It’s Furious Balancing

The recipient of the Baby Viking Helm was pleased.  The following is a direct copy-paste from her email to me.

I’m not even going to begin trying to explain this to non-gamers.

Textured Woven Valkyrie Helm of Dryness and Agility

RARE MASTERCRAFTED

Required level: 1

Mitigation: 200

Weight: 1.0

Frequency: Mythical

+50 health, +35 power, +15 intelligence, +15 wisdom, +50 agility

+150 vs. poison, disease, divine, heat, magic, and mental

+300 vs. cold

+200 resistance to diaper rash

+50 drool avoidance (applies to self and canine opponents only)

Effects:

• Casts Dispersion of Baby Powder when activated, creating a defensive shield against wetness and blinding all opponents in the area.
• Looks DAMN good.

On we sweep with threshing oar,
Our only goal will be the western shore.

The Viking Baby Hat is now - officially - an FO. A Finished Object. Completed. Done. Stick a fork in it.

My highly cooperative model for this photo shoot is Socks the Cat. He usually sits on the back of our living room sofa, looking out the front window. Our other cats sit up there with him sometimes and watch the world go by. I wonder what our mailman thinks.

Socks is also responsible for all the Led Zeppelin lyrics scattered throughout this post. If you’re totally lost, go check out the Viking Kittens. (WARNING: Plays Led Zeppelin music and a Flash animation.)

We come from the land of the ice and snow
From the midnight sun where the hot springs blow.

The hammer of the gods
Will drive our ships to new lands
To fight the horde — singing and crying:
Valhalla I am coming!

This was my first FO for Ravelympics 2008. If you’re a knitter on Ravelry, you may have heard about this. The idea is to complete a challenging project, or several challenging projects, during the Beijing Summer Olympics. You couldn’t cast on before the Olympic flame was lit at the opening ceremonies, and you need to finish before the flame is extinguished at the end of the games.

Knitting events were named after “real” Olympic events, and I signed up for Baby Dressage and the Glove Decathlon. We also joined up in teams, either by geographical region or Ravelry Group.  You didn’t have to pick a team to participate, but I did.   I’m a member of Team Obama and Team Michigan.

This is very loosely organized. You can be a member of multiple teams, but you must limit a project to one team only (i.e., I couldn’t count this one baby hat for both Team Obama and Team Michigan.  I had to choose one of them). You are competing only against yourself; you aren’t out to “beat” other knitters. Once you finish your project, you get a bloggy widget thing at the end of the games.  It’s sort of like the Special Olympics – all participants get a medal.

PROJECT NOTES

Ravelympics Team:  Obama

Made for:  A gal in our old EverQuest 2 guild who is expecting her first baby.  I don’t know when she’s due, but it must be soon!  Edited to Add:  Baby Nicolai will make his appearance on or about November 3rd.

Pattern: Baby Viking Hat Kit from Bella Knitting.

Yarn: Karabella Aurora 8, Dark Gray (approx. ¼ ball, 25 yards); Brown (approx. ⅔ ball, 65 yards); and Cream (a teeny, tiny amount; they didn’t send a full ball of yarn with the kit).

Needles: US Size 6, both DPN’s and 16″ circular.

Mods: I made the hat ½ inch shorter (3½” instead of 4″) before beginning the “every other row” decreases.  I started doing the “every row” decreases for the crown about 4 rows earlier than the pattern called for.  I wanted to shorten the length a wee bit.  I saw too many FO pictures where the hat looked more like a stocking cap (or the Pope’s mitre) than a helmet.

Challenges: Sewing on those damned wings was the hardest part. Making 21 bobbles on the same row was the most tedious knitting I’ve done in a long time.  I consider overcoming Bobble Boredom a challenge. My personal preference is No Bobbles Whatsoever On Any Knitted Item, but the hat really needed them to get that certain je ne sais quoi that says “Viking Helmet.”

How soft your fields so green,
Can whisper tales of gore,
of how we calmed the tides of war.
We are your overlords.

My next Ravelympics challenge is the Welig Gloves from Robin Melanson’s Knitting New Mittens & Gloves for Team Michigan.

Those bobbles have got to go.

That should read “Baby Hats and Moose Burgers,” but my mind tends toward the alliterative.

The moose burgers appear in my wee little head courtesy of The Yarn Harlot’s blog post from yesterday.  She and her family are visiting Newfoundland, and I am profoundly jealous.  Curiosity compelled me to look up the average monthly temperatures for St. John’s, Newfoundland and in August - August, mind you - the average daily high temperature is 67 degrees Farenheit.

Sweet Jesus, book me a flight for Newfoundland.  Now.  I knew the Canadians were culturally and spiritually ahead of us when I discovered the existence of poutine.  I am convinced I was born a bit too south and bit too west of Heaven on Earth.  Well, I would still need a high-speed internet connection, but we’re talking lighthouses, sheep, rugged coastline, and french fries with cheese curds and gravy, not to mention the Canadian wonderfulness of curling and Tim Horton’s doughnuts.  Cold weather, carbohydrates, and wool.  Sign me up.

But I digress.

Today’s post is about a current knitting project and some past knitting projects that haven’t made an appearance here yet.  Baby Hats.

Even though I am Child-Free By Choice, I do love knitting up cute little baby hats.  For the most part, they’re fast, Instant Gratification projects.  I’ve made a few Umbilical Cord Hats from Stitch N’ Bitch: The Knitter’s Handbook:

the first in red

and the second in cream.

Then there was the hat resurrected from the yarn I tried to use for the Baby Nemesis Jacket:

And then another with cables.

However, my all-time favorite Bebeh Hat, until now, was the Pumpkin Beanie  I modified from Crazy Aunt Purl’s pattern:

Yes, yes, very cute, but none of them have anything over the Viking Baby Hat:

It’s a Work of Art in Progress and my first project for the 2008 Ravelympics, which is yet one more blog post in and of itself.  I’ll write that one up later.  I want to keep knitting.

You know you spend too much time at I Can Has Cheezburger when you start thinking in LOLspeak.  You’d never know I was a Phi Beta Kappa English major, would you?  Well, the title of this post does derive from a Robert Burns’ poem,  so it has a small amount of literary merit.  I’m not claiming much.

My Red Red Rose is actually a handknit beret — Rose Red — designed by Ysolda Teague.  I’m sure she was referencing the fairytale character Rose Red, but my searches on the fairytale didn’t yield much I could work with in a humorous vein.  I mean, the girl marries the brother of the prince bewitched into the form of a bear; her sister, Snow White, gets the prince.  This isn’t the Snow White with the dwarf fetish, although a dwarf does appear in the story, but another Snow White.  Oh, go read the whole thing here.

But anyway.  Rose Red.  Knitting.

This is not the first Ysolda Teague pattern I’ve done, and it most definitely will not be the last.  I love her designs; her patterns are well-written and clear.  Even though there are tons of free patterns on the Internet, I most happily will pay $6.00 to $7.00 for one of Ysolda’s.

I did my first Rose Red in Cascade Cloud 9 yarn in the Chili Pepper colorway.  The Cloud 9 was perfect for this project.  Even though it’s an angora blend, I had very little shedding.  It did shed quite a bit when I had to frog and re-knit a part of it, but not excessively.  It has an understated angora “halo” and the red did not bleed when I wet blocked it. 

However, since it’s red, it means that my pictures simply don’t do it justice.  I think the second photo is the closest to the yarn’s true color.

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My photography is getting a smidge better.  Not phenomenally better.  A smidge.  A tad.  An infinitesimal degree of better-ness.  I’m home from work with stomach issues, so I’m afraid there’s not any photos in natural light today.  It’s also 86°F outside, which is a little warm for a wool-angora beret, no matter how much I adore it.

Adore it I do.  I want seven in different colors so I can wear one each day of the week.  I would use the Cloud 9 all seven times, too.

This is my first finished project with cables, and it’s beautiful.

/sigh

I wish it were snowing.

Steek (stēk) To pierce with a sharp instrument; hence, to stitch; to sew; also, to fix; to fasten.

From a knitter’s point of view, that’s an extremely tepid definition.  It concentrates far too much on the fixing/fastenening/sewing side of things and says far too little about taking scissors and hacking apart an almost-finished sweater.  The Wikipedia entry is more enlightening:

In knitting, steeking is a shortcut used to knit things like sweaters in the round without interruption for openings or sleeves until the end.  After completing a tube, a straight line is cut along the center of a column of stitches in order to make room for an opening…. The steek itself is a bridge of extra stitches in which the cut is made and is usually 6-10 stitches wide.  This technique was developed by the knitters of the Shetland archipelago and is particularly associated with Fair Isle sweaters, although it can be used for solid colors as well, blah, blah, blah.

The magic of knitting is that you can create a garment out of a length of string. The horror of steeking is that you must make a Leap of Faith and cut into the garment, praying all the while that it doesn’t unravel before your eyes.

Steeking is the one technique most likely to cause knitters to self-impale on their own needles.  It is seriously scary stuff.  Worse than turning the heel of a sock.  Worse than p3togtbl with Rowan Kidsilk Haze. Worse than, oh, I don’t know what, but I think that cutting a steek is the one technique most likely to cause a Major Knitting Freak Out.

To tell the truth, it really wasn’t all that bad.  I didn’t even need alcohol or chocolate cake to fortify myself beforehand — just a hot bath.

I think part of the Lack of Panic is because I chose a steek-appropriate yarn for my project.  I’ve been working on a Noro Kureyon striped vest the past few weeks.  The original pattern over on Knitty.com called for alternating two different colorways of Noro, but I fell in love with Colorway 195 (blue, black, olive, gray) and wanted a vest made entirely with that.

Steeking is best done with rougher, stickier wool, and Noro Kureyon is definitely sticky.  I wouldn’t have been so confident with something smoother (like Noro Silk Garden) or a less “rustic” (i.e., more processed) yarn.  The Kureyon, however, is perfect for steeking.

Despite this, I did have The Husband sew in a reinforcing zig-zag on either side of the line of knit stitches to go under the knife scissors.   I have heard of knitters who don’t use sewn or crocheted reinforcements and just cut a naked, unreinforced steek.  I might be crazy, but I’m not that crazy.   I basted a line of red yarn through the stitches to be cut and he obliged me with his l33t sewing skillz.  Click the Pic for “Really Big” Size.

I must apologize for my horrible pictures.  There is something about this colorway that defies a decent shot.  I think the “gray” stripes, which are an amalgam of purple, green, and silver, throw off the color balance feature on my digital camera.  I have not yet been able to take a halfway acceptable photograph of it. 

When it came time to actually take scissors to my knitting — the knitting I had worked on for 3 weeks, the knitting made with my favorite color of Noro Kureyon — I was quite calm.  I’m the sort of person who doesn’t see much sense in making a fuss about inevitabilities.  The vest was knitted; the steek was sewn.  What’s to be gained by wringing my hands and whining about it?

Not much, aside from looking weak and/or foolish.  So I just got ‘er done.

I get to use my nifty Addi Cro-Hook to pick up stitches for the neck and armhole bands once she dries from her wet block.  I should have Finished Object pictures soon.

Permission to look smug?

Every now and then, since I’ve watched the Lord of the Rings movies half a dozen times, I get bits of dialogue stuck in my head.  Gollum’s dialogue usually.  I wonder where this bit came from?

Sam:  What are you up to?  Sneaking off, are we?

Gollum:  Sneaking?  Sneaking?  Fat hobbit is always so polite.  Smeagol shows them secret ways that nobody else could find and they say “sneak.”  Sneak?  Very nice friend.  Oh, yes, my precious.  Very nice, very nice.

Sam:  All right, all right!  You just startled me is all.  What were you doing?

Gollum:  Steeking.  Sneaking.

The cat picture is gratuitous, but I told Kissy he would get some screen time.

Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.

I’ve had those two lines of poetry rattling around in my head because I’m feeling quite smug about two new knitting tools I’ve discovered.  “New to me” anyway; they’ve been around a while.

The first will warm the cockles of anyone’s heart — anyone who has ever felt discouraged or apprehensive about those ubiquitous finishing instructions, “Pick up and knit 124 stitches around the neckline.”

That’s an Addi Turbo Cro-Needle — a 32-inch circular needle with a US size 2 crochet hook on one end and a US size 3 needle tip on the other.  I believe that the person who came up with this one should be beatified; I certainly think it’s a miracle.  In my Innernet surfing research, it appears that there was a Sticks & String podcast some 6 months or so ago that mentioned the Cro-Needle, but I found out about it on Ravelry.

Ravelry is also to blame for my next purchase, which arrived on my doorstep yesterday.  I’ve been looking for an organizational solution to the circular needle mess that is currently breeding in a shoebox in my study.  Perhaps if I contain the prurient little buggers in individual self-sealing PVC sleeves (sorted by size) things will settle down.

This was an inexpensive purchase.  A short Innernet shopping search found an equivalent knitting needle organizer for $34.99.  I paid $17.99 for this.  The explanation for the price difference?

Yes, cats and kittens, it’s a fishing tackle organizer.  I am the proud owner of a Bass Pro Shop Extreme Worm Binder. Since it came, I’ve been dying to write a faux review on the Bass Pro Web site raving about how the circular knitting needle mess on my boat is a thing of the past, how well it stands up to a salt-water knitting environment, and does it come in pink?

When I heard of “The Game,” my first thought was of Thomas Tryon’s book The Other.  “The Game” referred to the twins’ ability to psychically project their awareness outside of themselves and into another.  For me, there’s all sorts of malevolent overtones to the phrase.

However, The Game I’m writing about today is wholly different, completely innocuous, and gives me something moderately interesting to post on the blog since I can’t think of a damned thing to write about this morning.   The Game is an Internet Flickr meme that I discovered on Pierre, The Yarn Snob’s blog.

What you do is:

1. Type your answer to each of the questions in the Flickr search feature.
2. Pick an image on the first page of the search results.
3. Copy/paste the image’s URL into the Mosaic Maker, using whatever layout you desire — providing it shows the 12 images.

You’ll wind up with something like this (Click for biggie size.  It looks much better) :

So, here are the questions (with my answers).

1. What is your first name? [edited out for privacy reasons]
2. What is your favorite food? Chocolate
3. What high school did you attend? [edited out for privacy reasons]
4. What is your favorite color? Cobalt blue
5. Who is your celebrity crush? Michael Kitchen
6. What is your favorite drink? Latte
7. Where would your dream vacation be? Paris
8. What is your favorite dessert? Ice cream
9. What do you want to be when you grow up? What?
10. What do you love most in life? Quiet
11. What is one word you use to describe yourself? Introverted
12. What is your Flickr user name? Laiane (I find it terribly amusing there’s a supermodel out there somewhere who shares my name.)
    

Et voilà.

Here’s another version of The Game where you keyword search (your answer) + sign.  I think I like this one on a more aesthetic level.

There are some fun things you can do with Big Huge Labs and your uploaded photos on Flickr.   I’ve posted a mosaic of my raindrop laden irises, and here’s a mosaic of my yarn pr0n pictures.  Well, my valiant attempt at yarn pr0n pictures.

Ooooo…..shiny.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend, cats and kittens.  I’m off to do some knitting.

I am Teh Suck at photography. My Standard Operating Procedure for all the pictures you see on this blog is:

1. Point.
2. Shoot.
3. Repeat nos. 1 and 2 six dozen times.
4. Use judicious editing and l33t Paint Shop Pro skillz to make picture look slightly decent and a reasonable facsimile of the actual object.

I love my little Fuji digital camera. Yes, it’s low budget, poky, and sucks the life out of my rechargable batteries like no one’s business, but it gets the job done 90% of the time.  Sometimes, when I’m lucky and the stars are aligned properly, I can take a passable photograph.

Mostly, I photograph yarn.  I received a batch of Noro Kureyon the other day and catalogued it for my Ravelry Yarn Stash.

Yeah, I know.  Not particularly impressive in and of itself.  Go check it out in its original size.

That’s Color 149 up above.  This is Color 102 (click here for original size on Flickr).

Noro Kureyon is an acquired taste.  A lot of people say it’s too scratchy for them. I prefer to think of Kureyon as “rustic.”  It washes up soft enough for me, delicate hothouse flower that I am.  It’s a love-hate yarn, I suppose.  The “haters” are certainly entitled to their opinions, misguided though they are, and are welcome to stick to 100% plastic Caron Simply Soft.    More Kureyon for me!

Why, as a matter of fact I am a Yarn Snob, now that you mention it….

Even though I claim that this isn’t a Knitting Blog, that’s where it appears to be headed. I’ve been thinking some about the appeal of knitting. Why does this intrigue me so? Is there more to it than messing about with sticks and string? And how much yarn, really, can one stuff into a single bedroom closet?

Knitting lets me tap into a creative process that is, for the most part, foreign to me. I’m not an artist. I can’t draw, paint, or sculpt. I’m not a musician. I can’t play a musical instrument and I certainly can’t sing. I’m not a chef. Not an architect. Not a programmer. Not a poet. Not an actor. I’m not an “anything,” really, in terms of creating.

This isn’t true with the knitting. I get to play with color, texture, and shaping. I can transform one thing (yarn) into another thing (something that vaguely resembles a sweater). I’m no longer a passive entity - I get to make stuff.

[My word, Laiane, your powers of observation are amazing. You must be the envy of your peers.]

Sarcastic and self-referential commentary aside, you can see where I’m headed. This “making stuff” business is new to me, and I’m getting quite addicted to it. I’ve got enough yarn and pattern ideas to last me a year — minimum. I’m still adding projects to my queue on Ravelry. I think I’ve come down from my last yarn buying spree, but I could be easily set off by a markdown on Malabrigo.

I have no willpower when confronted with a sale on good yarn.

I finished the Back-to-School U-Neck Vest from Stefanie Japel’s Fitted Knits collection. I do think that she is my favorite knitwear designer. I was able to wear the finished vest to the office in this lovely 60-degree spring weather. This is probably the last time I’ll be able to wear one of my handknits until October. I got a lot of compliments on my creation, even though I arsed-up the back neckline.

In any event, this FO is dedicated to Eowyn, Shieldmaiden of the Rohirrim. The styling reminds me a little of Eowyn’s dress in The Two Towers. I’ve been watching The Lord of the Rings (yes, again), but with the cast commentary audio instead of the regular movie audio. I did a lot of knitting while sitting on the couch watching those extended edition DVD’s.

It took about 3 weeks from start to finish. I only did minor modifications from the published pattern. The most important one was narrowing the shoulder straps. Many people commented on Ravelry that they felt they were too wide, so I reduced them down to 12 stitches. There were 14 in the pattern, so that’s not much; I was uncertain about making them any narrower than that.

I Kitchener stitched the shoulder seams instead of doing a three-needle bind off. I’ve done the three-needle bind off before, on the Tempting sweater, so I thought I should try something different.

I reduced the number of rows on the picked-up stitches for the neck and armholes. The pattern called for 3 purl rows, 3 knit rows, then 3 purl rows again. Way too much for my tastes. I did three purl rows only on the armholes and three purl rows and one additional knit row on the neck (just to spruce up the neck a bit and make it slightly different than the arms). I think all those additional rows on the neck and arms called for in the pattern would give it too much of a “Judy Jetson” feel — definitely not my style.

The final modification was the increases used for the bust darts. The pattern called for lifted increases, which are different from make 1’s (even though I find a lot of people who think they’re the same stitch). I wasn’t comfortable with my messy, miserable-looking lifted increases and used mirrored make 1 increases instead. Look! a close-up of Laiane’s tits!

I used two and a half skeins of Cascade 220 in Walnut Heather (Color # 8013, approx. 550 yards) and my size 7 and size 5 Knit Picks interchangeable circular needles in Harmony Wood

All in all, a good pattern, a somewhat flattering finished object, and something I can actually wear in public.

Forth Eorlingas.

As the weather warms up, I’m becoming more and more aware of how much I hate the summer and how much I am not looking forward to months of unrelenting heat and blinding sunlight. I can enjoy the milder weather we’re having now, the lilacs and forget-me-nots, but there’s this Impending Doom lurking just around the corner.

Michigan summers suck.

I’ve decided that the best way for me to cope with my Reverse Seasonal Affective Disorder is with Wellbutrin and lots and lots of fall/winter knitting projects. I can stay in the house, crank the air conditioning, and play with yarn; before you know it the outside will be clean and cold again and it will be time to wear some lovely, bright, handknit hats and scarves with my austere black winter coat.

For now, you get pictures from the backyard. The one positive thing I can say for the warmer weather is there is better lighting for photographing the Finished Objects. As always, click the pretty pictures to make them bigger.

This is the One-Day Beret from Through the Loops done up in Noro Silk Garden Chunky. I finished the bind-off on the drive home from ThreadBear. It was a tad on the large-ish side, so I did a quick hot wash/cold rinse to tighten it up. That and a few minutes in the dryer did the trick.

Despite the “purple mushroom” comment, I do love this hat. It’s going to go hide in the sweater bags in the closet with the cedar sachets and the rest of the Yarn Stash until November or so.

I wish I could do the same. Pass the Wellbutrin.

I’ve been slogging along on the Back-to-School U-Neck Vest from Fitted Knits. I’m actually progressing through it fairly quickly, so slogging is not the most apt word to describe what I’m doing. Maybe I’m actually knitting. Really knitting, like with darts and shaping and everything! Who’d a thunk it?

I am, however, a crappy photographer and a crappy Paint Shop Pro user. /sigh

Click here to go see a larger picture, but I don’t think it improves much. I have been spending the last hour trying to get the text to wrap and make this look halfway decent on the page layout.  No dice.  If I upload this via “add media” in WordPress, there’s no way to remove the vest picture from the gallery with Chrissy’s pictures below (unless I delete the vest picture entirely) .  If I link to my uploaded image on Flickr, there’s no way to get the text to wrap since you have to “add media” to get the text wrap feature to work.

The orange markers are for the bust darts (which are somewhat visible), but it’s hard to envision the finished project unless you look at it on a real person.

I should be able to model it in the near future — depending on how much Cat Help I get. I’ve been picking cat hair out of this project for a while now. Predominantly brown cat hair with black ticking.

Who could that possibly be?

Or rather, Daffodils and Detectives, since I’m going to talk about the daffodils first and then do a ham-handed segue into my latest fan grrrl obsession with a British detective show.

First, flowers. It’s springtime in my little corner of the world and even though I dislike warm weather and I suffer from horrendous allergies, I’m able to enjoy the flowers when they arrive. After the monochrome winter, seeing some life and color in the backyard is a treat.

We have cherry blossoms, some wildly overgrown forsythia, and a few daffodils:

Every time — and I do mean almost every time — I think of the word springtime, I start hearing Springtime for Hitler in my head.

And now it’s…
Springtime for Hitler and Germany
Deutschland is happy and gay!
We’re marching to a faster pace
Look out, here comes the master race!
Springtime for Hitler and Germany
Rhineland’s a fine land once more!
Springtime for Hitler and Germany
Watch out, Europe
We’re going on tour!
Springtime for Hitler and Germany!

I hope you’re familiar with Mel Brooks’ The Producers and don’t think I’m being terribly non-PC here. Springtime for Hitler is intentionally non-PC; that was its raison d’etre.

But anyway.

This leads me in to my next topic - a British detective program set in the South coast of Britain during the early days of World War II. It’s Foyle’s War, and I’ve become a complete and utter Fan Grrrl for it in general and for Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle in particular.

I started watching Foyle’s War because it was on my Netflix “we thought you would enjoy this” list. I was looking for dialogue-heavy movies and TV shows so I could sit on the couch and knit and not necessarily be glued to the TV screen.

I was hooked immediately by the attention to detail. I’m a World War II history dilettante, and I was very impressed with the costumes and the cars and the manual typewriters and the fountain pens and all the other minutiae that added up to wonderful period detail. I’m a sucker for stuff like that, I must admit.

Then there’s the character development. They don’t just show the good side of the British, but the bad as well: war profiteers, racketeers and con-men; how people of German and Italian descent were hounded and despised, if not interred in camps as suspected Nazi sympathizers or “enemy aliens.”

And then there’s Chief Detective Superintendent Foyle.

We’re talking serious, full-blown intellectual crush here, cats and kittens. I qualify and say “intellectual” because DCS Foyle isn’t hawt and he doesn’t interest me romantically. He’s too short and too old, for starters. He’s also too close to my own personality type - an ISTJ — but still, I love this character. Introverted, intelligent, and highly-principled, DCS Foyle can communicate paragraphs just by raising an eyebrow.

The problem is I enjoy watching the show so much, I’m not getting much knitting done, or the knitting I’m doing is, to put it mildly, not up to snuff. On my first attempt at the Back-to-School Vest, which is knit in the round, I discovered that I had changed the direction of my knitting at least twice, if not three times, during the course of a particularly intriguing episode.

If you know anything about knitting, this is not good.

If you don’t know anything about knitting, suffice it to say that I started knitting in the wrong direction. Hard to explain; easy to do.

Perhaps I should move on to less interesting programs.

Yeah, right.