Yes, and happy new year, along with hope that recession is not getting to you either. I've been a bad blogger but still trying to keep up. I never posted a picture of the pair of booties after finishing them, so here they are.
I finished them at about the same time that I was reading The Hype About Hydrogen, an interesting book, even if a little outdated. That's the problem when writing about technology. I know new nanomaterials are lowering the costs. There are also some uses for fuel cells that were not covered in this book, like using them to power laptops and other portable devices.
But the bottom line still applies: If you're making hydrogen from fossil fuels, you're still producing CO2 and contributing to global warming. The technology is not cost effective, neither for power plants nor for vehicles, and it comes with many risks attached.
Baby sweater? One sleeve seam down and that's it. I am in the middle of an urgent project. A person close to me underwent five months of chemotherapy and among all the unpleasantness of it, she ended up with peripheral neuropathy. In her own words, it feels like getting her hands and feet constantly pricked by a thousand needles, and the cold was making it much worse. Given that she has to work in an unheated environment (yes, she ran out of sick leave and vacation and even extended sick leave, so she must go back to work), I set out to make her a pair of fingerless mitts (pattern here, though I of course made some changes to it).
By now she might not need them, given that it is so much warmer now in California, but I am going to finish them anyway. I finished one and am in the middle of the second one.
And finally, happy Martin Luther King's day. I feel quite cheerful knowing that his dream is closer to becoming reality. But having an African American president will not magically set things right. Back in North Carolina, I used to live on a street with a really dull name, and when the name of the street was changed to "Martin Luther King Blvd" there was a public uproar. Homeowners complained that the value of their property would go down. Incomprehensible, but true. There's still people out there that refuse to live on a street named after a black man, no matter how noble and wise he was.
