Here's an unfortunate truth about my color knitting skills: they suck. I do okay with intarsia but my fair isle/stranding work is abysmal. That averages to thousand G-force suckdom. The Indian Floral Vest swatch looked dreadful -- MESSY -- so I ripped it out. I should have ordered A LOT more yarn because I am going to have to do A HUNDRED practice swatches. That is in addition to the hundred I already knew I was going to make to practice all that embroidery adorning the vest fronts.

On the flip side, the Clock Vest is going well. I'm starting to pick up the rhythm of the cable patterns so my speed has increased. Unfortunately, this Plymouth Bamboo Circular is not making me happy. The finish isn't as smooth as I like and the stitches get hung up at the joint. I’m going to have to remember not to buy any more.

I watched the most recent movie version of The Time Machine again this week. This movie, like the Frankenstein movie Kenneth Branagh put out a few years ago, made changes to the story that brings to my mind an interesting question. In the books, the protagonists in both stories are motivated purely by Science (I think, it’s been a while since I read Frankenstein.) In the movies, the motivation is personal: in the Time Machine, the scientist builds his machine to go back in time and change his past, and in Frankenstein, the child Victor Frankenstein is so shattered by the loss of his mother that he determines he will find a way to conquer death. Apparently, nineteenth century audiences were willing to accept that a man would make enormous sacrifices for, and devote his life to, a quest for knowledge, and modern movie audiences are not. Is this true? If so, what changed? Is it a true shift in thinking or just the mode of storytelling?