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Archives
May 10, 2008
A Little Architecture About Town
I've changed how I walk to work slightly to avoid all the smokers on Market, and now I go by this site every day. This is the Contemporary Jewish Museum, designed by Daniel Liebskind. Wikipedia says it opened in 2007, but it seems remarkably difficult to get into it on account of how they are in the process of placing concrete to make the large plaza that will connect it to Yerba Buena Gardens. I'm not a big fan of cultural museums like this (I prefer science or art museums), so it hasn't occurred to me to visit before now.
The museum is on a pedestrian alley that connects Market St. to Mission, the location of Beard Papa (which is closed when I make my commute, so no temptation to stop and get a $2.25 cream puff every day, thank goodness) and some interesting water features. There are a few of these pedestrian alleys along Market and they are always interesting, although not always very alive. This one is more so because it has a few restaurants along it, and also it is wider than the usual ones.
This is one of the fountains, which are very subtle but look like a lot of work (see the mineral stains on the bottom there?). I like how they add the sound of moving water without having spouts of water shooting everywhere. In a windy area, spouts of shooting water always mean wet pedestrians.
On Wednesday, I got a different view, because a few of us went out to the UCSF Mission Bay campus to do a materials study (holding material samples up to the walls of existing buildings and photographing them for comparison). The building I'm working on is out there, and the client wants the colour scheme to fit with the neighboring buildings to reinforce the sense of campus. While we were there I took this photo, from the terrace on Genentech Hall looking downtown.
The campus is remarkably postmodern, which is not a great thing in my mind -- I think the whole pomo thing is going to look very dated in a very short time. Also, I think it tends to look a little sterile and contrived. Fortunately, most of the buildings have managed to avoid looking like they belong at Disneyland (Michael Graves designed much of Disney's corporate architecture).
UCSF Mission Bay is the research/technology campus (hence places like Genentech Hall) on the edge of a big redevelopment of Mission Bay into a biotech center. It's pretty ambitious on the part of the city, and it seems to be doing well so far.
Technorati Tags: architecture, san francisco
# Posted by ayse on 05/10/08 at 10:10 AM | Comments (0)
April 24, 2008
Smoking Section
I have a pretty posh commute by Bay Area standards. I get on a bus two blocks from home and twenty minutes later I walk eight blocks to the office. Not bad. Well, except that I walk that eight blocks down Market Street in San Francisco, and in spite of laws banning smoking not just in buildings but around doors -- which means that smoking on most of the sidewalks along Market is also banned -- the sidewlak is essentially one long smoking section.
And that would not be so horrible in itself, except of course it's an urban canyon, so wind goes up and down the street, blowing the smoke right in your face. Combine that with bus fumes, car exhaust, cleaning fluids, and homeless people, and downtown is not exactly a great place to breathe in. Not that I can, either, because cigarette smoke makes my chest tighten up and I end up walking down the street holding my breath. For eight blocks.
On the other hand, the exercise is nice, and it really wakes me up first thing in the morning to go for a brisk, airless walk into a strong headwind. And when you get over the fact that you are in a crowd of tourists All. The. Time, downtown is a pretty good place to work. Lots of good places to eat that aren't even too expensive, good public transit access, and if you want to go to Bloomie's during lunch it's right there. Much better than past jobs in corporate wastelands, or even a job in Jack London Square which would like to be a tourist trap but simply doesn't have anything to attract tourists.
# Posted by ayse on 04/24/08 at 9:24 AM | Comments (0)
April 19, 2008
Swallowtail Shawl: ARG
Yesterday Goldie had a freakout and ate my shawl. Oh, no, not all of it, but she bit a big hole in it in a really obvious place in the nupps, so it's not invisibly repairable. And I was six rows from the end.
Sometimes I just want to kill that dog.
Technorati Tags: crafts, dogs, knitting, lace
# Posted by ayse on 04/19/08 at 11:20 PM | Comments (0)
March 30, 2008
Swallowtail Shawl: Nupps Complete
This evening I got to the end of 20 rows of nupps. This was billed to me as being about 70 percent of the work on the Swallowtail Shawl, which it most definitely was not, in no small part because those nupps are in a sea of plain stockinette.
So here it is, now large enough that it can't be spread out on the needles I'm using (I guess I could swap out a larger cord, but I can't be bothered for only fifteen more rows of knitting).
Technorati Tags: crafts, knitting, lace
(more...)# Posted by ayse on 03/30/08 at 11:41 PM | Comments (1)
March 28, 2008
Swallowtail Shawl: Nupps
I've finished the ninth row of the first Lily of the Valley chart on the shawl. I took some time and practise yarn and worked on the dreaded nupps for a bit. Because of that practise, I am not finding the Lily of the Valley pattern very complicated at all. It's mostly knit and purl, and the nupps are pretty obvious, so I hardly need to look at the pattern at all. Certainly I don't need to be as detailed about where I am in the pattern as on the budding lace, where I was always getting lost and having to go backwards to refind my spot.
Technorati Tags: crafts, knitting, lace, nupps
(more...)# Posted by ayse on 03/28/08 at 2:28 PM | Comments (0)
March 22, 2008
Swallowtail Shawl: End of Budding Lace
I just finished the budding lace pattern on the Swallowtail shawl, after much reknitting. (This would be a better picture but Rosie was very interested in the goings-on on the floor and kept shoving her face in the camera.)
Now on to page 2 of the pattern. The part that's apparently difficult.
Technorati Tags: crafts, knitting, lace
# Posted by ayse on 03/22/08 at 10:32 PM | Comments (0)
March 21, 2008
Back to the Swallowtail
I recently went back to work on the Swallowtail Shawl, started over the summer even though it was patently obvious I would never have enough time to work on it when school restarted. I even underwent dramatic repairs to the completed portion, and then I was unhappy with the results and ripped it all out again.
I would probably make a lot more progress on this thing, a lot faster, if I were not such a perfectionist that messing up one stitch makes me rip back two or three repeats in frustration, or rip the whole thing out and restart. But lately I've been using lifelines to mark "known good" rows and thus control the extent of the ripping back, and that's made things much better (except for that one time when I managed to pull a bunch of stitches off the needle when putting in a lifeline, of course).
See:
I'm on repeat 11 of 14 for the "budding lace 2" pattern. Apparently it gets much harder from here on in. I made the mistake of going to read the knitalong blog the other day, in which we see many knitters either knitting this thing very quickly (I just don't have that much time to knit), or totally freaking out about fairly simple things.
And here are my lifelines. I'm using one really long piece of string back and forth for the lifelines, so it's easier to manage if I leave it in for previous rows until I need more string.
Technorati Tags: crafts, knitting, lace
# Posted by ayse on 03/21/08 at 1:41 PM | Comments (0)
March 14, 2008
An Evening with Temple Grandin
Last night Elaine and I went to see Temple Grandin talk at Las Positas College in Livermore. My main gripe with the talk was that it was held in the stupidest possible place for a talk: a gym, with a gym sound system. I could understand maybe half of every word Grandin said, which was pretty hard work. Next time try for an actual auditorium, guys.
Technorati Tags: brains
(more...)# Posted by ayse on 03/14/08 at 2:27 PM | Comments (0)
March 1, 2008
Yarn and Fiber
I bought a bunch of skeined yarn recently, at Stitches West. In theory, I could just take the yarn to the yarn store and sit and wind it there: they're usually pretty good about that at midday during the week when there's nobody there. But I'd been planning to try to build a swift, so that is how I spent this afternoon:
I call it the Sketchy Swift, because it's kind of sketchy. That's because the material I had on hand was some really horrible exterior-grade plywood left over from the foundation work. On the other hand, I spent $3 on a nice piece of lazy susan hardware (the only money I spent on this) so it rotates very nicely. I may rebuild the structure from nicer material at a later date. Maybe something that doesn't shatter when you drill holes in it.
Also, I may have lost my mind because I recently made a small purchase:
The last thing I need to do is pick up another hobby. Right? Well, we will see. Fortunately, spinning yarn is a pretty low-tech and cheap hobby if you want it to be.
Technorati Tags: spinning, yarn
# Posted by ayse on 03/01/08 at 6:47 PM | Comments (0)
February 16, 2008
Light-headed
This is how I started my day today:
I was facing a couple of hours of driving with that hair in my way and I couldn't stand it. It's a bit uneven now and I'll have to go get it cut, but I feel a lot better. That hair must be made of pure lead.
Technorati Tags: hair
# Posted by ayse on 02/16/08 at 4:38 PM | Comments (0)
