Geeky combinations

Still no headway with Herman. Even though I feed him every day and bring him various presents we're still barely acquaintences. *sigh* I've even started to try and make sure the presents are old bits of clothing so that he can get used to my scent (that sounds weird doesn't it?). As of today I'm going to start just spending more time in the room with him. It's hard now that he's not in our living room! I think I missed the alpha rat boat when he bit me the first time and I just got upset. A little pathetic really on my part, but I felt really betrayed by our little Hermoine when it happened because we were good friends and he used to just climb out of the cage and into my hands. Then puberty hit and the hormones took over and our friendship was strained. I've never had this problem with larger animals. Dogs, cats, cows and even goats have been easier to gain the affection of and understand. Yet I am so totally lost at how to win the friendship of a rat. Go figure.

The knitting and crocheting goes well though. I learnt a wonderful new technique which is foundationless double crochet (US terms). In a nutshell, in case anyone cares, it's a method of starting your work where you don't need to work a foundation chain before starting. You do it at the same time as your first double crochet row. Much more efficient in my opinion. That and I hate crocheting into a foundation chain.

So far I've made a capelet and I've almost finished my decorative belt. Just miscalculated on the yarn so I'm going to have to sneak out of the house to Lincraft before Gene gets home. He took the car so I have to wait for Mum. Shhh... don't tell Gene. I also want to pick up some more yarn to make Gene a Linux Scarf. It's geeky but not too crazily geeky. It uses a technique called illusion knitting which means that you can only see the image at certain angles. So this scarf will just look like a normal striped scarf except at certain angles you can see the Linux penguin. Très cool! I've been having lots of fun over the last couple of days trawling the Internet with Mum for new patterns and inspriations. It's great to have someone else who's excited about geeky knitting & crochet stuff.

Also helps that she's willing to watch sci-fi with me. We ended up watching Startrek: Next Generation last night (the one where Picard's the arbitor for the installation of the next Klingon leader). We drew the line at the original series though. I still can't quite bring myself to watch that. I did watch the Trouble with Tribbles episode (or at least that's what I think it's called) which was great with all the furry rocks and all. Gene's insisting that now I've seen that I need to watch the DS9 episode where they go back to that episode. Sounds like a plan!

I've almost finished reading Gloriana
by Michael Moorcock. It really shouldn't have taken me this long to read it but I got distracted by my geeky obsessions. Well worth a read if anyone wants to borrow it. Kind of like Gormenghast but kinkier and a bit lighter. I think I'll start on Mother London next.

Tonight I'm meant to be catching up with Nick and Claire but as no details have filtered back to me yet, that still t.b.c. Gene's planning on making rice paper rolls for dinner so I should start getting together a list of what I need to buy at the supermarket so we don't have a repeat of my last supermarket outing.

Happy birthday Naomi (from Gene & Herman too)!