Ennui Or Emotional Exhaustion?

My cousin left on Friday morning and I've plunged into the shallows of ennui, except that it may just be emotional exhaustion. My mother's funeral is over, her body is buried, and there's nothing urgent for me to do right now.

The Red Scarf Project is over for the year, my scarves are sent off, and there's nothing urgent for me to knit right now.

The books I'm reading are good, but not as compelling as the John Ringo books. There's nothing I'm dying to read.

And I'm 15,000-plus postings behind in AFCA! That's alt.fan.cecil-adams, a newsgroup on Usenet, that I recommend to all my clever, intelligent e-friends. Reading the postings there, like participating, will lead me out of this ennui. The intelligence, the curiosity, the friendship, the humor--all of them will speed my re-engagement with life.

As a sign of this re-engagement, I just started casting on a scarf made with blue India ribbon. Every knitted thing begins with a single stitch, usually a slip knot.

Now and then, as I knit, I think about topology and Knot Theory. People who study knots would define a knitted piece as one big knot. Even the simplest garter-stitch potholder is, as I understand it, more complex than they can handle. A lacy shawl would bring their tools to a standstill. Yet we knitters produce such complexity routinely, never worrying about theorem or axioms.

Of course knitters aren't special in doing complex things without concern. When we've gone on a cruise we've liked to sit up near the bow of the ship and watch the water solve the Naviér-Stokes equations in closed form, in three dimensions, in real time. That's vastly more than aerodynamicists or hydrodynamicists can do, even with best and fastest computers.

Red Scarf Photos

Here, courtesy of my Xmas-present digital camera and The GIMP, are some reasonably sized photos of the scarves I knitted for the Red Scarf Program. I had planned on sending two red scarves and a dark rose Moebius scarf, but I changed my mind and sent a white mohair/acrylic Moebius instead.

These had to be in Virginia by the end of the month, so I sent them UPS second-day air. I was running way behind getting the box packed up, so it wasn't ready to go until 1600 or so. I printed out the shipping label and realized I'd forgotten to schedule a pick-up, so I did that and taped up the box. About five minutes after I'd set the box out by my front door, a UPS guy came by and took it away. Now that's real on-call service. It couldn't have been more than twenty minutes from when I hit 'return' to schedule the pick-up.

This is the first red scarf, knit in cartridge ribbing. It looks kind of orange in the photo, because I took it in the afternoon sun and it's a little over-exposed, I think.


You can see the chain stitch edging produced by slipping one stitch at the beginning of every row and purling one at the end of every row.

Here's a close-up of the scarf, to show the pattern stitch better.



Here's the second, which is almost the same color as the first. They're both bright red. This one is "red", the first is "tomato", and the colors are very close. The pattern is Argosy from the latest issue of Knitty. As I mentioned previously, I didn't quite follow the pattern perfectly. Again, there's are chain-stitched edges, as you can see. There's also a systematic error in the knitting, where I didn't look carefully enough at the pattern. It's not really visible, though.



Here's a closer look at the scarf. Before I washed and blocked the scarf it had a beautiful rolling texture that got flattened out. However, the way the light hits the scarf here exaggerates what little of it remains, so you can get an idea of it. This was a fun scarf to make, being knitted on the diagonal. It's quick, too. I'm going to make more.



This is the third. It's a Moebius scarf, knitted from the center out, using Cat Bordhi's technique. The scarf has only one side and one edge (there are no seams). The yarn is mohair, acrylic, and something synthetic, making a light, fluffy, warm scarf.



Here's a close-up, where you can see that it's knitted alternately with stockinette and reverse stockinette. This is to keep it from rolling up into a tube from the center to the edge.

Off The Needles

Well, I finished the third red scarf for the Red Scarf Project. I knitted it in KnitPicks Wool of the Andes in (surprise) red. The pattern I started with was Argosy, which appeared in the Winter 2K6 Knitty. The reason I say I started with this pattern is because I wasn't paying quite as much attention as I should have been and I knitted my version a little differently.

Rather than saying that I screwed up, I'm going to say that I created a personal interpretation of the pattern. What I did was knit two together (k2tog) after every yarnover on the right side of the square, even though the pattern omits that for the first yarnover in the first right-side row. I didn't figure this out until I was about twenty rows from being done and I certainly wasn't going to rip it all out and do it over.

I also did something I almost always do, which is to add two stitches, one on each end of the row. I slip the first stitch purlwise and purl the last stitch on every row. This gives a nice even chain edging up the side and prevents an uneven edge. Of course, I could do the same thing by slipping the first stitch knitwise and knitting the last stitch, but slipping purlwise is the default.

So now I have three scarves. One, a dark rose Moebius scarf, is completely finished, washed, and blocked. The other two, the red Argosy and the tomato cartridge rib, are knitted but not finished. I haven't darned in the yarn ends or washed and blocked them. I'll finish them up as soon as I post this. I'll take snapshots tomorrow, after they dry, and then bundle them up and send them to Virginia on Monday. UPS is my friend.

I also picked up three $25 Visa gift cards and will enclose them, with washing instructions and a brief note, with the scarves. All my life I've had pretty much everything a person could expect, with loving, supportive parents providing resources. I had a friend in high school who was a foster child and it was a pretty miserable life. I'm quite sure it hasn't improved one bit.

Speaking of college students, my goddaughter is a freshman at Penn State. I'm sending her a bunch of scarves. One of them is the Moebius scarf I knitted for her and the rest are the scarves I knitted while visiting my mother. I sold five of those through a friend who has does craft shows but the show season is past and they probably won't be in style next year. My goddaughter lives in a dorm and has a lot of friends, so I'm sure these scarves will find good homes. Apparently some of the students from warmer climes, like Puerto Rico and Florida, haven't been quite prepared for how cold Pennsylvania gets and scarves will be welcome. I'll take snaps of them, too.

I'll accept requests for scarves from readers, too. As soon as I finish Boron's and Kim's scarves and the Cashmere Moebius Cowl by Cat Bordhi, I'll be taking new requests. I've got some really nice yarns, including cashmere and alpaca, to use, too.

Back To Normal, Sort Of

We had my mother's funeral on Monday and it was very well attended. The odd thing was that everyone but the family sat in the back rows and there were about five empty rows between the family in the centers of the two front rows and everyone else. The flowers were quite beautiful, even though we'd included her two volunteer groups in the obituary for donations in lieu of flowers.

My one uncle, one of her brothers, sent a beautiful wreath with ribbon streamers that read "Soaring With Eagles". This so baffled the folks at the church that they checked the card very carefully to be sure it was delivered to the correct funeral. What they didn't know about her was that she had been the office manager at the Antelope Valley Turkey Growers Association plant for over 25 years. The reference was, of course, to the aphorism "It's hard to soar with eagles when you work with turkeys all day".

The service and everyone's remarks were very comforting to me. I knew she was held in very high esteem by some people, but I hadn't realized how many or how high. My cousins' eulogy and remembrances were wonderful; their remarks really resonated with everyone.

The luncheon afterward was also well attended. The menu was lasagna, tossed salad, and cake. Comfort food, in short, and it did comfort us.

We inhumed (buried) her the next day, in a very brief ceremony with only five attendees. The weather wasn't too bad on either day, actually, but it was still cooler than I liked.

My cousin from New Jersey's wife has stayed on to help me. We went over to my mother's house yesterday and she took some books and clothes. I was really pleased that the clothes fit her and were to her taste because I know she'll think of my mother every time she wears them. That means a lot to me, knowing that my mother is fondly remembered.

We went and saw a lawyer on Wednesday. We'd gotten the appointment to put our estates in order with a living trust and wills, but we spent most of the hour discussing the probate of my mother's estate. I'd bought the Nolo Press book about probating estates in CA and decided that I didn't want to do it myself. I'll be the executrix but they'll do all the work. The state has set the fees and they're very reasonable. It'll take about six weeks to set everything up and get the probate court's approval, so it should be finished up this year.

We're going to go down to Palm Desert in about two weeks. I'm just going to pack up and leave everything. It won't be long before it gets so warm there that we want to come back up here. I want a little time away before I finish clearing out her house and dealing with everything.

Details, Details

I've finally finished everything I needed to do for my mother's funeral on Monday. The last thing was to submit her obituary to the local newspaper. They'd run a death notice already, with minimal information; this was the actual obituary, written by me, with more details of her life and family, etc. I had to submit this before noon on Friday to have it run on Saturday. I also had it run on Sunday.

Then I had to finish getting my house ready for company. We'd been planning to go back to Palm Desert in October when she was diagnosed with cancer in August. We put our plans on hold immediately and bought some winter clothes, but we'd been packing things up to go south and now we had summer clothes to add. I'd also been buying yarn and turning it into scarves, because knitting was such a comfort to me as I sat by her bed every day. Plus I'd been hitting Amazon kind of hard, what with buying John Ringo and David Drake books, as well as some werewolf books (no, I don't really believe in werewolves, but escapist literature has its place) and Overstock.com had offered several items that were just perfect for the new house. So I had a dining room and living room full of stuff. My friend Pat and I spend three days scurrying around, picking up the house for company.

My cousin and his wife, from New Jersey, got here about 4:00 pm, after checking into their hotel. We had a lovely visit, with dinner from Black Angus to-go, and they left about 8:00 pm, an hour and a half ago. It's really wonderful to have them here, as they are easy to get along with and tremendous support. He's going to be a pallbearer and give the eulogy. They'll both be here through Tuesday and then he goes back to work and she'll stay for the rest of the week. She'll go down to Joshua Tree to see her mom and sister for a couple of days and then fly home.

My other nearby cousin, his sister, and her husband will come up from Yucca Valley tomorrow (Sunday). We'll all have dinner together Sunday night, which should be really nice. My cousin's husband is going to play the organ for the service and be a pallbearer. They'll go back Monday as they both have to teach the next day.

Those two cousins are from my mom's side of the family. Their father is her oldest brother, about two years younger than her. I have two more cousins, with spouses, from my father's side who are going to come. One lives in Clovis, up in the CA Central Valley, and the other lives in Utah. The CA cousin and his wife will be joined by two of their (six) sons, who are in Los Angeles this weekend for a gift show. These two sons are pharmacists, as was their father before he retired, and live up near Fresno, where they have a small chain of pharmacies.

I have a lot more cousins than that, since my father was the youngest of ten and my mother the oldest of seven, but a lot of them live in Utah and Colorado and are concerned about the weather for driving. I told everyone, quite firmly, that my mother, who was a very practical and pragmatic woman, wouldn't have wanted them taking too big a risk to be there and they were to decide accordingly. The cousins younger than me have jobs to consider and the ones older than me worry more about the road conditions, so I don't think they'll come.

However, I expect the turnout to be fairly high, as people from both her volunteer organizations are going to be there. She had volunteered over 15,000 hours to the hospital auxiliary and knew pretty much everyone. Ditto the Friends of the Library. This is part of the reason the interment is going to be on Tuesday. Our weather has been pretty cold for us and I really didn't want to drag all the volunteers out into it, since so many of them are older women. As I've told people, I don't want to be known as the woman who single-handedly wiped out the two biggest volunteer groups in town.

Oops, I just realized that I've left one thing undone. I forgot to order cards announcing her death to mail to everyone non-local who won't hear about it otherwise. Fortunately, I've got her address book and all the Xmas cards people sent, so I'll know who to send these to. I've got a lot of thank you notes to write, too, so I'll have to order correspondence cards as well. I'll get these ordered next week, while my cousin's wife is still here to go with me. The announcements don't have to go out immediately, of course.

We've got an appointment with a lawyer who specializes in wills and trusts and estates and stuff on Wednesday. We'd made the appointment to set up our own trust and get new wills, and I'm going to have them handle her estate for me. We're probably going to go down to Palm Desert for a few months and when we return I'll deal with emptying out her house and getting it put on the market. I'm not looking forward to that at all, but she had gone through and cleared out a lot of stuff when my father died, which should make things easier. I told you she was practical.

I miss her dreadfully.

Sad, Sad Day

My mother died this morning. She had cancer and had been in the hospital and nursing home since August. She wasn't in any pain from the cancer and in the end she just slipped away in her sleep. She was 84, almost 85.

Knitting Red Scarves

I've been knitting away quite intently for the Red Scarf Project in the last week or so. I finished my first scarf and I'm a little more than 8 in. into the second.

I had written, in an earlier posting here, that I was knitting the first scarf in Open Basketweave Mesh, but I changed my mind and knitted it in Cartridge Ribbing. It's a nice solid warm scarf, but not surprisingly, the pattern takes a lot more yarn than does straight stockinette or garter. I used a little more than two and a half balls of yarn making a five-foot scarf. That's not much, except that I only got four balls of that color, Tomato. Maybe I'll make a matching cap with the rest.

The second scarf, in Cranberry Wool of the Andes, is from this pattern, A Touch Of Whimsy Scarf. I'm enjoying this one, too, although I do regret that it's not a reversible pattern. I've learned how to do an I-cord cast on, which I'd never seen before. About halfway through the third repeat, I finally figured out that the first and last three stitches on each row are, effectively, I cord. Now that's clever.

The scarf for our niece is languishing on the needles. I don't like the pattern I've been using, because it's looks to me as if it'll be prone to snagging. I've got to look around for a good pattern to show off the hand-painted nature of the yarn. I really should frog what I've got done and wind it off into a skein, so I can weight and steam it to take out the kinks.

Other than that, I don't have much on needles, only one UFO (UnFinished Object) that I put aside to get my Christmas and Red Scarf knitting done. I've got about a foot of this scarf, Exchequered. Mine isn't black and yellow. Instead, it's cream and lavender, in Lion Brand Micro Spun. This is a fascinating pattern. It's double knitting. The scarf has two separate sides, joined only at the edges and the squares. This is the same technique people used to knit two socks simultaneously, one inside the other. I had to learn to hold the yarn in both hands, to keep from getting everything hopelessly tangled up. I've mastered Continental-style knitting, I think, but the purling is very difficult for me. I'm also having a little problem where I twist the two colors together at the edge. I'll probably end up frogging this one, too, and starting over, because it's just not as well-done as I'd like it to be.

Update On The Inside Slider

I finally decided to cover my plants in place last night. Good thing, too, because it got down to 7 deg F (-13 deg C). It got all the way up to 37 deg F (2 deg C) this afternoon, with a light breeze. I'm not going to transcribe any more numbers, but if you're interested go to Weather Underground and enter WJF for the airport.

I'm going to go fetch my sansevierias in for tonight. I don't think a cardboard box is enough protection, somehow. I think I got lucky last night.

A friend and former cow orker has twenty acres of lemons down in the Coachella Valley. He gave us a call as he drove down there and told me he was about to lose a lot of money from the freeze. His workers were there picking as many lemons as they possibly could, because it was going to be so cold tonight that he was going to lose the remaining lemons and some of the trees. It takes seven years to replace a frost-killed lemon tree. He isn't alone, of course. He suggested that I buy some lemons now, as the price was going to soar, perhaps to the point of dollar lemons being a bargain.

We have a lemon tree in the back yard of our Low Desert house, across the Coachella Valley from his grove. I probably won't lose a single lemon because it's not going to get as cold there. The NWS has a freeze warning for a hard freeze over all of SoCal tonight but historically our area is warmer than the other side. Of course, all the agriculture is on the other side.

What no one much mentions is that this is going to be very expensive for a lot of ordinary people. A lot of plants that commonly grow in SoCal can't stand a hard freeze, so a lot of landscaping is going to be damaged or even killed. That's expensive and it's not covered by insurance.

Incidentally, given the right conditions (mostly a clear sky and no wind) the air doesn't have to be freezing for fruit and other things to freeze. This is because of black body radiation, with the heat of the object being radiated, some of it to space. Years ago I took Heat Transfer and this was one of the examples the professor worked out. As I recall, citrus can freeze when the air temperature is as high as 37 or 38 deg F (3 deg C). That's why citrus groves in some areas have those great big fans, because moving air disrupts the radiation. Ditto smudge pots back before air quality was an issue. Another method for saving citrus is overhead watering to make "freezing rain". Covering the trees with ice keeps them from getting any colder than 32 deg F (0 deg C).

Baby, It's Cold Outside

We've got an Inside Slider, a dip in the jet stream that comes down the front of the Sierra Nevada, bringing us cold Arctic air and it's really making SoCal miserable. It snowed in Reseda, for example. Our lows are going to be in the teens up here in the High Desert and our highs are below 40 degF.

I've got to scamper out into our entry and rescue my sansevierias. I don't know whether to leave them out there and cover them or to bring them up by the door (close to the house and away from the open) or to put them out on the west-facing patio surrounded by leaky sliders or actually bring them into the house. I've got five or six of them, ranging from $7.99 supermarket specials to a Blue Bat I spent $50 for. It's the Blue Bat I'm worried most about, because it's got a fat rigid leaf and is exceptionally slow growing. It's S. halli "Blue Bat", which you can see here, not quite halfway down the page. Interesting, isn't it? Mine has three leaves now, triple the number it had when I got it.

Sansevierias are the perfect house plant for absent-minded owners like me. They're extremely robust and can stand infrequent and irregular watering. Down at the Palm Desert house I have about a dozen planted along the side of the house. They do very well there, as they can tolerate the heat if well-watered and it almost never freezes. I hadn't wanted to plant out my favorites until I saw how the others did, so I ended up bringing them up to the High Desert for, I thought, the summer. However, when my mother's cancer was diagnosed we decided not to go south for the winter and the plants are roughing it.

I Discover A "New" Military Science Fiction Author

Some time ago, like at least a year, I was browsing at my local Waldenbooks and I bought some paperbacks by an author named John Ringo. The titles I got were There Will Be Dragons (the first in a series) and A Hymn Before Battle, Gust Front, and When The Devil Dances (the first three in another series). I bought these because Ringo had co-written at least one book with another author whom I liked and I had liked that joint book.

I finally got around to reading There Will Be Dragons and decided I really did like the author. I'd say he's ex-military, a Southerner, and, like me, a baby-boomer, as well as a pretty good writer. So here I am on Wednesday, almost finished with the first book in a series and wanting more. I went to Amazon and found the next two books, as well as the other books in the second series, and ordered them. We'd joined the Amazon frequent-reader club, so we get 2nd-day delivery free. However, Monday, when they should have showed up, was New Year's Day and UPS was taking the day off. So I expected them on Tuesday, which was what Amazon promised me. I don't know what happened, but my eagerly-awaited books spent Tuesday down in the LA basin and didn't arrive at my house until late Wednesday afternoon. I was kind of grumpy about that.

However, I did have the first three books of the second series, so I started reading them. I caught the author in a glaring factual error, one that just leaped off the page at me, but otherwise the books seemed very well edited, without the ugly spell-checker errors that are so common these days. This series, set in what was the near future, has a certain resemblance to Tom Clancy's books, with lots of technical stuff and combat and somewhat shallow character development, but are, in my opinion, better written.

I like military science fiction, like David Weber's Honor Harrington series, because it's generally less fantastical than a lot of sf. In Weber's books, about all one has to suspend disbelief about is that faster-than-light space travel is possible. Human nature is still human nature, peculiar as it is. I also like some alternative fiction, like the 1632 series by Eric Flint and the Belisarius series by Flint and David Drake.

I don't know what's going on with all the collaborating in sf these days, but there seems to be a lot of it. On the one hand, it can make the quality somewhat uneven, particularly in series. On the other hand, we readers get a lot more books in the series. Plus, it makes it easier to find new authors, the way I found Ringo.

Now and then, not very often in the good collaborations, it's possible to tell which author wrote something. I don't particularly look for this (I'm a pretty uncritical reader) but now and then it's impossible to overlook. I know, with an absolute certainty, that David Weber wrote one paragraph in a collaboration, because of a quirk of his. To him, all chairs are comfortable. No doubt it's the Spanish Inquisition's influence (no one ever expects the Spanish Inquisition), but he doesn't seem to be able to mention chairs without calling them comfortable.

So anyway, I've finished the first three books in the first series (and discovered that there's a fourth volume, which I ordered today) and the first two and a half books in the other series. The problem with good books is that they have to be read, no matter what else goes by the wayside. So I don't have those photos I promised and I've only got about four inches knitted on my first scarf for the Red Scarf Project and our laundry hamper is overflowing and I'm slipping behind in AFCA.

I've gone back to working on the red scarf, as it has to be done and shipped to VA this month. I ordered three colors of red Wool Of The Andes from KnitPicks for these scarves. I really like the yarn, which is Peruvian wool. It's not at all scratchy, but it has a very soft yet firm texture and it knits into a fabric with a very good hand. It's also very economical. That's not why I ordered it, though; I ordered it because there were so many good reds. Anyway, the pattern I'm using is the Open Basketweave Mesh from Charted Knitting Designs: A Third Treasury of Knitting Patterns by Barbara A. Walker. In the Schoolhouse Press edition, it's the yellow volume and the pattern is on page 252. I'm using 21 stitches, but the two edge stitches are slipped purlwise at the beginning of each row and purled at the end, so the pattern is really worked on 19 stitches. On 6.0 mm (US 10) needles, this give me a scarf that's 5.5 in. wide.

I've Got The GIMP Working Again

OK, I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the GTK and The GIMP 2.2 on my D partition, where they'd been, and on my C partition. It still bombed when I tried to scale images. So I uninstalled all of it, including deleting the download zip files, and went back and downloaded the 2.0 version. I also ran a clean-up utility and defragged both partitions. Then I installed everything on my D partition and it works just fine. Scarf photos should follow shortly.

However, I still don't understand why The GIMP 2.2 suddenly stopped working. I can't think of any major changes I made between when it worked and when it stopped. I uninstalled the Norton Utilities etc and Microsoft Office somewhere in there, but I don't think that should have mattered. I also half-remember that The GIMP had stopped working before I did that, since I did it to get more disk space, which was one of the possible reasons for The GIMP choking, I thought.

Furrfu!

Finished!

I finished knitting the scarf for our friend Don today. I've got to add the fringe and wash and block it. It's knitted in mock rib stitch, from three balls of Adriafil Felis Trends here in Spruce (Shade 15), the one at the bottom. This is really fun yarn to work with, as it's soft and sort of fluffy-crunchy and it knits up really fast. The only surprise I got was when I was binding off. I did my usual bind off in pattern and discovered that the end was really flared by the binding off. I undid it and did it again, binding off very firmly so that the end wasn't stretched. It looks a lot better.

I made the scarf fifteen stitches wide, which came out to be 5.75 in. laid flat and about 2.25 in. when allowed to roll itself up at both edges. It's about 70 in. long without the fringe. As soon as I get it blocked I'll put up a photo.

The reason I haven't posted any photos recently is that the program I use to scale the photos down to a reasonable size, The GIMP, isn't working. Every time I try to scale an image, it crashes. I tried re-installing it over the old version, which didn't help, so yesterday I uninstalled it completely and I'm about to install it now. If that doesn't work, I know of another program that will work, I think, and I'll switch to it.

It's 2007 and my checks will be wrong for months

I'm knitting a scarf for our niece, reading AFCA, and watching the Rose Bowl game right now. The score is 3-3, the Trojans just sacked the Wolverine quarterback for the fifth time, and it's still the first half. It's been a defensive duel, but that doesn't surprise me; both coaches spend the first half scoping out the other team's play and then really start playing in the second half.

A few rows ago I discovered that I had done something eccentric and irretrievable about three rows before. Naturally, I tried to fix it but that didn't work. I ended up frogging* four rows and re-knitting. Now I check each row before I turn and knit the next one. I've got about fourteen inches done and it looks too wide to me. Maybe the fabric is a little too firm, too. I'm wondering if I should try the next needle size up and fewer stitches in a row. I only have two skeins of this yarn and it's a unique hand-spun, hand-dyed yarn that I'm sure I can't even begin to match.

*Frogging is when your knitting is so goofed up that the only way you can fix it is to RIP-PIT RIP-PIT RIP-PIT.

I stopped at the supermarket for some caffeine-free diet Coke (CFDC) yesterday afternoon, on my way to visiting my mom at the nursing home. I was really surprised. The store was full of people, all the check stands were open, and the store was out of a lot of things. I got the last CFDC, there wasn't a bit of Brie cheese anywhere, the service deli was looking pretty sparse, and the snack food aisle looked as if a horde of hungry snackers had descended on it and stripped it. In addition to the CFDC I picked up some crackers and a salami, so I had something out of the ordinary to nibble on today.

Were I still working, I'd have tomorrow off as a Federal day of mourning for Gerald Ford. Not that anyone would ever turn down a bonus day of leave, but that's a sad reason to get one. I always liked Gerald Ford, even when he pardoned Nixon. I never could see how he could do anything else for the sake of the country. Mind you, I despised Richard Nixon but enough was enough.

It's half time and I've got to go deal with the laundry before the game starts again.

Oops, I went off to do some things during half time without publishing this. It's not half time any more, the crackers and salami are dwindling, the sun is setting, and the game has moved right along. USC is ahead by 14 points, there's been another USC sack, and a penalty was finally called, well into the third quarter. See, I predicted that the second half would have more action than the first. Good thing, because the first half wasn't very exciting at all.