To be saddled with me.
She gave me this blog for Christmas a year ago—one of the absolute best gifts ever—and now is saddled with photography/uploading/downloading/troubleshooting duties. She encouraged me to write up my knitting patterns and now is also saddled with more photography/formatting/troubleshooting duties.
Ravelry ups the technological ante. I can navigate Ravelry just fine on my own, but spending time there leads me to various things that cause me to bat my eyes and come out with sentences that begin, “Honey…?” and that end with Melissa coming to the rescue in all sorts of ways.
And the Ravelry universe is big. One doesn’t just find knitting enticements and conundrums. One finds all sorts of temptations.
Case in point: I signed up for Ravelry’s Scientific Knitters Group. Not that I am a scientist, but I love reading, talking, thinking about various kinds of science. And one of the conversational threads on the Scientific Knitters Group is a discussion of good science podcasts available for down-loading.
There are Emerging Infectious Diseases podcasts, Quirks and Quarks out of Canada, a program called Radio Lab, science podcasts from the New York Times, Nature, and Scientific American, a science-for-laypeople podcast called The Naked Scientists, the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe, even individually produced programs like The Missing Link.
Having discovered all these, I have of course dashed off an email to Melissa (who today is attending the Seventh International Conference on Neuroesthetics in Berkeley—I am not the only info-geek in our relationship, I’ll have you know) chock-full of questions. How do I download these? What does it mean to subscribe to a podcast? Is there any way to do this all systematically? And—will you help me pick out an ipod, Honey?
I sense a whole new obsession coming on. If science podcasts were chum and I was a shark, we’d have a full-on feeding frenzy.
Lucky for me, knitting and podcast-listening are highly compatible.
P.S. While this all may be of limited interest to many of you, I’m posting about it in hopes of helping out other scientific wanna-bes.