Rent Control

Because I gave notice on an allowed date, the company that owns my building is now looking for the next renter. They asked for specific dates and times when I could show it, so I was hoping we could do the open house style on just one or two evenings. Instead they opted for having individual renters call me to set up individual times to come see the place. This is more hassle for me--more phone calls (my absolute least favorite thing to do here), more of my time wasted. One person called and we set up a time, then she called an hour before she was supposed to arrive and wanted to reschedule for the next day. Grrr. She finally showed up yesterday and as soon as she walked in I could see she wanted to leave (and she did 3 minutes later). Turns out they told her the rent would be 1200 CHF (about $1200). This is a 25 m² (250 square feet) apartment on one of the busiest streets in Zurich in a relatively dumpy (by Swiss standards) building. My rent is 841 CHF (about $841). I was already annoyed that it had gone up from 776 CHF in April (I know landlords raise rent, but why wait 2.5 years and then hike it all at once?). I'm glad I decided to give notice when I could walk away--if I had to find a follow-on tenant, I would be really stressed about trying to lie and sell the place, whereas now I can just be honest!

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This blog post about the psychology of dealing with climate change (or not, as the case may be) and some more general thoughts about risk assessment psychology is interesting. I especially liked "The science of human behavior, particularly the psychology of risk perception, robustly shows that we use two systems to make judgments about risk; reason and affect, facts and feelings. It is simply naïve to disregard this inescapable truth and presume that reason and intellect alone will carry the day. That’s just not how the human animal behaves." This reminds me of something I consider to be a fundamental flaw of traditional economics: the idea of the rational actor as the basis for the entire economy.

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I've been spinning a lot. I dyed a bunch of wool this winter, but I hadn't been spinning so much because my back always hurts after sitting all day. So I've been planning to sell my wheel before I move, but I just couldn't let go of all the wool I dyed! So I've been spinning in 10 minute spurts (one little ball of prepped wool), and it's going ok. I'm surprised at how much I can get done! Of course, now that I'm seeing results, I'm second guessing my decision to sell the wheel. Argh!

Recent yarn I've spun. The red yarn was spun in April, knit into bad, thick socks, and frogged.

One batch (the rusty stuff on the left) was so pretty I couldn't bring myself to ply it--I knew the colors would just kind of muddy out. So I've been dreaming up patterns that would look ok using energized singles which bias like mad. I was thinking of a tank top knit in the round--the leaning stitches would just add textural interest! However, when I finally skeined them up, I realized something about my spinning: my singles don't have much "energy" (twist). They hardly coil up on themselves. This explains why my plied yarn is never very plied--the whole idea behind plying is that twisting two yarns together in the opposite direction from how they were spun means that the over-twist in the singles untwists in a way that makes the ply tighter. Balance is achieved. Instead, I have these barely twisted singles, which turn into two strands that are more like neighbors than plies.

Rust colored singles without much twist

Blue and red yarn--note how the plies are barely plied in the red yarn!

I've also been working away on my bog jacket. I worked up the back and sides (the bottom part with the fold/phoney seams), then added extra stitches for the arms. I put in the red racing stripe at the neck/shoulder/top of arms, and now just reached the neck. The front shoulders/arms are worked separately--I've started on one side. I might rejoin the fronts when I get back to the long-color-change yarn because I would prefer the stripes to be the same on both sides. That means steeking the front top. I've had some bad steeking experiences---no disasters, but just a lot of hassle and not being so thrilled with the results. I stumbled across some advice recently about not steeking heavy weight yarns, and suddenly my past troubles made a lot more sense--yes, dealing with tons of bulky ends does add a lot of bulk to the steek opening! Since this yarn is pretty fine, I think it would go better. I'm trying to figure out crochet steeking on a little test square--no ends to weave in, or so I'm told! And this is definitely the yarn for that--it's super grabby. When I dropped the stitches for the phoney seams, I had to hand tug apart the stitch in every row! In fact, I could probably just cut without securing the steek at all...

Bog jacket up to the neck split

How's your binocular vision?

I have been getting a lot of eyestrain headaches lately from working on the computer all day. This is incredibly bad timing as the big push to write my thesis has just begun (no doubt the stress of that is compounding the eyestrain...). Last month I went to see an optician to get checked for some middle-range computer glasses. She spent an hour testing my vision and apparently I "failed" some of the tests because at the end she said I needed to see a specialist.

A month passed waiting for the appointment. I had a headache on all but two days of it.

Yesterday I finally saw the specialist who spent 2 (two!) hours testing my vision. It was interesting--at least an hour was spent with a red filter over one eye and a green filter over the other to see how my binocular vision was. Turns out my eyes don't "play well with others" and it seems I have some convergence insufficiency. The second bulleted list under "symptoms" at that description is a disturbingly accurate description of me. I wound up quitting a tee-ball team in frustration after a year because I couldn't hit the ball. Yeah, the ball that wasn't moving? I still couldn't connect the bat to it. I've also been terrified my whole adult life of passing cars on undivided highways--I can't judge very well how fast the oncoming cars are moving and thus whether I have time to pass. I've always known that I see pretty much only with my left eye. When I have to use the right eye for some reason, it feels as strange as trying to write with your non-dominant hand. You can test your own binocular vision here. When I do that test I see just one thumb/eye.

I'm not entirely sure how "handicrafts" slipped into my life, although I'm actually a pretty crappy knitter from a technical point of view--my stitches are sloppy and I am constantly splitting yarn or popping stitches off the needle or "air knitting" (missing the stitch entirely). I'm also really good at correcting mistakes! It's the same as how everyone who hears me type thinks I'm a really fast typist because there are tons of keystroke sounds. They don't realize 70% of them are backspace...

I see yet another specialist next week to discuss whether I want to do some "eye PT". This training tends to turn up on quackwatch type sites because it tends to get overpromoted as a way to solve all learning problems. For kids who actually have a seeing disorder like the one I apparently have, this actually will help.

The good news is I dusted off my spinning wheel after neglecting it for a while because my back hurts. And because for some strange reason I had decided that I "should" spin some lacey yarn. I hate spinning such fine yarn because it takes forever, and also because I can't really knit with it!! I knit so loosely that most fine gauge yarns are off limits if I want any kind of structural stability in the final fabric. Plus I have trouble seeing that kind of stuff. Life is definitely too short to spin yarn I don't even like!! So I plied up the crazy thin stuff that had been blocking me and moved on. Here's a shot of the 2 ply result. Left scale marker is a 5 Euro-cent coin and the right is a US penny.

Red single

Here's a bit of the first single I'm spinning from the yarn I dyed on the weekend. I like the color, but this is my first time really trying to spin lace yarn. I had been thinking I would spin it for the Mystery Waters KAL, but several problems became evident:

Red isn't exactly in the 'water' theme, unless I pretended I meant it to mean that glorious red that clouds (which ARE water) turn during sunset

• I have 6.5 ounces of roving, and I need 1200m of yarn for the shawl, leading to a tremendous amount of anxiety pervading every minute of spinning. Doesn't make it the 'fun hobby' it's supposed to be...
  
• I spin pretty slowly. Especially this thin stuff!
  

So in the end I ordered some gorgeous yarn from handpaintedyarn.com in the 'San Francsico' colors. I lived in SF for 6 years, and I LOVED the fog there, so this has all kinds of warm fuzzies for me! Plus less anxiety, which is always a bonus for this nervous one. And the wonderfully helpful people on the KAL pointed to me to where I can order Addi metal lace knitting needles--can't get them here in Switzerland, which is ironic since they are a German company and I live less than an hour from Germany. Anyhow, I am now dialed into the German yarn store world and am VERY pleased!!!

Dying roving

I decided to dye some more roving today. I joined the Mystic Waters KAL (although signups are over here) because when you are languishing on one enormous lace shawl, heck, the best thing to do is start another! Ha ha.

Then there is the yarn problem. As I complained yesterday, I just can't find my way around the yarn stores here in Zurich, at least not when it comes to finger/lace weight, or hand painted, or silk, or or or. Then I got the idea to knit it with qiviut, that obscenely expensive fine down of the musk ox. I've gotten over the sticker shock of living in Switzerland and have been known to spend a lot of money without too much pain, but when I realized this shawl would run to $300 for the yarn I actually balked.

The last yarn I spun was actually pretty fine, so I thought maybe I could either just spin it a bit finer (rather, spin it ALL fine rather than some fine and some a bit bigger) or just knit the singles. I really like working with my hand dyed stuff, so I am dying about 7 oz of something (my roving isn't labelled since all I ever buy is Blue Faced Leicester, although I think this is something else that I bought when I first learned to spin and was trying some stuff out) with "rust" dye.

The wet wool, waiting:



The hot dyed wool, simmering to absorb all the dye. I can't wait to see how it turns out!!

Accidental orange

This is a skein of yarn I spun this spring. I was teaching myself to dye--I thought I was making red roving but wasn't quite sure about the dye amounts. I somehow imagined if I didn't have enough that it would turn out pink and I could just knit up something for my then-5 year old niece who is deep into the pink stage. Instead I got this.




I kind of like it, actually, since I'm obsessed with fall and earthy colors. It's definitely best used as an accent color, though!