unbearably warm

Ah, Vienna. Vienna in the summer is hot and humid (except currently it's warm and humid and stormy and partially rainy) and the less said about it the better.

Kuro has flown the nest (or yard) and has done so apparently so successfully that s/he lost her/his parents. They came to our yard to look for her/him, but no Kuro. And after all the love and care we gave that bird ... tssss. Anyway, I'm sure Kuro is quite alright and while I hope that the parents don't drop another baby bird in our yard next spring, I'm also kind of curious to see if they'll do it again.

In the meantime, knitting. Yes, despite the heat. I just do it where or when it's cooler (the country, Starbucks, during rainstorms). I finally knitted something that for some reason I haven't knitted for myself until now. Legwarmers, that is. When I restarted my knitting, after the first bad experiments (did I talk about those yet?) I made legwarmers for my mother and for a neighbour ... but not for me. And I have suffered cold feet and cold ankles for many years and always thought "Gee, I knit, right? Why am I not knitting legwarmers for myself?"

Actually, considering I don't wear my woolen socks that often, why didn't I just knit legwarmers with the sock patterns? I guess sometimes I'm so set on FOLLOWING THE PLAN that I don't even see how a very small deviation from that plan can make everything so much better. I'm pretty good at deviating in general, but sometimes ... sometimes it doesn't happen until quite some time later.

So, the Spiralling legwarmers. And how they paid off already. At first I thought a rather involved pattern like the very pretty Unraveling Ribs Socks would be cool, but that required a whoooole lot of purling and chart reading and the yarn just didn't really like the pattern. Then I looked at the beautiful Sinusoida socks and fell in love. I actually love the slip-stitch fabric so much that I'm wondering where else I could use it.

The yarn is an older edition of Lana Grossa Meilenweit "Party" and is therefore a little scratchy. But when I saw the colors, I just had to have it, although looking at them now, the pictures are again much too blue. Damn that camera! I really like this combination and the pattern just mixed up the stripes beautifully. And I just need to weave in two more ends and cut off that one end ... finishing ... never one of my favorite activities.

Now I need to get back to work - the letters are almost almost almost transcribed, but due to very complicated circumstances I can't print out the last ones. And tomorrow I start doing historical research for the book project about the recipient and author of those letters.

Celebratory kitty!

what am i doing?

Recently I read another knitting blog that raised a lot of questions for me. What am I doing with my blog? What are my intentions with it? What am I showing and why am I showing it? How am I writing and why am I writing this way? What could I do differently? What does my blog say about me? When I started the blog, I intended to write "a knitting blog, although I guess I won't be able to keep out my opinions on movies, books, comics, music and other things out completely. A knitting blog that will hopefully not only cover the projects I'm working on, but also my thoughts on knitting, new patterns I've discovered, things that are going on in the knitting world and so on."

Ha! Considering the blog started to turn into THESIS BLOG in June 2010, it now seems a rather lofty goal. But up until then I had talked about my knitting, mostly, with a bit of music and anime thrown in for good change. And then I started with pictures of flowers. I worked so much in July 2010 that I had no time to knit and the computer broke and the thesis ... and I started illustrating my blog with pictures of Vienna and Scotland. Before going completely silent in September, I posted pictures from Switzerland, the Czech Republic and, once again, Vienna. Then I finally returned to blogging in February 2011, after I had finished the thesis and started posting pictures of the sky and the moon. And a few knitted items, too. Then, more pictures of flowers and of places I had been to - Hungary and Germany.

After reading the other knitblog, I'm now feeling uncomfortable with my pictures of flowers and earrings and the moon and the places I went to. I feel like I'm bragging. I feel like I'm being twee or posing as a hipster. I feel ... pretentious. The other knitblog had a lot of pictures of stuff - buttons, mugs, cloth, cutesy things. I thought of Bezzie and her views of another knitblog with beautiful (but extremely pretentious) pictures of knitting. I thought of all the other knitblogs I read - most of them feature either the knitter's life as it is or they feature lots of knitting. A very few - one or two - feature photography that I would call ... show-offy. A very few - one or maybe two - feature photographs of things other than knitting. I don't read the show-offy ones very often and I don't read the ones showing lots of cutesy stuff very often, either.

So why the heck did I post so many (pretentious, show-offy) pictures of flowers, the sky and the places I had been?  I mean, sheesh, for my travels, I actually have albums on facebook. Why here? I'm not even using the pictures to illustrate how certain colors of certain places INSPIRED me (caps because pretentious). My inspiration doesn't work that way. The rhododendrons in the last post made me think of underwear, not knitting. Maybe it's because I don't have a lot of confidence in my writing. The other blog was eloquent, if at times infuriating (because trite, wrong or pretentious, also some elements of the writing style got on my nerves very much). I feel like my posts aren't eloquent at all. I feel they're short and matter-of-fact and there's a lot of "-" and "...".

The knitblogs I like to read the most are eloquent and funny. And they make the daily life of their writers sound interesting. One of my favorite blogs doesn't even have pictures - or only very rarely. I don't trust my sense of humour to come across very well, it is weird, nerdy and obscure. My daily life isn't very interesting, either. I could rant away about the person playing saxophone in the other room (who is leaving in a few days, I'm glad to say) or about the lack of a shower curtain or the brothel or whatever it actually is (officially a swinger club/sauna ... yeah, right) in our house or the weird owner of the hotel in the house behind us who screams at people who put their trash in the trashcans because sometimes there are people who don't live in our house who deposit their trash in our trashcan, but while I love reading about such things on other blog, I, myself, don't feel like writing about them.

I could show you pictures of my room, of the flat I share with two other people, of the house and district I live in - but I'm shy about posting pictures of my own self and I wonder if my readers (I do have readers, the blog stats say so) actually would find it interesting to see where I live. I'm also afraid of looking pretentions in the way of "ooooo, look at me, I live in VIENNA in a house with JUGENDSTIL windows on the TOP FLOOR in one of the HIP DISTRICTS". But why did I post pictures of Vienna and other places I've visited, then? Nothing else to say or show, I guess. And the idea that a blog post without pictures is a bad blog post (I think I read that somewhere). Well, maybe I should take pictures of my chaotic room ...

Where is that line between pretentious and "oh look, I went here and saw this neat thing"? Where is the line between twee and "these are the buttons I'm going to use for this cardigan"? Showing you pictures of the two bowls that I got last week from a jumble sale - is that pretentious? After reading the other blog, I guess the answer is: yes. Showing you my grandmother's soup bowl that I use in place of a yarn bowl - that wouldn't be pretentious, I hope. It's not like it's a superduper expensive treasure or something. It's just a soup bowl.

But the other bowls aren't either. And they aren't even from the 19th century or anything. Googling has revealed that they must have been produced between 1939 and 1945 and inspection has revealed that I scratched the surface of one of the bowls during transport (bad porcelain, I must say). Showing you the earrings my mother gave me for my birthday - pretentious, I guess (really?). Is showing you the earrings that I recently bought from a place that sells cheap jewelry and repainted with nailpolish pretentious or a useful idea?

I do know that I feel jealous of bloggers who post pictures of the beautiful places they live in and the places they visit and the knick-knacks they own and the things they knit, always photographed against interesting backgrounds, in great clothes and neat shoes and headscarves and makeup. Actually, when I see the things they own, I want to own them, too. And I am jealous of their lives, too. Heck, I, too, would like somebody else to take pictures of me in my knitting in nice clothes and makeup in beautiful locations. I'd love to be married and have children, too. But I already have plenty of twee knick-knacks and buttons and live in a beautiful place and I have opportunities to go to beautiful places and knit beautiful things and I can take pictures of flowers and the moon and whatever else strikes my fancy. And marriage and children will come (hopefully). And why shouldn't I post these things on my blog? It's my blog, after all.

But I now feel just as pretentious as those bloggers. Displaying my privileged life and the stuff I own was not one of my intentions when I started this blog and now it's even less my intention. But it's so easy to hide behind beautiful pictures. It's easy to say "I went to Bonn and to the country and killed millions of dandelions" and not talk about the things that I should be doing (looking for a job, among other things). And damn, whining about the loss I feel after finishing my thesis is pretentious, too, which is why I haven't done it here.

I also find the pretentious blogs boring. There, I said it. Yes, buttons, yes, knitting, yes, whatever. I'm curious about your life, not your buttons. Well, I'm definitely a voyeur, heck, I see nothing wrong with what Jimmie Stewart did in Rear Window. But then, I am a historian, a professional voyeur of people's lives in the past. I'm immensely curious about the way people lived and continue to live (a convenient excuse), so I want to know how the knitbloggers live, too. Otherwise, show me your knitting and plenty of it.

But all this makes me wonder - what the heck should I write about on this blog then? Well, maybe I should write more about my knitting and take pictures of me in it, even if I'm not wearing makeup and the background is chaotic! I've also come to the conclusion that writing about knitting itself can be pretty pretentious, too, but still, I haven't done a post about "what knitting MEANS to me" yet. Maybe I should do that (don't worry, it won't be about CONNECTIONS or CONSUMERISM). Maybe I should just write what I want to write and show what I want to show and concentrate on my own life instead of looking at all the others and wondering why they seem to have it so much "other" than me. Of course other people lead different lives and write different blogs, duh.

Maybe it's time for a new job it totally is.

looking for signs of spring in Hungary


Yes, it's been a while since I posted. The stomach virus killed my motivation and energy to do anything but sit and knit. I do have some pictures and a whole post on my 250th project prepared, but let me share something else with you today. Yesterday my mother and I drove to Hungary to have another look at the Eszterháza palace built by the Esterhazy family in Fertöd, a couple of kilometers over the Hungarian border. Here's a Wikipedia link (in English). 

The picture above shows the garden side, I didn't take a picture of the front, because the courtyard is currently being renovated and that doesn't look too nice. As you can see above and from the Wiki link, it used to be painted in what is called "Schönbrunn yellow", after the Schönbrunn palace in Vienna, which is also yellow. In an early attempt of corporate branding, Emperor Joseph II. ordered all buildings erected by the state and the Habsburg family to be painted in that color and so it became fashionable to paint everything in that yellow.


However, Schönbrunn used to be painted pink and grey and so did Estzerháza and while Schönbrunn will probably never be pink and grey again, Estzerháza is being renovated to show its initial coloring, which suits it much better. The beautiful gardens - also reminiscent of Schönbrunn, but less extensive and without the hills, fountains and follies - are also in need of renovation. There's a dell that probably used to be a fountain and you can tell where there were extensive flowerbeds and broad gravel paths to walk on, but those are all overgrown with grass.




Left over are the beautiful yew trees. Those attracted my attention the first time around when we went there a year and a half ago or so.

Back then, the grass was bleached to a pale green, the sun was wintry and faded and the black-green yew trees made such a stark contrast ... I still wish I had taken my camera that time. Ah well, I'll go again to capture it. As it is, I like the yew trees even now - I could probably stay a whole day and take pictures every hour to see how the light and shadows change.



But we actually went there to look for signs of spring and to take in the sun. I am extremely fond of spring flowers and while Vienna is showing definite signs, in the areas North and West of the city spring usually progresses far more slowly, so South we went.

And I was right, the sun was hot and the gardens of Eszterháza were teeming with violets and other wildflowers, bugs, ants and birds. There were so many violets that you could actually smell them, a sweet, delicious smell. Driving to and from Fertöd, we could see plum and peach trees in bloom already.

Apart from having fun with my new tripod, I had no fun at all messing with my camera settings. The blues in the violets and in these tiny star-like flowers which are native to this part of Hungary and are called Scilla buekkensis nearly drove me to madness, both in the food setting set on red (made the greens far too golden) and the macro setting (old problem of not catching the blue correctly).

I wonder why my camera can take pictures of the blue sky without any troubles, but these intense and unique blues and violets make it go haywire. Maybe it's the ultraviolet component. There ought to be a bee setting. Still, I think these came out rather well. Now back to knitting (and baseball anime).

andy warhol knitwear

Last week I finally hit upon the setting which is probably most appropriate for taking pictures of knitwear. It's the "food" setting. The thing is, even though it has 12 megapixels and a billion gajillion settings and whatnot, my camera still can't pick up the nuances of colors. That lovely cowl up there (photographed in the most unimaginative manner) is a most beautiful shade of lavender mixed with blues and lilac and certainly 50% more beautiful than seen in this picture. Although this is the picture that portrays the color most accurately, the others were miserable failures.

This is a shot of my Tegami Bachi cowl made from the wonderfully soft and addictive Malabrigo Yarn Lace in "Violetas", food setting, reddest option, macro option. It's closest to the original shade, just like the shot of the whole cowl above (also food setting, reddest option). Seems my camera has the problem of turning everything too blue.

This is still food and macro setting, only a little less red. It's turning blue! Although there is really not too much blue in the yarn.

This is the default and apparently "neutral" setting. See how blue it is? How can this be? Is it the light? No direct sunlight at the time, no flash, everything should have yielded a "normal" shot.

Have a look at this! Food, macro and the first actually "blueish" setting. It's a whole new yarn, one apparently named "Antarctica" or something similar.

Finally, the bluest setting. It looks like an Andy Warhol print. I wonder what food actually looks like photographed with this setting. I guess I'll be testing that soon. But isn't it crazy? For comparison, the reddest setting right below.

No, it isn't photoshopped. It's just my camera! 

Some more examples. That's a view of the sunset taken from my window (forgive the reflection of the actual camera). Setting probably the generic "landscape", colors pretty accurate.

The same view, only with the "dusk" setting. Notice a pinkish tinge that wasn't actually there? That's actually the automatic "dusky" setting. Why?

A view of the night sky one day past the new moon. Notice a pinkish tinge? Yes, the "dusk setting".

And that's the "night" setting. More like the real thing, but apparently, it adds a bit of a greenish tinge. 

I wonder ... is it me? Is it my computer? Or is it the camera? I never had such problems with the old analog camera. Ok, I couldn't take pictures like this with the old analog camera. But even the old digital camera only had color problems with intense purples and pinks - seems like it's colors with an ultraviolet component that are the trouble. But I have lots of blue knitwear, the loveliest being my new Cartouche Fragment. Lots of variegation in that one, greens, blues, purples, grays - and my camera can't pick them up. I'm going to do a few more experiments. Maybe it really is the light in my room. And I guess further experiments as to the veracity of the "dusk", "sunset" and "night" settings are needed. But how annoying ...

And if you think I'm not still watching the news from Japan in horror ... every morning I don't want to get up because the news is worse every time. I hope when I wake up tomorrow, Japan is still there. A bit worse for wear, but without the nuclear catastrophe that seems to be on the horizon.

two of many






This winter I knit a large amount of cowls, scarves, shawls and other neckthings. Yesterday and today I attempted to take some pictures, but mostly failed, since the sunlight and my camera didn't like me. I'll try again after my final exam, maybe I'll be more relaxed then. 


The above picture and the one on the right belong to a neckthing - a scarf that can be buttoned up to make a large cowl or one that can be wrapped around the neck twice or used as a turban, armsling or whatever strikes your fancy. This is my own pattern, but I was inspired by the many similar ones out there and by the Shippo scarf from the book Scarf Style. Due to the colors, I gave it the rather dramatic name Smouldering Storm. Yes, I have a thing for dramatically named things.

The yarn is Rowan Summer Tweed, 70% silk, 30% cotton, full of weird plant bits. I suspect Rowan of deliberately spinning in the plant bits to give it a "rustic" feel. I hate weird plant bits in my yarn. And then the buttons! Sewing on nine buttons ... I don't know what came over me.

This one is the Boneyard Shawl, dubbed Le temps des cerises, because drama. It's remarkably difficult to take pictures of yourself without a tripod, which is why in the far-off future, I will have a tripod of my own.

The yarn I used is Lana Grossa Biosoja, a sleek but soft mix of cotton, bamboo and soy. The yarn itself is a knitted tube, so when it snags, which it does frequently, it's impossible to put the snag back where it came from - annoying. Still, my favorite shawlette of this winter.

The leftovers have been turned into something I called "Little Ripple", which has refused to be photographed. Maybe I'll just have to bundle up all my knitwear, take a friend and have a photo session somewhere.

So far, so good. Studying for the final exam is still going on, only 4 more days and I'll be a bona fide historian with a title (kind of scary). I'll try to relax by looking at the moon ...

too quiet here

Yes. Suspiciously quiet. That's because work on the thesis has ground to a halt. All my anxieties have not been miraculously healed, after all. I shouldn't have expected them to be gone just like that. The idea of finishing my degree after about 10 years of studying has created all kinds of sad and anxious feelings. Going out into the world! Finding a job and a place where they'll pay me to write a dissertation! No more classes! No more student jobs! Something to look forward to - scary as hell at the same time.

I'm still scared, but I decided to accept it. It's okay to be scared, that feeling won't go away for a while, so I might as well finish writing. I finally went outside again today after staying in my cave for the last three days and it's been ok. Maybe I was just waiting for the rain - strangely, right now I prefer going outside in the rain.

I also had a dream, haven't been dreaming in a while what with my screwed-up sleep schedule and it told me that things will be ok. I dreamt that we were still clearing out the old flat (my father's flat where I lived for +20 years) and we got in a whole lot of furniture, beautiful furniture. I was going through my two rooms, thinking about where I would put it all, rearranging everything in my mind. Then the dream changed, I was walking with my mother, crossing a street in Vienna with cars and streetcars (weird, because I avoid jaywalking whenever I can) and there were people singing a stupid song on the streetcar. The streetcar had a handwritten label "EMO" - apparently, people got on the streetcar to sing emo songs? The dream changed again and my mother and I were in Edinburgh and people on the street were singing a sea shanty and we discussed how different those two cultures were and how much better it was to sing a sea shanty than some stupid song. That's when I woke up, remembered that I didn't have to clear out the flat anymore, that I had no space for furniture (no matter how beautiful it is), that I want to go to Scotland and I felt a lot better about everything. (To be fair, I also talked with one of my best friends about my anxiety and had a little "say goodbye to uni" ceremony.)

Instead of writing I have been knitting. Finally. It felt really good to get back to something that I'm actually good at, something tangible, something beautiful, a kind of work that lets me see its quality right from the start. Writing into the void with a bare minimum of feedback is hard for approval-seeking me, although writing a blog isn't all that different, except nobody grades it and you don't get a degree for bloggery.

Where is the evidence that I've been knitting, you ask? Oh well, on Ravelry. I have taken no pictures yet, because that would mean having to figure out how to get the card into the new laptop and I don't quite know how to do that. I *could* possibly get the camera usb cable from the box that is over at my mother's. But I don't feel like taking pictures right now. So you'll have to keep looking at my other pictures. It's all part of an evil plan. Now it's back to work on that thesis of mine.

it's getting very near the end

Last weekend there was a much-needed break with *nothing* happening, except light cleaning and baseball anime which would have lead to the thesis being completely abandoned, if the main character hadn't put me off at the end of the second season - Goro you moron, you can't leave Toshi alone! (not a link to second season - that's the 6th season there, wait a minute, there is no Toshi in the 6th season ... nooooooooooooo!).

Bishies and baseball, a deadly combination to the anime nerd academic. Now I'm back to the grindstone and my thoughts are finally starting to work again, the quotations are starting to turn into pieces of text and the end can't be that far off.

The best thing that has happened is knitting - finally. I almost forgot how nice it is to watch something and knit or go someplace and take the knitting along with you to pass the time. I'm working on a little cowl with some of the reward yarn I got this summer. But no pictures yet, because I'd first have to figure out how to get the card into the computer (or look for the cable).

Znaim/Znojmo in the Czech Republic.

And today my mother and I made a little run to Ikea, because Ikea has these lap cushions with a hard plastic surface for laptops. Genius! Especially since my touchpad is a touch too touchy for precise work, so I need my mouse. Now I can finally write with my computer on my lap and my mouse by its side - I'm sure the thesis will grow much faster. The other thing I really needed was a breakfast bowl of my own. Now I have one. And then there are always some things that you want and kind of need - new, colorful bedclothes, a new large cushion for the couch, a little plastic set thing for the couch table ... but I did not get the measuring cups, because my old ones are better.

Fotographed straight down

I hope this will be one of the last thesis posts ... I've finally recovered from the "so tired of my thesis" part, but I still want it to be over and done with. Which means - back to work, I guess!

headlong pitch into another world

I'm still writing. Currently I'm on another section that just needs a lot of compilation and I have to finish working with this one book, because I have to return it tomorrow, so I am slowly sucking it dry of information and then will go over all my written parts again to see if I have missed a place where I wanted to insert some information from that book. I'm also waiting for my mother to return for a day. I've cleaned and swept and vacuumed and done all the dishes.

Last week I fell into the folk pit on youtube. I love folk music and its many different qualities. I happened across a couple of especially hypnotic songs and my brain has already picked up the easier ones. I guess it needed a break from writing. But now I'm back on it, even though I am extremely unwilling. Gritting teeth and bearing it as we speak, though.

Pictures courtesy of a beautiful expedition with my Scottish History class back in the spring of 2007. Uppermost is the garden of Falkland Palace in Falkland, Fife, then there's a window in Linlithgow Palace and lastly a tree in the vicinity of Rosslyn Chapel. I'll just leave you with the song that is gently inspiring me today, it fits perfectly with the rain and the cold: Sadly, the video was taken off youtube, but if you ever should find a recording or video of Dick Gaughan singing the "51st (Highland) Division's Farewell to Sicily", give it a listen.

coming up on week three

It's the third week of thesis writing - or maybe the fourth already. For a historian, I'm really forgetful about things that happen in my life and I can actually make myself forget them, too, leaving more space for "real" history. But it is a fact that this is the third week of me cooped up inside, unable to meet with friends, unable to move around much, unable to do anything without strong feelings of guilt.

Oh well. It will also be the last week, if I have anything to say about it (and unfortunately, I am the only one who has anything to say about it).

Today it's yet another trip to the library (ha, and I thought last Monday was the last one), two libraries actually, just to make sure that I haven't got too many second-hand citations in my text. My friend V. is bringing me another book from Linz on the weekend and I am milking the internet (JSTOR and Google books) for all it's got. Without the internet, I could chuck the whole thing, anyway. I'm really looking forward to the day, when I can have access to all the texts I need without having to pay large sums of money. Just to illustrate: to borrow a book from the Munich University Library via the Vienna University Library, it costs 14,90 Euros. I don't know if it costs that much per book (one would hope not), but even if it doesn't, that's just too much.

Working on the thesis, I'm going back and forth between "so bored!" and "ooh, fun!" It's a very strange life. The myth of the scientist needing absolute quiet in her (more often his) room and lots of service is a little truer than I thought. I also see why my dad always did his writing in the night, which I do, too, but it's starting to wear on me. Work gets done, though, even if I'm not generating text. Yesterday (or actually today at 1am) I finally whipped all my footnotes in shape.

Time to hit the libraries. Gratuitous Scotland pictures taken at the beach in North Berwick and at Tantallon Castle. I'm leaving you with a hypnotic song by the great Karine Polwart, which I've already learned how to sing, seeing as it's so simple.

new laser new luck

Or, how I held the world to ransom over a million billion dollars and bought a new laptop. It is very sleek and shiny and fast and pretty. Have I written anything on it yet? Yes, a little. Tomorrow I shall write more. Actually, I have some handwritten pages which I really should type in, but I need to do a couple of tests first to see how I can use the laptop *and* the mouse in bed first, because the touchpad is annoying me very much. It does do some rather nice tricks such as bluetooth, so I connected it to my cellphone and got three years' worth of pictures off of it. Pictures such as this:

It's the Natural History Museum, some time in early spring, I think, and one of my favorite times of the day. My fun internship is sadly over, but it was a lot of fun and I've returned twice to use their scanner and their airconditioning. I might head over next week to write, but it depends on the weather. The second job is still ticking along somewhat, but finally winding down as well.

That's between the Natural History Museum and the Art History Museum, it's a statue of Empress Maria Theresia, mother of Marie Antoinette. She also birthed 15 or 16 other children. I just liked the sky and the contrast.

That's the back end of the Belvedere with a rather awesome cloud above it, taken two or so weeks ago. Anyway, there has been some knitting going on to relax my head, a summer scarf as a birthday present for my mother and some work on Herzblut, but now work on Herzblut is stalled, because the second ball of yarn is in the other apartment. I shouldn't put too much work into Herzblut right now, anyway, since the paper needs to be done done done.

That's Schwarzenbergplatz, which I used to go by with the D tram every morning, but this picture is actually three years old. Finally, I found what I want to write on the Moon. It is a quote from Dorothy L. Sayers' novel Gaudy Night and I think it should be quoted to every female scholar. Harriet Vane, the protagonist in this novel (usually the main protagonist is Lord Peter Wimsey) is anxious about meeting all her old university friends again, because a lot of things happened in the books before this one and calms herself by thinking about her achievements. "They can't take this away, at any rate. Whatever I may have done since, this remains. Scholar; Master of Arts; Domina; Senior Member of this University (statutum est quod Juniores Senioribus debitam et congruam reverentiam tum in privato tum in publico exhibeant); a place achieved, inalienable, worthy of reverence. " The Latin bit says: "It is decreed that Juniors will show to Seniors appropriate and fitting respect both in public and private." (not my translation).

It's long, but it will fit on the moon, I'm sure. Otherwise I'll just write the citation and people will have to look it up.

stars and flowers

I'm at 39 pages and need to convince myself to get to 40 today. It's the last week before I start an internship at a library, which I'm looking forward to, but there are lots of things that I have to do this week, because next week I'll be on standard work time for the first time in a few years (2006 actually) and there are some things that can only be done in the mornings in Vienna, such as visits to the university offices to straighten out all the red tape hoops - or would that be red tape skipping ropes? - that I need to jump through to get my thesis on the official tracks. I hate red tape. Thank goodness my mental directions finally reached the history department and they put together something of a checklist, which looks fierce and dreary. So tomorrow I shall gather alllllllll my university papers and on Wednesday I'll go visit the hopefully nice people at the student service office to ask them what papers, signatures and whatnots I'll still need.

Gee, that was a lot of text! Would that my thesis would grow whilst I blog. But let's talk about flowers. I love flowers. I love taking pictures of flowers. And if my dinky little camera from 2004 was a little better at taking pictures of particularly vibrant flowers, I'd be overjoyed. It still takes pretty good pictures of roses, though. To wit:

That's my favorite rose in the whole garden. New Dawn. A climbing rose with a wonderful, not too overpowering smell and it blooms from May to September. Then there's Constance (Constance Spry), who after a few years of growing without any blossoms is now always full of them:

It's no wonder that roses would also inspire my knitting. I made up this Rose Mitten pattern on the go with a chart I found somewhere, the curlicues are part of a fairisle design. The yarn is Lana Grossa Mood Print, which is soft and squishy with a little silk to make it extra-nice. I finished these in September 2009 and haven't even woven in the ends yet ... tsk. Maybe in September 2010 so I can wear them.

Here's the palm ...

The thumbs are a bit of a weak point, design-wise, but overall, I'm pleased. Apart from the roses there are plenty of other flowers in that garden. Like peonies, which I also love very, very much. The light pink ones actually have a bit of a minty smell.

And an intriguing visitor ...

Here's the darker variety of peonies. Funnily, when I was searching for project pictures, I came across pictures of these same peonies and roses that I had taken in May 2008. I'm really glad these flowers decide to delight us again every spring. To be honest, I'd love to plant even more roses and peonies and all kinds of beautiful flowers, since they mostly take care of themselves, unlike vegetables.

Strangely, even though I love flowers so much, I don't actually have many knitted items that use an explicit flower design. I have a few with leaf lace, but flowers, not so much. This is one of the few items, the Plum Blossom mittens - frogged, sadly, because the yarn needs smaller needles. But I have the yarn still and will remake them at some point. I love the design of these so much and there are so many things you can do with the idea. The yarn is Lana Grossa Baby Alpaca, soft and lovely, but not very stretchy, hence the need for smaller needles.

In that garden, there's also a tree that my mother calls Japanese Lilac. I have no idea. It's from the botanical garden in Frankfurt, planted probably a hundred or so years ago, since it's rather large. This year the spring was so cold that it's blooming only now and the bees are all over it and making a lot of noise.

Funnily, the bees entirely avoided the following plant, I have no idea what it's called in English, we call it jasmine, but it isn't jasmine (I know, I have real jasmine here in Vienna).

I made a yellow spot on the kitty's forehead with that pollen. I like doing that, since all cats are yogis and he looks cute like that. Too bad I didn't take his picture. Overall, this blog really does lack cat pictures, I must say. Like the bees, I have avoided the following project. It's crocheted and actually very simple to make. I only made it because it looks like a flower. And I made it in those colors, because they were available, I have no excuse, really. Never wore it. Still love it. Just don't know what to do with it. The Chrysanthemum Tea Shawl by Doris Chan has been redesigned by her into a skirt as well, so maybe I'll try my hand at that at some point in a different color.

Now I'm definitely more in the mood to write. The star that I mentioned in the title is the evening star. I've been watching it every evening since the weather has cleared up. I know it's actually a planet, Venus to be correct, but it's still my favorite.