Not Dead Yet

I have a nifty new iPad to play with. Here's an example of some handwriting to text I've been toying with. The translation is sort of hilariously weird with some of my scrawling but still pretty cool.

I've gone quiet fiwoggingnfhen Mets, busy. But, a New Year is upon us. I have. a shiny new iPad Mini. I'm hoping t will streamline some of my writing. I seem to do better writing by hand than typing. I've been filling stew pads, but am hgsnng to use my iPad and wind up with min text from my scrawling.

Loot

My birthday was on Wednesday. There was loot.

The Oreos are already gone.  I have to find something to attach the "Beware of Attack Ferret" sign to.  And I'm fiddling around trying to figure out a way to send only some of my news from Google Reader to my Kindle.  

Four Years Ago Today

I was in Khartoum for the very first time.  Specifically at the museum, drooling over cool things.

Mmm, pottery

Was-sceptres and ankhs with arms so they can hold up flags

C-Group pottery

Probably a beer strainer.  Ancient beer was some funky, chunky junk.

Beautiful Kerma beaker.  We still aren't sure how they managed to achieve that silvery "ash band"

Weights for quantities of gold.  The semi-circle with the tails at either end is the hieroglyph nbw for "gold"

Bronze mirrors, probably imported from Egypt during the New Kingdom

Two colossal statues of Kushite kings

Antique graffiti

Tom's ass in a temple

Enemies of Egypt personified as bound prisoners (heads missing)

And the lesson of the day:  I should really have gone through these back in the day and captioned them more fully because I honestly can't remember for sure what some of them are or why I thought it important to take those particular shots.  Or even if I had the camera for some of them or if Tom had it. 

Anyway, the museum is awesome.  They've reconstructed several Egyptian temples that would have been flooded by the formation of Lake Nasser had they not been chopped up into manageable blocks and then moved.  Mmmm, temples.  Temples without other tourists.  Mmmmmm.

Xmas Morning

Heeeee!

Most hilarious moment - ripping wrapping paper to see this:

I screamed "WHYYYYYY!!?!?!?" for quite some time after I stopped laughing.  It's a SodaStream, by the way, and should be super awesome.

I also got a scarf and more sock monkey jammies!  Eeee, sock monkeys!!!!

Oreo got a goose toy.  And some other stuff, but he's mostly interested in killing the goose.

And Tom got a new money clip and I got him a starter pack from the Art of Shaving.

The 12 Days of Ice Age Christmas

Snowmass tally: 10 mastodons, 4 mammoths, one "once-in-a-lifetime" find - The Denver Post

Pretty nifty find. The list of animals has me thinking someone should get cracking on some song lyrics.

Some earlier articles about the initial find by the guys digging the reservoir indicate that at least one of the mammoths was buried in peat which would account for the preservation (rather than fossilization) of bone and hopefully some soft tissue.

Widespread Panic fans will be interested to learn that Snowmass Village at least considered making "Big Wooly Mammoth" the official village song.

NAMIWalks Chicago - Team T-Shirts

As I've mentioned before my husband, some friends and I are walking for the National Alliance on Mental Illness in Chicago this coming Sunday. (There is a link on the right side-bar of my blog for those who'd like to donate/sponsor us.)

NAMI has encouraged teams to get t-shirts. Tom and I decided we'd screenprint our own.

So, Tom found this tutorial on Instructables and I found a related one on Cut Out and Keep.

I wanted an Old West sort of font for the team name, since we're the James Gang and crossed canes.

Tom was nice enough to turn a photo of an ergonomic cane like the one I prefer to use into a silhouette in Illustrator. I did the rest in Inkscape (there was a lot of swearing while I was figuring out how to get text to arch).

I spent most of yesterday painting out the negative space in my screen - a quilting hoop holding some old sheer curtains. I mixed a bit of white acrylic paint with Mod Podge to paint out the negative space (the paint was so it was easier to see where I'd painted).

Tonight we pulled prints using fabric paint rather than proper screenprinting ink because netiher of us felt like going across the city to get proper screenprinting ink.

Pretty cool, huh?

James Hance - Relentlessly Cheerful Art

James Hance - Relentlessly Cheerful Art

Some fabulous stuff here and the prints seem very reasonably priced. We have a few bare walls that need decorating...

NAMI Walks

Wow!  Less than 24 hours and I've already hit my fund raising goal of $100.  Big thank you and kisses to my sponsors!

I had kept the goal low because I know money is tight for a lot of people right now - I was expecting $5 here and there, but some lovely friends have been wonderfully generous!

You can still sponsor or join the team!  We still have 47 days to go.

Evolution of the Alphabet

The Oriental Institute Museum has a regular series of special exhibits.  At the moment, the show is Pioneer to the Past about the trip of the OI's founder, James Henry Breasted through Egypt and the Middle East visiting various significant sites, many of which the OI at the time had projects exploring.

Coming this fall will be Visible Language: Inventions of Writing in the Ancient Middle East.
Should be pretty cool.

My husband has been working on various behind-the-scenes stuff for the show, one of which is this awesome, awesome video showing the evolution of signs from Egyptian hieroglyphs to our own alphabet.  The link goes to the OI's Facebook page, which you should be able to view even if you aren't a member of Facebook.  There are some other sneak-peaks of the upcoming show there too.

It's both an excellent explanatory tool, but I'm also very impressed with the video in general.  Very awesome. 

I know many of you are interested in the origins of writing, etc., so I thought you'd especially enjoy this.  Even if you can't make it to Chicago for the show, I do encourage you to check out the OI Facebook presence and the website for all kinds of fun photos and videos and other snippets of info.

Archaeological Field Records as Art

I was just messing around surfing on Wiki and glanced at the entry for the Hallstatt culture (Iron Age in Central Europe) and found this glorious watercolor of a series of graves excavated by Johann Georg Ramsauer in the mid 19th Century.  The records were apparently never published, but survived as folios.
Really, really awesome (to me at least). Field records can be that way, especially when dealing with highly decorative or "artistic" assemblages, but making these pit burials beautiful and alive was probably far more challenging. Very cool.

Finished Pug

Last night I finished making a pug amigurumi using a pattern from the wonderful June at Planet June. Despite her wonderful pattern instructions and equally wonderful on-line tutorials, I think the color changes in the eye-mask area turned out a little wonky, but she's still a cute little pug baby. I'm hoping she'll be loved by her recipient. As it is, I think I may have blisters on my fingers from all that crocheting. :P
I'm ashamed to admit I've barely used my zafu since finishing it. It seems every time I'm about to move from the couch to it Oreo decides he wants to climb in my lap and I can't resist doggie cuddle time.

First Dye Results

I pulled the fiber out of it's plastic wrap first thing after I got up today and gave it a good rinse in luke-warm water until the water ran clear.


Then I laid it out on a towel, folded the towel and walked on it a bit to press out the water.

And, finally, I laid it out on a drying rack under a ceiling fan and let it dry.

The colors turned out waaaaay better than I expected - very vibrant and rich. There were a couple weird bleed spots, but no big deal. Even better, though I don't think you can tell in my craptastic photos, I managed some decent purples, which are usually difficult to obtain as the dye tends to "break" into red and blue.

I'll try for some better photos in natural light soon.

Now I just have to figure out this whole drop-spinning thing. ;)

Star Trek Beer Cozy = Awesome + Win

Mr. Spock Season One Beer Koozie
Originally uploaded by lizzylaws

Lizzylaws has created a fabulous beer (or other bottle) cozy based on the Star Trek uniforms from Season 1 of the original series.
I love the details - the rank stripe, the delta-shield insignia with the science device.
Super nifty.

Even better, she's offering it as a finished object in her Etsy shop, LizardKnits or for the knitting-abled, as a pattern for sale on Ravelry.

Given my fondness for Star Trek, knitting, and root beer and ginger beer, I am an enormous fan!
You can find out more at her blog, too!

Merrick, The Elephant Man

Merrick, The Elephant Man
Originally uploaded by MrFoxyy

Very cool amigurumi of John Merrick. Interesting topic, and another example of the very interesting mouth technique that Mr Fox has demonstrated with other pieces, like Mr. Bunnyford, one of the ultimate marriages of cute and nightmarish I've seen.

Patterns and finished items available at Mr. Foxy's Toy Emporium.

Amenhotp III statue head surfaces in Luxor

King Tut's grandfather's statue head surfaces in Luxor
| Reuters

Pretty cool. Sourouzian keeps finding all kinds of cool stuff in what used to be the Mortuary Temple of Amenhotep III. This time it's the head of a colossal statue that they probably found the body of a while back.  For scale, the head is about as tall as a person.

If you look at the photo, you can get an idea of the amazing quality of the sculpting. The sort of rectangular notch was probably to hold on a separate decorative element. He's wearing the white (bowling pin) crown of Upper Egypt (the south), which is usually associated with the vulture goddess, so the uraeus is probably to represent Renenutet spitting at his enemies.

His cheekbones are highly modeled and he has a faint smile and the corners of his mouth drilled. Really beautiful work, especially in granite (probably from Aswan). His nose is intact too, which is really nice, because statues have a habit of falling face first and smashing off their noses.

Amenhotep seemed to be sort of obsessed with youth - it seems that the later in his reign you get, the younger he appears to be in depictions. In actuality, he was probably a rotten-toothed, fat bastard near the end of his life. It's possible he even went so far as to ask some vile Asiatics for help - his father-in-law (AIII had a lot of wives, including a daughter of the king of Mitanni), and Tushratta of Mitanni was kind enough to send a statue of Ishtar said to have healing powers. (However, reexamination of the Amarna Letters suggests that the statue came to bless the marriage of the princess of Mitanni and Amenhotep III and not to heal his fat ass...)

It's sort of amazing to see these huge things coming out of what was a flat, boring looking field the last time I was in Luxor (which was 2004). You have the two colossal statues of Amenhotep III (one of which is the Colossi of Memnon that used to sing at sunrise until some stupid Roman messed it up) and then...a field. No sign at all of the immense mortuary temple at all. It was actually sort of weird to see those statues just sitting there.

Apparently, judging by the recent finds, there's some pretty awesome stuff under the field, though.

Thanks, peoples!

My page visits seem to have jumped quite a lot in the past day or so, which is very nice to see.  Hi!
I'm reasonably certain a lot of that is thanks to Samurai Knitter who also blogs about knitting and science (her favorite flavor is botany) and history and other fun stuff in a lovely, snarky manner.  Also, she has a cat named Sekhmet and a daughter likely to become a mad scientist in the near future, so really, staying on her good side before they (the cat and daughter) take over the world is probably a good idea.

One of my Egyptological buddies (in fact we started grad school together lo these many years ago) gave me the transliteration for "Suck it, old man" -  snqy s i iAw.  Glad to see all those years of hard work paid off.  I genuinely appreciate him saving me the effort of trying to figure it out myself.  I firmly maintain that the weird MRI spots on my brain are located directly over the Egyptian language storage centers.  :P

I'm contemplating trying to do some treatments of Egyptian history in the same way as the Tut stuff on a semi-regular basis.  I had a lot of fun writing these past posts without having to worry about appropriate tone and footnotes and crap.  So, we'll see where that goes.  Requests are welcome.  As it is, I may well just start up with the Predynastic and work forward.

Internet sabbatical

Just a quick note.
I'm feeling dreadful the past few days and so have decided to take an internet break today (yes, I just woke up and got out of bed, that's what delayed sleep phase disorder plus chronic pain does to you).  I hear the Tutankhamun DNA results were leaked earlier today and while I find the preliminary data fascinating, I'm also not really in any condition to say much about other than "wow, cool.  Wait, what?"
So, planning on curling up with a book and fighting off headache and sore throat with rousing fantasy fiction.
Hopefully I can get my hands on a copy of the JAMA article when it's actually published later this week.  I am most interested to see the results as presented there rather than 2nd and 3rd hand through the press.

On another note, so far as I know, I was totally right about Tut not being a chick.  :P

Golden Dragonet

Golden Dragonet
Originally uploaded by Angry Angel

This Pern inspired dragonet (or fire-lizard) by Angry Angel is amazing. The detail with the eyes is great and now has me wondering if all the nifty new tech for making interactive and/or light-up soft-form toys and objects would make it possible to get eyes to whirl and change color like they do in the books.

Angry Angel notes that she wanted a fire-lizard as a child. Theoretically, I'm a grown up and I still want one. Seriously. If I ever get stupidly rich, I do believe I will endow a research project to create them. Of course, when the abominations unto the Lord that inadvertently are created and released and proceed to wreak havoc on the world at large, I'll be a villain. But it will totally be worth it. :P
Ahem.
I hope the recipient appreciates her, because she's absolutely wonderful.

Latest Project

It's a re-usable/washable duster sleeve for a pronged hand-duster that might rhyme with "sniffer."

I used Sugar n Creme cotton (which you can't see it this super lazy photo I took with PhotoBooth) and Lion Brand Fun Fur and followed this pattern.  See here if you aren't on Ravelry.

Nifty coolness.

Presents!

To the right you can see the product of my hard labor with the sewing machine: a laptop sleeve for Tom's new MacBook Pro. I used the really awesome pattern from Sew Mama Sew with a few modifications. I couldn't find fusible fleece, so I would up using double-sided sewable fusing to stick quilt batting to the appropriate pattern pieces. I used a cigar patterned quilting cotton for the lining and black twill for the exterior.

It's a nice, snug fit and pleasantly soft without being too fluffy.

For the motif on the exterior I found a photograph of a bannerstone, did a basic automated trace of it in Inkscape, printed it out, traced it onto half of a manilla file folder using graphite paper and then cut out the outline using an Xacto blade to make a stencil.

I stuck a good-sized book inside the finished case, put a washcloth over it just in case there was any bleeding from the paint, and then pinned the stencil to the case with a multitude of pins.

Then I used white textile paint and a sponge brush and filled in the stencil and went over it with some pewter textile paint and a smaller sponge brush to get the look of veining in the stone.

I really enjoyed this project and am very happy that Tom likes it and it turned out so well.

The only major snags were the lack of a free arm on my sewing machine, which made stitching around the opening a huge pain and the fact that the basting spray I bought to stick the batting to the lining wound up not having a spray nozzle. I wound up with the double-sided fusible, though, and I think it worked out much better in the end.

For my presents, I got more sock monkey jammies and matching slipper socks (aren't they fabulous?) and one set of double pointed knitting needles with the instruction to buy a set of multiple sizes of my choosing. I went with these from Amazon. This means I'm a step closer to knitting socks!

I also have cash to do something with. I'm considering a new low-end sewing machine with a bit more funcitonality - buttonholes, more stitches, more presser foots, and a free arm. Nothing particularly fancy.

Oreo got some new treats that are supposed to be good for his joints and a rubber squid thing with long felt tentacles.

So, a wonderful Christmas all around.  I hope everyone else had as nice a day!