the middle knitter

(Forewarning: This post doesn't have any knitting in it at all, but it does have the Miracle of Life, which is almost as good, right? Come back in a few days for knitting.)

This is Hermes Trismegistus*. He's a Rhoeo spathacea, or "Moses in the Cradle". I bought him from Wal-mart last winter. (He was about an eighth of that size when I got him. The smallest bag of potting soil I could get was laced with Miracle Gro, and that stuff really works.)

It's been kind of a challenge figuring out what to do with Hermes when I go away for break. For the shorter breaks, I usually just water him and stick a plastic bag over his head. For the longer ones, I have to find somebody local who's willing to take care of him. This summer, I left him at the house of the lady Aud and I housesat for this summer (the one with the dogs). In order to cut down on the hassle for her (since she did me several really big favors this summer), I left him outside on her porch, with her petunias.

A month of sitting outside made Hermes go a little bit feral, I think. When I picked him up, he was full of twigs and leaves . . . in fact, I think there's still an acorn cap sitting in his pot. He was also full of caterpillars, and several of his leaves had something on them that looked suspiciously like eggs.

When we got back to the dorm, I took him straight to the kitchen sink and hosed him down with extreme prejudice. In the process, I managed to break off several fairly substantial sprigs. (It was a small price to play for not having mystery creatures hatching in my dorm room. My roommates are grateful.) Not to let them go to waste, I trimmed them and stuck them in a class of water to see if I could get them to sprout roots like my mom used to do with her houseplants.

I was unsure about it, honestly. I wasn't sure if I should have trimmed the cuttings (reassurances from my biology major roommates notwithstanding), and it just seemed like there must be some sort of magic surrounding such a procedure.

So when I found these, not a week later, I was thrilled and amazed. Just like that! I mean, seriously, I just stuck some cuttings in water, and in a matter of DAYS they had sprouted little roots. These are serious about surviving, you guys. I think it's amazing. I keep holding the cup in my roommates' faces and saying, "Look at this! There are more new roots today! Isn't that amazing?" (You have to be a special kind of person to tolerate me as a roommate.)

Anyway, now I have a bunch of little baby Hermeses on the way and I need to figure out what to do with them. I could plant maybe one of them. I still have one little pot leftover from when Hermes himself was small, but I really don't want to be juggling another houseplant around. One is hassle enough.

I'd like to send them to my mom, actually. She likes houseplants, and I bet she'd appreciate them pretty well. But that means I need to figure out a way to ship live plant cuttings across nearly 2,000 miles.

Let this be a lesson to all of you: think carefully before spawning little baby living things. Whether they're babies or houseplants, you'll be responsible for their existence. You need to be prepared for that.

* Hermes Trismegistus was the aspect of the Greek god Hermes that the Greeks associated with the Egyptian god Thoth. He spawned a whole corpus of magical texts in Late Antiquity, appropriately called the Corpus Hermeticum. For those of you playing along at home, there are at least three degrees of geekiness involved here: I named my house plant (1) after a Greek god (2), and not only a Greek god, but a fairly obscure aspect of that god, who actually represents an Egyptian god (3).

Recently, my knitting queue got long enough that I had to make a file on my computer for it. I had too many gifts promised or deadlines looming, and plenty of projects I wanted to do for myself, so I had to organize them. Currently, the top of the priority list is gifts for Aud's family, because they're letting me come along with them to Rome over Christmas, which is an amazingly generous and nice thing to do.

I've been really stumped by the gift for her brother. I'm sticking with a scarf, but I've had the hardest time picking a pattern that's the right balance of attractive and not girly.

I went with a simple 3x3 rib. I'm still not crazy about it, but at this point I'm pretty much giving up and just knitting. The main thing hampering me is the yarn. It's recycled from a Goodwill sweater. It's an acrylic/wool/angora blend. The plan is to go sickeningly cute and make him and his girlfriend items out of the same yarn. The problem is, the angora is just an inherently girly yarn--something about the fuzz and the hairs. It's hard to make angora angry.

Also, the fibers coming off of the angora really bother my allergies. So, every time I go to work on the scarf, my eyes and nose start itching. It's unpleasant.

In order to escape the angora, I dug out my old lime green merino and started a sweater for Afghans for Afghans.

I don't have a pattern . . . I basically just cast on enough stitches to go around my needles and started knitting. The needles are too big for the yarn, so when the sweater's done, I'm going to felt it. It'll be warmer, and it'll cover up the fact that the stockinette is horribly lumpy and uneven.

Last night, I dreamed that Knitpicks was discontinuing their Felici. I was very, very distressed by this.

I pretty much can only knit on the weekends. During the rest of the week, school keeps me too busy. When I'm reading for class, I have to do it with a pen in hand, or the whole thing goes in one ear and out the other. During the rest of the week, I rely on the little critter you see above to occupy my moments between events. Yes, my friends, you're looking at a bona fide Tamagotchi.

When I was a kid, these things were all the rage. I never got one. I had a Gigapet, a dog. It was fun enough, but I was annoyed, because every time it grew up, it looked exactly the same. (Unless I starved it or mistreated it, and I was the ultimate Goody Goody child--I didn't break the rules or abuse my virtual pets.) I have to say, the Tamagotchi definitely beats that old Gigapet.

I'm especially fond of its current incarnation. Its name is Mars (because I give each new pet a classical name), and it turned into a hamster. It's adorable. I love how adorable it is, and I love the irony of the Tamagotchi I named after the god of war being an adorable hamster.

No posts for now. Sorry, guys--the weekend got away from me, and now I'm staring down the barrel of a good eight hours of homework to be done before bed. Erk.