The God Particle

The Higgs boson is supposedly that elusive thing that creates life...creation in a particle.

Spark of Life

When broken down into it's various components, the human body is just a list of elements...oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, etc.  Yet put all those elements in the correct proportion into a blender, and alas, a human is not what you will end up with.

So it is with all things creative in my mind.  Put together all the colors and the content, and even use the same kind of paint brush, and you could still hardly replicate the sublime beauty of something like a Matisse painting.

As I've begun to explore the act of creativity in my own life, I realize that not all the things I do are imbued with the same spark of life that some seem to create almost effortlessly.

I'm going to see one of my very favorite singing artists, Namoli Brennet, this coming week in Albany, and so on my drive up to Albany this week, I listened to her songs.  I realized that there wasn't one of the songs I listened to that didn't come together in an incredibly successful way.  And even though my playlist for a very early Monday morning consisted solely of her songs, the music was varied and diverse and endlessly interesting (or at least interesting enough to keep me entertained for about 3 hours drive).

Perhaps my creativity will start to come a bit more naturally and not require quite so much effort and fuss.

Current Knitting

I have been doing some work on the Icelandic wool pullover, and I'm making progress on the upper back.   But I've also been working on a new project, that seems to be turning out just swell.

Yes, it's another pullover, but different than most sweaters I've knit.  I started with a center panel of garter stitch, inserting two rows of gray stripe.  Then I picked up stitches on each side of the center panel, and did shaping and intarsia to continue the stripe across the chest.

The back will not have the stripes, but will have a random square of gray on the center of the back.  I am whimsically hoping the Higgs boson is present in this design and it comes to life.  Perhaps I'll call this project, Frankenstein.

Readers' Comments/Questions

Regarding the biscuit recipe, Jo writes, "It would be a lovely gift to make a credible biscuit! It seems like the proportion of flour and sugar is wrong in the transcription of the recipe here on the blog? "

I realized the recipe looked rather weird in Chrome...so I'll try and edit it so it looks correct.  There's very little sugar and a bit more flour.

To all the blog readers who speak the Queen's English (the other queen), I apologize for using a word that has a different meaning for you...biscuit for us is a non-yeast dinner roll, with baking powder as leavening...not a cookie.

Carol also writes, "We eat/drink so much Kefir, and have been thinking about making it ourselves. Could you tell me, please, how Thaddeus does this?"

I could probably get him to explain this all to me, but you'd be much better off googling this.  He purchased a live grain of kefir from someone on-line, which came soaking in milk.  He adds about 2 cups of milk to the grain every day and a half and creates a beverage that I can hardly gag down...it doesn't taste anything like the kefir I buy in the supermarket.  And I'm sure there are details I've left out...best to do a bit of investigation of this one on your own...there's tons of information on the interwebs.