Herp 'n' Knit

No clever title, funny photo

Seen across from the Morehouse Merino store in upstate NY (picture taken last year following the NY Sheep & Wool Festival at Rhinebeck):

Virus, go away!

I may just be the laziest blogger on the planet. It's not that I don't want to blog, but darn life just keeps getting in the way! After two weeks of sick kids, I am the lucky recipient of their cold, which includes a nasty sore throat. After working at home on Monday to avoid getting my coworkers sick as well, it's only getting worse, not better. Aaarrggh -- I haven't even had time to take pictures of my latest secret pal package yet! :(

Rest assured secret pal, your package was much appreciated and really brightened up my day. I am still petting the organic cotton when I feel too sick to knit. Although, maybe if I do a little more knitting, I'll feel better... Worth a shot, right?

Memes

I became interested in the origin of memes and how they propagate, and came across this on Wikipedia:

The term "meme" (IPA: /miːm/, to rhyme with "theme", not /mɛm/ or /mimi/), coined in 1976 by the zoologist and evolutionary scientist Richard Dawkins, refers to a unit of cultural information transferable from one mind to another. Dawkins said, Examples of memes are tunes, catch-phrases, beliefs, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. A meme propagates itself as a unit of cultural evolution and diffusion — analogous in many ways to the behavior of the gene (the unit of genetic information). Often memes propagate as more-or-less integrated cooperative sets or groups, referred to as memeplexes or meme-complexes.

Couldn't resist this meme, stolen from http://knittingspaz.blogspot.com/.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.

Well, here it is:

Initiative often takes this form of being unusually enterprising. Take the shipping clerk who realized his company did enough business with Federal Express to get not just a volume discount, but a dedicated computer to track shipping orders. The clerk took it on himself to approach the CEO as he was leaving work and pitch the idea -- and saved the company $30,000.

From Daniel Goleman's Working with Emotional Intelligence