...Is that meant to happen?

• New Thing Learned for 6 February: The chemical family of steroids share a carbon structure of three 6-sided and one 5-sided rings; hence, in nature and in the lab it's "relatively" easy to convert one to another. The work of Percy Julian, the second African-American to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry, paved the way to production of these hormones on industrial scales. [Source: Nova, "Forgotten Genius".]
  
  
• New Thing Learned for 7 February: Tyrian purple comes from the puke of the snail, or at least that's more or less how the presenter characterized it -- it's some sort of mucusy secretion, anyway. (Yes, again with the snails.) I'd heard somewhere it was from the ground-up shells, I guess they were trying to sanitize it for the kiddies or something... [Source: The Naked Archaeologist, "True Blue".]
  
  
• New Thing Learned for 8 February: I suck at plunging out toilets. Sorry, I'll try to go learn something more useful by the end of the day. ;)

Meant to Get Things Done today, but ended up in a running argument with our delicate flower of a toilet instead. This happens more often than is reasonable, and we do have a replacement all researched and waiting for the funds to fall out of the sky from somewhere, but for now I'm still having to work on my plunging technique about once a month, just to keep my skills sharp. Bah. Now my hands hurt and we have to call a plumber anyway.

Mum, the Plumber.

...AANND I think I'll let that provisional Thing Learned for today stand, because Mum walked in and had the thing unblocked in six minutes. Now wondering if it would be worth it to have a kid just to see if the dormant gene-for-unblocking-toilets-and-finding-things would automatically switch on. Ah well, it saved us a plumber's bill anyway.


5.75 repeats left in the Shawl That Ate My Liver And Lights; the partial number is because "Chicago Tonight" is coming to film a piece at the city's knitting thing tomorrow and I've decided that my lust for glory is sufficient to drive me out even in this weather to be there, so I knit ahead of my daily quota-to-get-this-thing-done-by-next-meeting by working up the one complicated round of the four here in the relative tranquility of my own home, where nobody cares that I have to count under my breath to keep from losing my place when we're talking about numbers greater than five. And yes, I was knitting during the ballgame, and yes, I did lose my place every time an announcer said a number. It's an ADD thing.