Last year, I went to the “King’s Brunch” at St. Olaf College, and they served an awesome fish chowder. I still remember how I could have gone back for thirds (yes, I had seconds) and maybe could have eaten nothing but the soup for the entire meal. A few weeks ago, it was cold enough to be soup weather. I thought it would be worth cloning the chowder – and it worked out pretty well!

This recipe makes about 8 servings.

4 slices bacon
3 ribs celery
2 carrots
1/2 large onion
3 cloves garlic
3 T butter
1/4 c flour
3 c skim milk
1 c clam juice
2 large potatoes
1 tsp thyme – dried
1/2 tsp black pepper – fresh cracked
2 tsp parsley – dried (more if fresh)
2 1/4 c corn – frozen
8 oz salmon – skin removed, cut into bite-size pieces

Chop celery, carrots, onion, and potatoes into small dice. Mince garlic. Cook bacon until crispy, drain fat. In residual bacon grease, saute celery, carrots, onion, and garlic. Add a little water as needed, cook until crisp-tender, remove from pan. Melt butter, stir in flour to form a roux, begin adding milk slowly while whisking constantly to prevent lumps. Add milk until a thick soup base is achieved. Add clam juice (and water as needed, to increase volume and to decrease saltiness). Return vegetables to the pot, add potatoes, thyme, pepper, and parsley. Cook at a low simmer until potatoes are nearly soft. Add corn and salmon, heat until salmon flakes and corn is warmed throughout. Serve immediately.

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In other news, I reached a personal milestone at the end of March:

If you can’t see the gilt text, it says “1 Gal.” I am AB positive, which frankly makes me a fairly lousy donor (can donate only to other AB positive people, which is ~3% of the general population), but Mayo has enough patients coming through the door and can use all donations. One of the techs told me that our hospitals routinely buy up to 50% of the blood from other sources, the volunteers cannot come even close to meeting the level of demand.

I know I have a few biology and other science PhDs who read my site, so I thought I’d post a job ad. My department is seeking a new full-time editor (a colleague is retiring). The ad is here.

Yesterday was my 2-year job anniversary. We didn’t do anything special to celebrate, but I recently was thinking about how much I love this work and how perfectly it suits me. I read an article at CNN Money a few weeks ago, and the bit at the end (quoted below) could have been me talking. I even emailed it to Matt and told him that I was “prototypically happy.”

People who are most satisfied with their jobs have found work that is challenging but not impossible, that offers a degree of autonomy (from being able to put a couch in their office to having some freedom with their hours) and that involves a task in which they can sometimes get so immersed that they forget to eat, check e-mail or even go to the bathroom. It’s unrealistic to expect such immersion every day, but those who find it from time to time are significantly happier.

I don’t “dis” the work that I used to do because it is a good, meaningful job to perform (in fact, I am a little nostalgic about it sometimes), but I know that trading in the pipettes for the pencils was the right move for me. If you think that it might be the right move for you, too, please drop me a note, and we can talk privately.

I thought I had spun and plied all the yarn that I needed to finish the Peacock Feathers shawl.

That’s approximately 30 g of yarn.

This photo was taken before Charlie Cat discovered the yarn drying on the rack in the bathroom and chewed the 1 continuous thread in about 12 places. (Why, Charlie, why?!? Yes, he’s fine. It doesn’t look like he ate any of it – just gnawed until the threads broke.) Some pieces are a few yards long. Other pieces weigh as much as 10 or 12 g.

I may still have enough to complete the shawl. I am midway through the final chart and have only ~10,000 stitches to go. Just in case it’s not enough yarn, I have another 2 cops of singles to ply.

I heard a surprising quote on the radio the other day – approximately 30% of US taxpayers are neglecting to get the 1-time telephone excise tax refund. That’s crazyland, peoples! When the government is offering a refund to EVERYONE who has had a phone (land line, cell, doesn’t matter), you darn well ought to get your $30 to $60 back.

After reading that it was possible to get considerably more if I opted to go through my old bills, I had to give it a shot. I am very weird about my finances – I keep all documents relating to money forever (I still have pay stubs dating back to my undergraduate years), and at the beginning of every year, I sort the previous year’s bills by topic (eg, gas, electric, credit card, etc) and by date before I pack them up for storage. I don’t know why I feel compelled to do this, but I do, and so it was a simple matter to locate the relevant bills and see how much of my money I could get back.

I went to the basement and found the files:

I picked out the phone bills from the rest of the year’s payments:

And we calculated that our refund was worth more than $80! (With the standard credit, we would have qualified for only $40.) It was sort of funny – the tax amount per bill was between $0.60 and $1.25, and as I was adding them up, Matt kept saying, “Is this really worth your time?” Well, I got it all squared away in 30 minutes, so – yeah, it was.

Seriously, though – if you haven’t yet, I urge you to claim that credit in your tax return. If you’re getting a refund this year, even the minimum standard amount is enough to buy, say, the new Interweave sock book and a 100-g ball of sock yarn.

Yesterday, some of you asked what was the purpose of a fat-core bobbin. If you have filled a bobbin while wheel spinning, you may have noticed that you needed to decrease the take-up tension when the bobbin was empty and increase as the bobbin filled. If you try to spin laceweight on an empty bobbin, you may find that your wheel has no middle ground between zero take up and yanking yarn out of your hand.

A fat-core bobbin gives a spinner an edge over controlling tension, and, in my experience, using one makes it is easier to achieve a “just right” amount of take up. Performance-wise, I know of no difference between a fat-core bobbin and a regular bobbin that is half full of yarn, but in the interests of keeping projects straight, my organization mindset reacts better to a 1-bobbin-per-project scheme.

Others have suggested using foam pipe insulation (see here; scroll to the second picture) to bulk up bobbin cores. That will be adequate in a pinch; however, the balance will be off and the flyer will rattle unless you cut a second piece to fit precisely into the slit area. Also, you need to avoid using the first and last flyer hooks because the yarn may fall into the abyss between the edge of the foam and the edge of the bobbin and develop deadly tangles.

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In other news, I’ve been playing with my square spindle.

I have a sample of Shetland roving (oatmeal color, ~4 oz) that ultimately will become a 2-ply jumperweight yarn.

I know you’ve never seen this before:

Fat-core bobbin, custom made for my wheel

Let me tell you this wonderful story. When I ordered my Drudik wheel in 2000, I tried to time it such that the wheel delivery would roughly coincide with the anticipated completion of my doctorate (a congratulatory gift to myself, as it were). I figured the money situation would be tight with me fresh out of school, so I ordered only the minimal number of bobbins and passed up the lazy kate. I typically used storage bobbins anyway, so it wasn’t a big deal. However, after we had loosened our grip on the discretionary spending wallet, I tried to order more bobbins (someone scared me by asking what I would do if, say, a visiting kid broke one), but MD had so much other stuff on his plate that my request was probably shuffled to the bottom of the stack.

In January, Theresa emailed to say that she’d noticed I had left a comment on Franklin’s ‘blog wishing out loud for more bobbins, and would I like to talk with her dad, a retired-engineer-cum-woodworker-extraordinaire who could probably make me some awesome new bobbins?

Yah, you betcha I would!

Working with Jim W was an all-around fantastic experience. Anyone who knows me even a little knows that I have a wide streak of technical geekery that makes me relatively hard to please because I can spot imperfections in nearly everything (really, I can’t help it), plus I’m a control freak communication fanatic who wants to know exactly what is going on all the time. Jim said that as an engineer, he appreciated where I was coming from, and we had a good understanding from the very beginning.

We agreed on the price and started the project. It began with me sending photos, descriptions, and a sample bobbin. He sent back photos, a test bobbin, and a micrometer to take measurements. We discussed wood types, finishes, what additional photos that I needed to send, etc. He regularly e-mailed progress updates. Eventually, we decided that I needed to send the entire maiden to him to truly perfect the new bobbins. (Thank the FSM that nothing was damaged or lost by the postal service.) From start to finish, it took about 2 months, although honestly, most of that time was because I was super slow to send photos and stuff.

I ended up getting 4 regular bobbins (in matching myrtlewood) and 2 fat-core bobbins (“found” cherry; 1 not shown here). They all work superbly with the wheel. I think that this kind of project posed unique challenges – essentially, I was asking Jim to duplicate another artist’s work, and I needed the bobbins to work seamlessly with a product that was handmade and designed by a stranger. As knitters, we often have trouble matching a designer’s gauge. As spinners, most of us have some degree of difficulty matching the grist we spun last week. I can’t imagine that it’s a simple straightforward thing to copy a wheelwright’s bobbins.

Jim did a really great job. The bobbins are beautiful to look at and feel wonderful in the hand. He exceeded my expectations, in fact. (I particularly appreciated the regular e-mails. Not to generalize too much, but other men are not so good with the communication.) I’m especially excited about the fat-core bobbins, they prompt me to dream about many lace projects.

Thanks again to Theresa for introducing me to her dad! I recommend his work highly and without a single reservation.

I’m a horrible joiner, not a knitalonger, and a lousy participant in group efforts.

However, I did put a feeble effort toward interacting with the folks who challenged themselves to do 100 miles of exercise between Jan 1 and Apr 1 this year. I was proud to participate with all of you.

I only logged miles that I walked on a treadmill (no incline, speed of 1-1.5 mph), so I guess I can’t quite say that I ran the distance, but it turned out to be 195.2 miles in all.

Congratulations to everyone who participated.

Can you stand it?

This muffin had real live kernels of corn mixed into the batter.

Recipe is here. Peabody gets a much better crown on her muffins than I do – I don’t know why mine are so flat. (I recently bought new baking powder and I swear I didn’t overmix.)

In my experience, this muffin is the only baked item that tastes good after a quick blast of microwave energy. The recipe calls for a fairly high amount of oil, which preserved them for 3 or 4 days at room temp and probably prevented them from drying out in the microwave. Although the muffins were sort of heavy, I liked them. Matt didn’t like them. (Surprise…) He said the feel of corn in his mouth made him think of grubs.

So I ran out of yarn while knitting my Fir Cone Shawl, and I attempted to spin new yarn that matched the old stuff.

I surprised even myself with these results. I spun the original yarn about 7 years ago, when I was a total yarnmaking neophyte. As you might guess, the plies were underspun and somewhat uneven, and the final yarn was somewhat underplied. It is not how I spin today. Yet I was able to go back in time and channel my inner newbie. See for yourself – pink is the old yarn, white is the new.

Hmf.