, rather than mechanics. Freedom!

Fast forward to now-ish, when I realized that my beloved calculator is pretty much useless, since there are now online graphing utilities that are not only more powerful than the calculator mathematically, but also easier to share.

I continue my march towards dinosaur-hood.

Today, in process

the wholly underslept edition

I procrastinated on $Task, which at least got me to be a bit productive in other areas as I avoided what I knew I should work on. I finished spinning some yarn by hand, using the roving I'd gotten at least two NHC Retreats ago (read: over a year and a half). The drop spindle it's pictured on I wasn't really able to make work, so I was twisting fibers by hand. Unsurprisingly, the yarn is very variable width, far from uniform in twists per inch, but as a first attempt at something I've never tried before, I'm proud of it, and have to consider what I'll make with it. (Measuring how much it turned out to be would be useful here.) Added benefit: I used it as the first project for a three-month challenge event I've joined on Ravelry.
(The other useful task was clearing out a corner of my living room. Anyone not-me wouldn't notice the difference, but it's making me happy every time I look over there. I wonder how long that happy will take to wear off? And whether that bit of happy will translate into another area dealt with not too long from now.)

Coolest thing seen today: a moving curve of rainbow on my front door.
There's a skylight in the stairwell of my building (how I can see moonshadows some nights), which was covered in last week's snow storm, but now has partly cleared due to all the sunny days we've had. The sunlight seemed to be dancing through the ice or melted parts to my door, refracting as it came to tremble back and forth.

The yarn fairy came to visit! While I was on shift at the Asylum, the woman who coordinates the fiber arts meet-up came by with a huge bag of yarn she no longer wants (her default description: "I have enough yarn to sink a battleship.") for me to get first choice of. Some was ends of things, some random partial skeins, some full skeins with labels (which is useful to know what fibers I'm working in). I had a crochet hook with me and doodled some little end bits into a piece that may eventually become part of a jacket or blanket. Oh, and she brought one of those square zippered plastic cases that bed linens come in for me to pack it in to. I really like using them, because it's easier to see what's inside than some of my other options, and the smaller ones let me work on projects with the yarn at floor level, without the possibility of escapees.