I will!

You should check out some of Sharon's other patterns. They're all just about as nuts as this one.

This pattern is one of the things that first got me into knitting. I'm thrilled to finally be making good progress on it.

It's certainly been doing its best to drive me insane. 😅 I plan on having it framed (and thoroughly sealed against pests) once it's done.

It looks great! Mattress stitch is fiddly and can take some practice to learn to do neatly, but I bet you'll see improvement on the second mitt. You can also always undo the seam on the first one and redo it if you're not happy with it

VeryPink Knits is a great resource for video tutorials, including seaming/grafting. She also has slow motion videos of a lot of techniques that are specifically geared toward beginners. She's been my first stop for years when I need to learn a new technique for a pattern.

My best advice overall is to take each new technique as it comes. A lot of patterns seem intimidating on first look, but even the fanciest, most complicated-looking stitches are (almost always) just knits or purls at their core.

There are tons of free tutorials and resources out there, and lots of online and in person fibre arts communities full of lovely people. Ravelry is a fantastic place to start for free and paid patterns (Etsy has a lot of AI slop scams), and I hear their forums are pretty good. If you're a Discord person, feel free to DM me and I can link you to a fibre arts server I joined a few years ago as well (not sure what the rules are here for linking to those sorts of things).

I find that with the way I knit, most cable needles get in the way. For smaller cables (up to about 5x5, depending on yarn weight), I use one of the thicker plastic locking stitch markers, and I prefer the big safety-pin-style stitch holders for anything larger.

It was going okay before dude started bragging about how he went out with a lady not too long before. He wasn't all that into her and he said she clearly wasn't into him, but he paid for dinner and guilted her into going home with him because he "might as well get something out of paying for her." Giant red flag at this point. I went to the bathroom, when I came back the bill was on the table. He claimed that the server had brought it as one bill, rather than separate, and pointed out that she'd drawn a heart around the total in red pen. He refused to let me pay for my portion.

The thing is, it's standard practice for servers to ask if the bill should be together or separate here, and I'd always been asked at that particular bar. Dude wasn't a local and clearly didn't know that. This guy told me about how he used "but I paid so now you owe me" to coerce a woman he knew wasn't interested into having sex with him, and then immediately tried the same bullshit on me. He had deliberately asked for a single bill while I was away from the table. I'm reasonably certain he's the one who drew the heart on the bill too.

Needless to say, it didn't work. He still tried to drag me off to catch the train in his direction with him and got real upset when I told him to fuck himself and bolted. I'm very glad it was an early date so it was still light out. This guy did not take kindly to being told no.

First date. I made it clear at the outset that I wouldn't be going home with him. I'm not normally opposed if I'm interested in someone, but I was on my period and felt more like an amorphous blob than a sexual being that day.

During the date, he thought it was a great idea to tell me about how he went on a date with someone a year or so earlier. He said it was clear that she wasn't into him, and he wasn't into her either, but he convinced her to go home with him anyway. He figured that since he paid for dinner, he "might as well get something out of it." He described how she'd basically fled his house afterward as if it was a funny anecdote. I hadn't really been feeling it with him to stay with, so by this point, I was looking for my exit.

I went to the bathroom after we ate. When I came back, he'd already paid the bill, and made a big show of pointing out how the server had drawn a big heart in red pen at the bottom. This is where the big alarm bells started. I was a regular at the pub we were at, and they always asked how to split the bill. I'd also never seen a red pen in the joint. I'd planned on paying for myself, but the guy refused to take my cash.

We both had to catch different lines from the same train station after, and to no one's surprise, he tried to get me to go with him. He even tried to physically pull me toward his platform. I ended up running away, and blocked him as soon as I got home.

This was about 10 years ago. These days, I'd have given him a piece of my mind at the restaurant and walked out, but at the time I was way less confident than I am now.

I have never spent more time pretending to be busy than when I've had to work in an office. And god help the person who drags me away from what I'm doing every five minutes for "meetings".

I cancelled my Netflix account. I keep Disney Plus around for my stepkid, and Prime Video because it comes with Prime, although I'll probably cancel that soon too. I'm keeping Funimation.

Streaming is becoming worse than cable. At least if I got cable (which I won't) I could PVR shit and skip the ads. The idea of paying a monthly fee to get advertised at anyway is nauseating.

The ultimate irony is that the first popular incel support community was started by a woman.

Yep. I'm a 5'5" woman with short legs and a long torso. In order to fully depress the clutch on my car, I have to have the seat nearly all the way forward. There are plenty of other signs that my car was built for a 6' tall man, but that's a biggie.

I smoked for almost 20 years. I lost track of how many times I tried - and failed - to quit. Last December I just felt done. Put it down and haven't gone back to it. I even had a few cigarettes while out with a friend in March and had no desire to go back to it after. I know a few other people who quit like that, but far more who have struggled with it for years and still smoke.

I have no idea what changed for me. Every other attempt failed, even if I felt really ready to quit.

My current partner and I are planning on getting married in the next couple of years. He's wonderful. I don't see this relationship ending, but if it does my best friend and I plan on throwing darts at a map until we hit somewhere we both like. We'll get a place and become old punk grandmas together because neither of us wants to deal with dating ever again.

Dad was born in the '50s into a family I can only describe as Victorian. Very rigid gender roles, happy and angry the only acceptable male emotions, and all the "fun" stuff that comes along with that kind of upbringing. I'm in my mid-30s now. He worked a job that sent him out of town for weeks or sometimes months at a time, but where he would often have several weeks off at a time as well so he was either never around or home all the time. Mom was a stay at home mom, but that's about the extent of the gender roles enforced while I was growing up.

Dad and I had a fairly close relationship until I got to about 14/15 but I did learn very early that he was not the person to go to for anything emotional. He never knew how to handle emotions and - like many people of his generation - he didn't think about the long-term effects that his offhand comments and teasing might have. As an adult, I understand that it was his way of showing affection but it's taken me a very long time to work through the body issues I picked up because of his (and Mom's) teasing about "the family nose/thighs/shoulders/etc."

We drifted apart when I got to high school. The teenage girl hormones hit really hard. He didn't know what to do with all the feelings I was having so he either ignored them or got angry with me if they inconvenienced him. I never felt like I could talk to either of my parents about what I was going through so I withdrew into myself. Honestly, I was a pretty shitty teenager and my parents were both pretty shitty parents of teenagers (though in my defense my sister was way worse from a much younger age and never really got much better - we still don't get along.) As I got into my twenties and calmed down, Dad continued to treat me like that hyper emotional teenager. I resented that a lot and kept him at arm's length.

Dad's and my relationship is good now but it took a long time to get here. It took me accepting that he is never going to change and meeting him on his level, while asserting my own boundaries. I've spent a lot of time unpacking the hangups and baggage I carried with me into adulthood, which has given me the ability to get past "Dad is an asshole". Dad was raised in an environment with a lot of gendered pressure, came out of it with severe anxiety - which you can see runs in the family if you know what to look for - and his only coping mechanism is control. When he feels out of control, he explodes. However, being a "man of a certain age" (a.k.a. Boomer) there's no way he'll ever develop the emotional intelligence to understand and acknowledge that. He has no incentive to and has never learned the language. I learned that if I want a relationship with him, I have to be willing to work around that so I do the work on myself and focus on what he and I have in common - which is a lot! It's been a slow process, but I've also seen him finally start to acknowledge and respect me as an independent adult over the last few years and that feels pretty good.

On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, my partner has a fantastic relationship with his 7-year-old daughter (my stepdaughter). He's very emotionally intelligent and self-aware and has no problem talking with his kid about feelings - hers or his own. He also rejects the idea of traditional gender roles and doesn't feel at all weird about playing dress up with her, getting his nails painted, or any of the other "girly" things she likes to do with him. Neither of us had good parental relationships modeled for us growing up (mine were distant and affectionless with each other, his were volatile) so we do our best to show his kid what a loving, respectful adult relationship looks like. I've often thought that I wish my dad had been a parent to me like my partner is to his daughter.

I think the most important thing about any parent-child relationship is that the child feels supported, respected, and confident to come to their parent about how they're feeling. That's going to look different in any relationship, but staying empathetic and not assuming you know better than your kid about what's going on in their mind is always a good place to start. It also helps to be self-aware. Recognize where you might have hangups or emotional baggage and be proactive about addressing it. I have done more self-work in the last two years of being a stepparent than in the previous ten. That's not to say I didn't also do a lot in those ten years, but my partner and I both strongly believe that it's our job as parents to do better than our own parents did, even if our parents had been stellar. But no pressure, right? XD

It's well after midnight and I'm rambling now so I'm going to quit while I'm ahead.

Eggs are a staple food and an ingredient in an absolute fuck ton of things. They're also very nutrient-dense and a major source of protein for vegetarians and people who can't eat meat. Sure, you can just not buy eggs but that's not realistic for everyone and it doesn't stop the price of everything that includes eggs as an ingredient from going up.

It's a private company in the "health and wellness" industry. Basically modern day snake oil salesmen that convince vulnerable (or stupid) people that "big pharma" is evil and giving you cancer or whatever, while the mystery pill they're peddling will cure anything that ails you. It typically comes with a hefty price tag, lots of sales pressure, and zero evidence to back it up.

The fatal dose is significantly lower for xylitol. If my 90 lb dog ate a few pieces of chocolate, he might be miserable for a few days and need a vet visit, but it would take a lot to be fatal. If he ate a few pieces of gum, it could make him much, much sicker or kill him.

IIRC white means you got all the secret glyphs in one playthrough.

I'm getting real California City vibes.