Day: November 5, 2020

Blanket Update

November 2, 2020 6 of 8

I tried, but it looks like eight posts isn’t going to happen today, either. Well, better luck tomorrow. I did leave my word count goal behind me over 300 words ago. So there’s that.

So, I’m still unraveling the blanket and trying to figure out how to make a large knitted blanket out of all of these pieces without losing a lot of yarn to knots when it hit me.

As I said earlier, this blanket is ancient. Some of the threads are snapping as I unravel them because they’re so worn. So I’m going to have to knit it from two strands held together as one.

This is one of my weirder photos. I was unable to get a picture of the Washington Monument that I really liked, partially because of my equipment but mostly because of the fact that they’d drained the reflecting pool when we were there in 2010. When we were walking along the National Mall, though, I noticed that I could see the reflection of the Monument in this puddle. So now, if this blog ever does take off, this pigeon will be famous.

So, rather than pairing up strands, what if I double the strand over and join it to another strand with a square knot*? Then I don’t have to find two strands the same length. I mean, knotting it this way will automatically make two strands the same length kind of by definition.

I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before.

*That’s the knot where you bend both strands in half and then loop one loop through the other and then pull the non-looped end through the loop. That’s probably not really any clearer, but it’s nearly midnight and I’ve had a busy day, so that’s probably the best I can do right now.

Gratuitous Amazon Link time! This one’s by one of my favorite kidlit authors, so you’ll be seeing her name a lot. This 12-hour period will be brought to you by Winterborne Home for Vengeance and Valor, by Ally Carter. I wasn’t really thrilled by the title, but the story was fantastic. April comes to live at the Winterborne house with a group of orphans. April has a key with the Winterborne family crest on it, and she’s convinced that the key opens a lock somewhere in the house.

I Wonder of Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT) is Still a Thing?

November 2, 2020 5 of 8

Yay! My first medical article, I think.

This post is brought to you by still more blanket unraveling. The blanket is king-sized and while trying to work out the best way to do this, I’ve only unraveled about 0.9% of the blanket. By my estimation, the original blanket (minus the hem, which I just cut off, because life’s too short for trying to unhem a 10-year-old blanket with a seam ripper) is 56 square feet (5.2 square meters) and I still have 50.25 square feet (4.67 square meters) of blanket to unravel.

Actually, now that I’m thinking about it, since those 5.75 square feet are a fringe, I’ve only unraveled half of that area. So I think I may have only unraveled 0.045% of the blanket.

So I’m thinking “at least I’m getting my NEAT on,” which made me wonder if the science is still good on that.

Looking at the PubMed abstract of an article (Non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT)) from 2002, which may be the original article defining NEAT, I see that this article has been cited in 33 articles total, four articles of them in the last year. Two of the 33 articles were clinical trials.

While I believe that health is more important than waist size and these pages don’t necessarily follow that belief, I also found this page from Harvard Medical School and this page from Vanderbilt University Medical Center. So I guess the NEAT thing isn’t completely out of favor.

Time for another Gratuitous Amazon Link. This is another choice from the Fantastic Strangelings Book Club: Catherine House, by Elisabeth Thomas. This one was good, but really creepy. Our protagonist, Ines, is invited to Catherine House, a school that doesn’t consider itself to be a college or university, but which takes the place of one. The course of study at Catherine House takes three years, and their students are forbidden to leave the grounds during that time. And, of course, as with all of these kinds of books, there is a secret at Catherine House and Ines cannot leave it alone until she finds out what it is.