and I forget what I was thinking about but SUDDENLY brain goes 'hey what if another bobbin?'

and at first I was like 'pfft, no, that wouldn't work' but then I thought about it a bit more and

CHAIN PLIED 4 PLY YARN

CHAIN PLIED SELF STRIPING YARN

lessons learned so far:

doing this directly on the wheel is a nightmare task (and probably would get you more variegation than self striping)

if you're going to do a chain ply ball from across the room don't be lazy and just use the lazy kate pins

all done! about 206 yds and 154 grams

notes:

there's both yarn that i did with shorter stripes (chain ply ball from across the room) and longer stripes (chain ply ball from the kitchen table, through the kitchen and into the hallway beyond). the second one is with a measurement that i got from a ball of self striping yarn in my stash

personally i find it interesting how with normal chain plying there's less color mixing with short loops and more mixing with longer loops, but with the nature of using two solid/tonal singles in different colors it's the opposite

the knit swatch uses both yarn from the end of the long stripe skein (bottom) and from that early attempt at chain plying directly at the wheel (top, but there's not much)

The tension is a little rough on these starting rounds and I wish I had done a couple extra rows of ribbing, but I’m still in the ‘wait and see if it resolves’ phase before I frog and try again.

"you look great!" - normal. Anyone could say this. Could be true or could just be lying to be nice. Very normal expected thing to say to someone

I really just have to summarize Thomas's entire life:

He was in a committed relationship with a male swan named Henry for 18-24 years before a female swan named Henrietta showed up and mated with Henry.

Thomas was initially jealous of the pair and attacked them, breaking 2 of the 5 eggs Henrietta had laid. However, once the remaining eggs hatched, Thomas warmed up to them and helped raise them.

Henry couldn't fly because of an injured wing, so Thomas taught the cygnets how to fly.

When they needed to reduce the goose population in the pond where Thomas and the swans lived, they dyed Thomas's feathers red so he wouldn't be separated from Henry.

Henry, Henrietta, and Thomas remained in their happy throuple for years and raised 68 cygnets before Henry died in 2009. After Henry's death, Henrietta found another swan and flew away, leaving Thomas alone.

Thomas finally met and mated with a female goose in 2011 and had his own babies. However, another goose named George stole them and raised them himself.

As Thomas grew elderly and blind, he was relocated to a wildlife center where he raised orphaned cygnets.

His caretaker at the center described him as "pretty high maintenance."

Thomas died in 2018 at the age of around 40. He had a funeral that included a small coffin and a procession that was led by a bagpiper. He was buried under the stone where Henry was buried, the two finally reunited in death.

A BAC content of 0.4% is defined as "the lethal dose" in most medical textbooks. That's the dose where half the people that reach it do not survive, the LD50. You take 20 people off the street, make them drink til their BAC is 0.4%, and odds are good you'll kill 10 of them.

For most people, that takes something like 13 back to back shots, equivalent to 20 oz total, or 600 mL.

If this woman weighed 200 lbs (90 kg) and just straight chugged those bottles in under an hour, her BAC would've peaked around 1.6, which is 4 times the level that would kill most people outright. It would take her 85 hours after stopping drinking to "sober up" to merely the lethal level.

If she were to space it over a 24 hour bender, that would still result in a peak BAC of "merely" 1.4%, still over three times the lethal dose, with an estimated three days to return to "merely lethal" levels of sobriety.

Several thoughts on this.

That fact that this person is not dead is, by itself, impressive.

The fact that they were able to travel somewhere and pull a prank in that state is legitimately incredible. The LD50 for falls is 50 feet. In my head, I am putting this on the same level as a woman falling out of a 5 story window, staggering away, only to get apprehended later gluing googly eyes to random objects.

There was a drinking game some of my friends played in college while watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail that we always wound up cheating at, because every time we attempted it we got blitzed. We did a fully sober watch of it one time while tallying, and that drinking game would've required us to take 55 shots in order to make it through honestly. We all agreed that was ridiculous, but I am only now processing that it was ridiculous in a way that could actually get people killed. If you're making drinking games, please try to give yourself a 9 shot budget, tops.

This woman consumed the equivalent of 65 shots. Which means that she alone could pass the Monty Python drinking game.

One of the Golden Rules from back in my Misspent Youth was to never ever ever drink while rolling. Ever.

It's been like ... 26 years since I did MDMA (yes, some of you can do math, that is in fact what changed)... but IIRC MDMA makes it harder to remember how much you've had to drink or tell how drunk you are, and you can end up drinking too much alcohol and/or too much water (bc you're puking and/or sweating too much), and it's just... bad. Confusion, delirium, memory loss, total inability to regulate your body temperature...

This won't matter in the moment, but combining alcohol and MDMA can strip way more serotonin out of your brain in concert than either one does alone, leading to a phenomenon known as "Suicide Tuesday," where you drop out of your 3-day-weekend-long roll/drunk into a dark well with no bottom that lasts for days and days while your brain desperately tries to shove serotonin back into itself.