Dichroic Reflections

Many problems can be solved by throwing money at them. It’s a strategy Ted and I use too often, just because at the moment, we’re OK on money but horribly short on time, and we often don’t have access to (or don’t know how to access) other solutions, because we’re Not From Around Here.

With the Macmillan thing (and the pattern it’s part of) I was reluctant to use that solution on the Kindle problem just now, but, well, I need Amazon more than they need me. Also, when I posted about my problem on the Ravelry Kindle group, someone made a cogent point: “Just noticed: for as many Kindles that have been sold and how many are owned by Ravellers…when one of them goes bad it merits a new thread on this list. That’s pretty good reliability. )” And finally, the Macmillan books including Kindle books are back on Amazon.

(Ted and I had a whole discussion on this last night, on what of all of this is a moral issue and what’s a business issue. His view is that it’s all a business issue; when I finally said, “It’s a moral issue because they’re getting between me and my ability to buy books!” he paused and then said, carefully, “OK, I can see how that’s true in your world.”)

As of this morning, I’d abaout decided to go order a Kindle 2 – since I have the funds to do so, getting a reconditioned K1 didn’t make sense for me. But Amazon’s checkout page says they use a courier service to ship them internationally, and it would get here in only 2-4 days. I don’t want it sitting on the apartment guard’s desk that long, so it makes sense for me to wait until I get back to order it. And that gives me more time to think about what I want to do.

My Kindle just broke!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Currently it’s still readable-on; there’s an area on the upper right about half an inch wide and 3 inches long where the screen is displaying …. well, sort of boxes with smudges in them. Not test, anyway. This happened because I was charging my backup battery for our trip – when I put the better battery back in and turned it back on, this had happened.

I called Amazon, but since my Kindle is over a year old the warranty has run out. So my options are:
- buy a refurbed Kindle 1, $99. And they are back-ordered so it won’t be shipped for at least three weeks.
- buy a new Kindle 2, $259, could be shipped today.
- buy an iPad when those go on sale, $459, shipping in late March.
- don’t buy anything and hope none of my books have important information in the upper half of the rightmost 1/2″.

This is the worst time for this to happen, as I head out for almost two weeks tomorrow and am then only back for a week before leaving again. I’d probably go with the Kindle 2 option tonight …. but then there’s the Macmillan thing. How can I drop that much money on the Kindle when I don’t even know if I’ll be able to get the books I want?

So I guess my best choice for the moment is option 4, coupled with hoping that the problem doesn’t expand and if it does, the lodge where we’re staying has a good library. And while I’m gone, I will debate between the K2 and iPad options. I guess. And see what the news is when we return.

Fuck.

(I’m actually feeling a foolish tendency to descend into full-blown panic over this – How will I survive without a functional Kindle if it goes bad? I am reminding myself hard that anxiety is a side effect of the malaria drug I’m on, and that the Kindle 2 option does at least exist.)

Any and all advice is welcome. I don’t promise to take it but would be reassured by hearing others’ views, even if they’re “You’re being an idiot. Go order a bunch of dead-tree books from Powell’s. Or reread the ones you have.”

I am way beyond “thrilled” and almost into “speechless” (seriously – it took me three days to even figure out how to say this) that I have been nominated for a Rhysling Award for Clotho Visits the Local Yarn Store, originally published in Twist Collective. That’s amazing company to be in.

(I wonder if this is the first poem ever published in a knitting magazine to be nominated?)

The Toastmasters “guess the accent” thing went really well last night. At least, I had a geat time and I think everyone else did Huge thanks to everyone who recorded (or wrote) a greeting for me – I didn’t use them all but got a good sampling. I think Billy from Wales really threw them; I’m not sure anyone there really knew where Wales was. (Not unreasonable: how many Americans or Brits can locate Guangzhou on a map?) I heard that one guy said he’d never really gotten a sense of how US accents vary until now, so I think that means it was a big success.

• I just finished my big huge meeting with me presenting to the big huge management guys (well, not personally huge, or at least not all of them, just high up in the company). I wouldn’t call it a raving tearing success but it wasn’t too painful either, which is really all you hope for. And the VP at whose bequest we were all meeting pledged full support (and pushed us to do stuff faster than we think possible, but that’s what VPs do. (Not VIP, VP, as in Vice President of my company. Waaay up in management.) When I say “just finished”, it is now 20 minutes after my bedtime. They all stayed an hour for what was scheduled to be a half hour meeting, so they took it seriously. But the timing is another reason I wasn’t looking forward to it. Glad that’s done – tomorrow for the mopping up.
• First thing this morning I got an extremely nice and totally unnecessary email from someone who is definitely a VIP in my little world.
• Right before the meeting I finished knitting my Rogue sweater, and though I couldn’t knit during it (because I was running the meeting) I figured out how to do the tricky hood grafting. I’d never realized the knit-purl-purl-knit only works for stockinette, and I haven’t seen instructions anywhere, but I figured it out structurally.
• My Toastmasters guess-the-accent game seemed to be a big success. I owe more detailed thanks to a lot of people in a lot of venues, so I will do those tomorrow.

Hey, cool! Listening to Crosby, Still, and Nash, I just realized: I will get to see the Southern Cross twice this year – last October in Tasmania, and next week in South Africa. It’s the rainy season, but hopefully the skies will cooperate enough to let us get in some star-watching.

My arm hurts. Also, my underarm hurts, and it’s slightly swollen (though less than yesterday). Unless I had really bad form in my squat/push presses Sunday, I can only assume it’s an effect of the yellow fever vaccination we had Friday. That’s odd, because the lists of side effects do mention sore arms but don’t say anything about swollen lymph nodes. Mefloquine, the malarial prophylactic drug we started taking yesterday, has an even more fun list of possible side effects, including insomnia, headache, paranoia, and vivid dreams. I’d wonder if I had some of those Sunday night, but waking up in the middle of the night and taking a while to go back to sleep isn’t uncommon for me, and if I’m up at 2AM and anything hurts, I have such a strong tendency to decide it’s probably cancer / tuberculosis leprosy / flesh-eating alien diseases that I’ve learned to push the worry off until morning (when it generally turns out that what I have is a minor bruise or a slight cold).

Still hurts, though, and I’ve felt slightly feverish, queasy, or achy on and off all weekend – all common side effects of either the vaccine or the mefloquine. Actually, I was feeling a bit off all week – the reason I suggested going out Friday was that I felt up to it for once. On Saturday, we ended up coming home early from a wedding (“early” being about 8 courses into a 10-course banquet). Still, over the weekend I managed to erg, lift, establish that the local mall doesn’t have any of the things I wanted to buy before our trip, buy a cheap duffle bag, go food-shopping, and make a big batch of jambalaya so I guess it counts as productive. Hopefully this comng weekend before we fly out, I’ll be up to getting a sturdier duffle bag and a smaller camera bag. (If not, we have Plan B: the cheap duffle we got yesterday and an enormous bag we took to Antarctica – both are big enough to fit the camera bags we have, but might be a bit large for a small charter plane.)

All that said, though, the week started out well: some good news yesterday and some more this morning, and the knowledge that it’s my last work week before vacation! Then it’s back here for a week, to the Netherlands for house-hunting, back here for two weeks, and off for good. (Where “good” means “until my first business trip back to Taiwan”.)

workout details under cut – wasn’t feeling well a lot of the week, so I took it easy.
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Last night was great! We decided to go out to a pizza place a few stops down the MRT. It’s right near where a bunch of people from work live, so we called one of them to join us and he promised to call another. The other guy couldn’t come and the first guy’s wife is back in the US, so it was the three of us. Then one of the Dutch guys who works for Ted came in, complete with wife, visiting in-laws …. and month-old baby we hadn’t yet gotten to see. So I got baby-snuggling time (and got spit up on, thoroughly. Oops. My own fault for burping him after feeding without a burpcloth – I don’t have good baby-handling skills any more.)

Decent wine, a place that wasn’t crowded on a Friday night, good company, the best pizza in Taipei (that’s not faint praise; it compares with the best I’ve had in the US, though it’s a thin-crust style I don’t often see there), homemade tiramisu, and a baby … the only thing that could have made it better would have been getting to pet the cat who’s been there other times we went to that restaurant.

(It’s called Alley Cats. It’s on an alley and they have a cat.)

This sweater is just going to be touch and go all the way though, I see. I currently have about 2 balls of yarn left, with half a sleeve and half the hood to go. I’d feel a lot better about it if I’d managed to find more than one more ball of yarn last week – clearly I wouldn’t have had enough without it. I’ve worked on other sweaters that miraculously took much less yarn than I’d expected; this one is the opposite, just eating yarn. I have a few possibilities if I do run out:

• snip a stitch and unravel the hem facing of the sweater body, then pick up the remaining stitches and reknit it in a contrasting yarn (which I did use for the sleeve hem facings).
• re-knit the sleeves a little narrower. I think my gauge is off just a hair, so everything is a bit bigger than expected, which is why I’m so short on yarn. I do like the easy fit, though.
• unravel until I have just a few inches of the hood, then turn it under and sew it to make a stand-up collar.
• unravel the hood and then reknit some length of it but backwards, with the cables on top and let that flap sit on my back in sort of a sailor collar.
• go back to the yarn store (but when??) and see if another ball of this yarn has magically appeared.

Actually, the stand-up collar idea would involve the least amount of rework and be very wearable – I’d be unlikely to ever wear the hood up anyway. But I’ll go on knitting just in case I have enough yarn to do it as planned, and if it’s very close to enough, maybe try that idea with the hem facings – they’d lie flatter in a finer yarn anyway.