mail order husband?

Okay, this is cheating a little bit since my flight back from Philly got in late this evening and I have no energy to really post.



I'm not sure if Summers is still reading my blog but I had been promising her a S. African mail order husband for about a year now. Don't get excited Summers, he isn't in the U.S. yet (although you will be the first to know when he is). I just wanted to post a little teaser. This photo is from years ago when we were living in Oak Park, IL and Jaco visited us en route to Chile from where his plane to Antarctica departs (he's a meteorologist for an adventure company that supports trips to Antarctica -did I tell you?). His only flaw is that he spends half the year down there every year. Otherwise he is a good and charming man who knows how to treat a woman. Still interested?

the happy parents to be

Here is my college roommate and her husband Farooq. Let's hope they like the baby stuff I got! I'll try and get pictures from Jen once the baby is around to actually model the stuff.

Needless to say, I am also knitting up a storm for this kid. Fortunately Jen isn't due until after the holidays so I have a prayer of getting it all done along with my holiday knitting.

Oh and I've changed the nablopomo symbol for Jeanette. While this one implies an equally violent fate, it seemed better suited given that I'm and ecologist and all (and really dislike handguns).

And just in case anyone missed the irony, earlier today (meaning less than half an hour ago!) I complained about how I had been posting every day but blogger dated the posts for the day I started writing each one so it looked like I had posted three times on Wednesday. What do I do? I go insane and post three times on Saturday morning. Eh, I'm still stuck in the hotel outside of Philly waiting for my parents to drive up from D.C. to visit so what else am I going to do, work or something?

St. George and the two body problem

So this is a post I wrote just before going out of town so that I could upload it in case of limited internet access. However, looking it over, there really isn't anything I feel should be changed and it's what's going on in my life right now. So having figured out the issue with blogger dating posts, this should come up as being posted today instead of yet another Wednesday post.

Most folks don't realize that something like 90% of all female PhDs chose people with PhDs as their life partners. This number is much lower for male PhDs (this implies that there must be many more male PhDs than I ever met but the pattern does seem to hold true based on my own experience). This makes finding tenure-track positions that much harder because you have to find two in the same geographic area when finding one can often be difficult enough. To some extent I'm fortunate as Marius has no interest in a position that requires research. While those jobs are not necessarily any easier to come by, it is much easier to find a position that requires research and a position that doesn't in the same town compared to trying to find two research positions.

Last weekend Marius and I made a frantic drive out to southern Utah so that he would be on time for a job interview he had out there at Dixie State College (yes, that's really their name and no, they don't think it's funny -the area used to grow cotton, badly which is why they don't any more but they kept the name).

I was completely freaked out to be honest. I have heard stories about how Utah Mormons can be a rather exclusive group out of fear that their children might grow up to marry non-Mormons. When I posted to some of my list groups about it, I heard more of the same. We have no problems with Mormons but we don't enjoy the thought of being ostracized from the community we live in because of our faith (or lack thereof). Of course the whole reason he applied for the job is because St. George (where Dixie State is located) is less than an hour from Zion and Bryce.

He rocked his interview and I fully expect him to get a phone call on November 10th with a job offer. Fortunately he also asked the hr guy he had to interact with some pointed questions about the community and got really great reassuring answers. In addition, the pay isn't bad, the benefits are unusually excellent and the cost of living is much lower than any place we've ever lived. Plus, they will happily offer me a job the next time they get funding for one.

BUT (and you knew that was coming didn't you?) they have no money to facilitate research. I don't need much since my research is funded externally but I do need a greenhouse and grants don't generally cover construction of buildings.

Ugh. So if I went out there I'd have to give up my research program. I don't talk about it much here on the blog but I derive a great deal of satisfaction from my research and feel that I am making a significant contribution to the field of plant ecology every time I design a new experiment. Most plant ecologists don't consider the fact that plants can interact directly with each other (i.e. plants communicate with each other using chemicals instead of sounds) and so there are big gaps in our understanding of plants that I am working to fill. There are only two other people remotely interested in the topic in the U.S. and three labs working on the topic outside of this country. To give it all up would create some hard core regrets sadly.

So, if Marius is offered the job, we've agreed he can accept it (assuming they pay him enough and all that) and I can spend the next 18 months looking for a job that will allow me to continue with my research. If I get one and there are opportunities for Marius to teach in the same area, we will both move out to where ever the new job is. If I don't get one in the next 18 months, I will have tried my best and I will move out to St. George and teach. This isn't giving up lightly. If I don't get a job that I want in the next 18 months, it's unlikely that I ever will. And it isn't that I dislike teaching, I love it. I just also love my research. Even if I ultimately move out to Utah, it isn't all bad. It's hard to complain when the view outside of your windows looks like this:

and there are five-ten state and national parks within a 30 minute drive. Yes, there are much worse things in life.

grumpy with blogger

Okay, so I have been posting while out of town. Before I left I started some posts and saved them in the off chance that I didn't have a connection at my hotel but could steal a few minutes on a college computer to upload a post.

When I discovered I had a real connection where I was staying I opened up those posts, rewrote them dramatically, and then posted them. What I didn't realize until just now is that blogger dates the posts for the day and time that I started them as saved drafts!!!! So despite blogging every day, it just looks like I went a bit insane on Wednesday and posted three times. Grrr...

Oh well, I'll still try to post every day despite not appearing to rise to the challenge.

cooking with intention

Carolyn over at curlypurl had a nice idea that I was sort of coming to privately, a cook-along. The idea is to increase the amount of real cooking one does for ones family (I'm taking this to mean lacking in prepared foods -those prepared by someone else that is). Now I try to do this already but last month I really got going on this idea particularly trying to incorporate more creative vegetarian meals into our dinner cycle. So for now I will be trying to increase the nights that I don't just make an omelet or a pizza for dinner and I will be inflicting the story of those meals on you all.

Neither of us are vegetarian but I was at a bookstore and found Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian while looking for a good pumpkin curry recipe. This is a fabulous book. I have now made five meals out of it and we have LOVED four of them. The fifth was a chili recipe that is fine but nothing special or worth noticing even. I haven't even made it out of the legume section but even Marius has liked everything and he used to expect meat every night of the week.

So far my favorite recipes have been the ones using black-eyed peas. Maybe it's a southern thing (how many of you knew that I was originally from the south?) but I think these are the most under-rated legume on the market. They aren't trendy. You can't even find organic ones at Whole Foods. But they are awfully tasty. Tonight I made the black-eyed peas with swiss chard and sauteed some chicken with garlic, lemon zest, tomatoes, and parsley. This is officially the first time I have cooked swiss chard so of course I used the red stuff which resulted in pink black-eyed peas. It's such a pretty vegetable, how could I not? After cooking the beans you add the chard and cook it for another half an hour with a bit of salt. Once everything is nice and soft (and the water has cooked down which takes about 3x as long as Jaffrey says unless you raise the heat), you add lemon juice and olive oil and then heat more olive oil in a separate pan with a dried red chili and finely chopped garlic and onions. This then is added to the bean-chard mix and tossed.

I don't have photos of the meal since Marius ate it all but I'll try and keep evidence of these meals in the future. We still have left-over chili but it's in the fridge in single serving containers and isn't very photogenic at this point. Next week I'll experiment with mung beans since you can find organic ones at Whole Foods in the bulk section so I now have two pounds in my kitchen.

the things we do for our alma mater

Okay, this is going to have to be a wimpy post. I have just arrived in Philly to visit my alma mater. I left California at a time that I would have likely been going to sleep at the last time I was on the campus of my alma mater (with the exception of the last reunion).

On top of it all, I have promised my beloved former department not one but two lectures on my research. One of which is scheduled for 9am EST. That is 6am PST!!!! What the hell was I thinking? Fortunately there is a place to buy good coffee on campus and I will avail myself of that repeatedly I am certain.

The good news is that I can hit the bookstore just in time to buy Bryn Mawr College baby gear for my college roommates' soon to exist 90% certain that it's a girl baby. I really do feel for this child. She will have a pair of amazing and very intelligent parents but might experience just a little bit of pressure to attend a seven sisters college. Not that I can blame her mother. We loved (and hated) our years at Bryn Mawr. I think it did amazing things for both of us and I feel that I had a much better college experience than my friends who attended big co-ed state universities. I actually feel that more girls/women should consider single sex colleges. I went because it was the best school to which I was accepted and I was worried about the whole all-female thing. It turns out it was one of the best things life decided for me although the year I spent in Israel just after graduation did a great deal to help me put my hard core, Bryn Mawr nourished ambition into perspective. I'm not sure that I would be a biologist today if it weren't for Bryn Mawr and the professors I had there.

Could you imagine my obnoxiously anal yet flighty mind trying to make it in a career outside of academia?

Better not.

nabloporno

Ack! I'm not sure if I can manage it but I'm going to try and take up the National Blog Posting Month (or nablopomo) challenge. Why in the world would I want to commit to this when I have ten job applications to submit, three manuscripts I'm working on, two lectures to prepare for this friday AND I will be out of town for at least two long weekends and possibly four?

Who knows. I'm insane, that's why. I will probably fail miserably but I figure it might be entertaining for my friends to watch me fail miserably if nothing else.

At least this one counts for day 1.

Big Sur and our Anniversary

Friday was our fifth anniversary and so we went to Big Sur to celebrate. Of course we didn't realize that everyone gets married in October and so Big Sur was experiencing its prime wedding season. We were thinking that we wouldn't have a problem finding a room or a campsite. We were wrong. Why is it that so many of my travel stories include that sentence?

On the way up we made the obligatory stop to check out the elephant seals (and ground squirrels that are there to check out the tourists) along the coast.

By the time the sun was setting on Saturday we had made our way completely through Big Sur and had found that there was nothing available. Every campsite was full and even the hotels that charge a minimum of $900/night were fully booked.

But we got lucky. Gary, at Big Sur Lodge, had taken a reservation 90 minutes before we showed up from a woman who did not provide a credit card to hold the room and promised to arrive within ten minutes of her call. Since she hadn't arrived by the time we got there, Gary called the Big Sur restaurants to see if she had stopped for a meal and, when he couldn't find her, he released her room to us. While we were filling out the paper work, three other groups arrived hoping for a room. We literally got the last spot in all of Big Sur and Gary called around to verify that for us and the other people who arrived later.

Big Sur Lodge isn't on the ocean but it is in one of the state parks with some lovely trails and a small waterfall. After spending a night in front of the fireplace we got up bright and early to try and beat the wedding guests to the trails. We largely succeeded.

On Sunday we drove up to Marina to visit a friend of Marius' and have lunch at English Ales, yeah, that's right, we had "lunch." English Ales is a microbrewery that has been around a little bit longer than we've been married that makes a wonderful and tasty variety of beer that you can find throughout California. We needed to try the sampler of course. It arrived in a set of little 4 oz. glass steins that I had to largely consume so that Marius could continue driving. I thought the sacrifice was rather big of me.

That night we were able to find a campsite and then hiked down to the beach just after dawn.

The weather was lovely although it was a bit overcast at times. Even with all of the people that were in the area, Big Sur is large enough that we were largely alone for most of the time. We just have to go back again when the wedding crowd doesn't make it impossible to get a shower.

political content may not be appropriate for all ages

I have to vent. I don't know how many of you were aware of this but the Bush appointed deputy commisioner at the FDA and then later Bush appointed commissioner of the FDA (now ex of both positions thank god) is on my sh*tlist and has been for many years.

His name is Lester Crawford. He is a man who wrote books suggesting that women suffering from PMS or menopause should help their medical situations by praying more. I have no problem if you feel that prayer helps you to improve your personal well being. I have serious problems with people telling women that they don't pray enough when they are suffering from a medical condition (except perhaps when they can't provide any other form of treatment). This is the man who was in charge of the continued fiasco concerning Plan B (morning after pill). For those that did not keep up with that issue: Plan B had been up for approval as an over the counter drug for years. Congress approved his appointment on the condition that a decision be made concerning the status of Plan B. Congress did not require that he approve it for sale as an over-the-counter drug despite the fact that the FDA's external review committee determined that it was the safest drug to be evaluated by the FDA in decades. Once he was appointed he claimed that they could not make a decision due to a law forbidding drugs to have two different statuses (stati?) since he wanted to make it available as an over-the-counter drug only to women who were not minors.

Oh and did you know that he is a veterinarian by training? Yes he also has a degree in pharmacology but still...

Shortly after he was appointed to head the FDA he resigned. There was much gossip about the reasons why. It would appear that we now know why.

Yup. On top of it all, the man is a bona fide crook. There is no evidence that he profited from his crime which makes him a stupid crook.




Fiber related content. I have just cast on the back of Durrow for the third time. Not once has it been the fault of the pattern. The first time I switched sizes half way through working it and had just finished it when I noticed this. The second time was today when I realized that my gauge had grown significantly since the first time I knit it. Fortunately it's a quick knit. Of course, by the time I finish the back, I could have been nearly done withe sweater if I had been paying attention.

My Yixing Teapots

Thuy asked me to put up photos of my pots. So here they are (minus one as it is very delicately carved on the outside and I have yet to take a photo of it that allows you to see the carving).

What is a yixing teapot? It's a pot made from clay found only in Yixing, China. It comes in different colors and different textures but the main characteristic for which tea drinkers seek it out is that the clay is very porous. Many claim that the clay acts as a sort of filter. I'm not sure about that but I do know that if you take a tea and drink it in a normal glazed cup and then pour the tea into a cup made from the clay, it does taste subtly different. People talk about old teapots having sorbed so much tea over the years that tea leaves are no longer needed to brew a pot of tea in them. Since most people suggest that antique pots be sterilized before use I have a hard time believing the story but it's a nice one.

They are traditionally used to brew oolong teas. Tea leaves are often oxidized or fermented when the are harvested. Green teas are not oxidized at all, while black teas are completely oxidized. Oolongs are any tea that falls between green and black teas. I tend to prefer those closer to black teas but there are many excellent oolongs that are very close to green.

First up is my sad broken pot. You can see the crack in the lid and the glue on the side of the dragon head. What you can't really make out from the picture is that the lid doesn't quite fit into its opening anymore. It used to fit perfectly to the point that it wouldn't fall out when you poured tea.







Below is the same pot from straight on. You could almost pretend that it isn't broken except for the poorly fitting lid and the funny looking eye on the left (the crack runs through the glaze of the eye).














Next is the now infamous pot from my mother (see earlier post about my move). Very cute but not very functional and machine made.














I didn't mention that my father also gave buying me a teapot a shot when he was in China on business. It was a complete surprise for me so I didn't have the chance to warn him that they tend to cost more than your average teapot. He suffered a rather severe case of sticker shock. Still, while this isn't a very well made pot, it is at least partially done by hand and it took a couple of years before I saw similar ones for sale in the United States. It does have a flaw in it that prevents it from being used but we won't tell my Dad that given all of the effort he went through to bring it to me.




















And the last one is my very first teapot. I had recently discovered single estate teas (and you can too) and oolongs when my local tea shop (which happens to be one of the finest in this country) had their annual yixing teapot fest. Since these are the pots in which you traditionally brew oolong I felt that I needed one. For an inexpensive pot, this is a remarkably well done locust and if Marius hadn't packed it full of wet leaves during one of our moves, I'd still be using it to brew tea (it grew mold by the time we unpacked it).

More information on toxins: produce

Since folks seemed to enjoy getting the link to the Skin Deep data base I wanted to quickly post a link to a new study the EWG did on the presence of pesticides in and on store bought produce.

The idea is to provide information on those items most likely (and least likely) to hurt you if you don't buy organic. My peaches and apples will all be organic from here on out or I won't eat them. 96% of all fruit tested had detectable pesticide residues AFTER WASHING!!!!

Yikes.

neighbors can be a bad word sometimes

Last week I was walking to the gym in our complex when I heard very young kittens screaming. They were wandering out of a neighbor's patio area (fenced off) and so I shouted to try and get the woman's attention inside. I figured they were hers.

Nope. Not hers. Their mother just showed up a few weeks before and gave birth to them. They were screaming because the woman hadn't seen their mother in a few days and so she figured that the thing had been killed. She made a big fuss about how she is always calling animal control and how every cat within a twenty mile radius comes to give birth on her patio. So I asked her if she was going to call animal control seeing as how the kittens were going to just continue screaming and she had made it very clear how annoying this was.

She responded with something along the lines of "I suppose I should," sighed and then vanished from the window. I called up again to ask if she was going to call. Her entire manor suggested that she hadn't vanished to go to the phone and make the call. The same woman came back and replied "no, she probably won't." As if she were talking about another person!

Pissed off, I picked them up and drove them to the animal shelter figuring that if they were killed there, at least they wouldn't die slowly and painfully.

What is it with some people? All she had to do was pick up the phone and someone would have come to get the animals that were annoying her so much.

So yesterday I'm walking in from my car and I see her standing next to her car with the hood up. She is clearly having car problems and is on the phone giving detailed directions to someone on how to call AAA for her. If it hadn't been for the welfare of the animals, I'd feel guilty that I was somehow enabling this odd behavior. WTF?

I can wear nail polish again!

Okay, I'm jumping the gun here because phthalates are just the tip of the iceberg, but it's progress. They haven't mentioned a word about removing toluene.

"Powered by EWG's Skin Deep database, the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics and thousands of concerned consumers like you pressured Orly International, OPI Products, and Sally Hansen to remove a toxic chemical from nail polish. The ingredient, dibutyl phthalate (DBP), has been linked to birth defects, is banned from use in cosmetics in Europe and is considered a reproductive toxin by the state of California."

If you haven't looked at the Skin Deep database, you should. You can look up any cosmetic or personal care product you use and find out to which toxins you are exposing yourself. Getting phthalates removed from nail polish is huge because it generally isn't identifiable in a list of ingredients and you have to contact the manufacturer to find out if one of the ingredients listed contains the toxin. They will often tell you that their products contain less than the legal amount but when you are using umpteen products that all contain toxins, you can imagine that there might be an issue.

Even many "organic" products contain preservatives that have been linked to breast cancer so it's best to be as informed as possible.

oh so L.A.

As I was uploading those photos, I had the news on in the background. Of course there is some high speed car chase going on just down the highway from us that they are filming live.

I think this is the second one I've seen since I moved down here less than a month ago and I almost never watch the evening news.

as promised -sorta

I don't have a photo of the silk sweater I made for my mother but I'm working on it. In the meantime...




























...my first branching out scarf is done! I have even bound off and woven in the ends although these photos are from just before that point. This is BFL that Thuy and I dyed with Smart and Final food coloring. I spun it up on a spindle and knit it as a single. The one I knit in Moco quiviut is also done but looks really dumb without being blocked. I had two skeins of the quiviut (one in navy and the other in a burgundy/wine hybrid color) and one skein was not enough to make a scarf even though I used the second skein for the garter stitch border. To lengthen it I added a bunch of garter stitch to both ends but that part seriously flares out while the lace section pulls in. I will block it to within an inch of its life and it should all even out... I hope!

Martha asked what had broken my cable. It was, of course, the cotton linen stitch afghan that will not end:















Sadly, when I spread it out to take the photos I discovered this:
















Yup. It pooled. I had three cakes of yarn that I got from a sale bin when we were in Cary, NC years ago. The first skein worked up nicely with only a little pooling. The second skein started out the same so I stopped worrying about pooling. Clearly this was a mistake. Normally I don't mind pooling colors in my space-dyed yarns. I just REALLY don't like regular pooling, which is what I have in this afghan now. If it had formed interesting patterns, I might feel differently but regular blobs really aren't very appealing.

So.

I will rip it out. And the afghan that will not end, will take that much longer to end so that I can alternate between skeins to break up the blobs. On top of all of this, it looks like I will run out before it is the size I want (2lbs of cotton only goes so far apparently). So now I'm on the hunt for a solid cotton to compliment this color-way. Given that it's basically a deadened rainbow (basic colors with a bit of black added to them), I have lots of options. Suggestions anyone?

Oh, and for the record, my replacement cables arrived yesterday from Denise. I'll let you know how they work out but I still love their customer service.

photos and films

I took the promised photos on Sunday but haven't had time to upload them and it's too late to do it tonight. We spent the evening watching the documentary "Why We Fight" which, while dated, is documentary about the industrial military complex as evinced by post-Vietnam wars in the U.S. (with an obvious focus on Iraq). None of the information was new (at this point although had we seen it when it came out we would have been more than a bit outraged -did you know that over one billion dollars of our defense budget between 2002 and 2003 was spent on domestic advertising?).

I'll upload the photos of my knitting projects tomorrow and everyone can see why I must rip out nearly half of the linen stitch afghan I've been working on for the past year (on and off). Sadly I haven't spread it out much in the past couple of months and so only noticed some really bad pooling when I took the photographs. So now it will be the project that takes me forever and a day to finish.

score one for procrastination!

So I still haven't broken out Marius' nice fancy dSLR camera to take photos of my knitting (but I will by the end of this upcoming weekend Martha!) . But I must share my small victory today.

In Santa Barbara we didn't have a very big apartment. In fact it was so small that my desk doubled as our dining room table. Well we're in a bigger place now and had bought a second hand table from a grad. student who was leaving town right before we moved. However, we have been lacking dining room chairs since we moved into our new place. Since our new table has gray metal legs, I've been wanting to find something like this:



















Now this chair is being sold at DWR for $370/chair. It was on some t.v. show and is insanely expensive now given what it is. Hunting around online however, I found these:

Which are nearly identical to the above chair. The biggest difference is that the front legs are round as opposed to squared off (and the chairs are bolted together as opposed to being all one molded piece). I agree that the first chair looks better, but how much better? Certainly not the $330 difference in price. That's right. The cheaper chairs are just $40 at kmart of all places (just FYI: our table does not look like the one in the photo).

So I procrastinated on going out and buying the chairs for weeks until last night. I drive out to the nearest store and find that they are sold out of the chairs. This is not because people saw the chairs on t.v. and realized how similar (but much cheaper) the ones at kmart are, but because they didn't sell and so were placed on clearance. At the store I'm at they can't even tell me what the new price is since they don't have any information on them now that they are all gone. I go home a bit discouraged because I assume that this will be the case at all local kmarts. They are still available online for the original price as a last resort (for a $35 shipping fee) but I decided to brave near rush-hour traffic today and try another kmart today. They HAD them! They not only had them in stock, they had almost 100 of them. And the best part is their clearance price is just $8/chair. Yup, I spent a total of $32 on these bad boys, less than what one chair would have cost me if I had bought them at their regular price.

So I have learned my lesson for the week. Procrastination pays.

I LOVE Denise needles

So I contacted them (last night!) about sending the broken cable for a replacement (and mentioned that it has happened once before -both time with heavy projects). I also asked if they had thought about reinforcing this part with a bit of metal (both breaks were at the exact same place) even though I realize that such a suggestion is a bit presumptuous. This was their response.

Hi Erin,

I'm so sorry to hear about a SECOND cord tip snapping!

One is unusual, but two is miserable. Occasionally, a kit that is exposed to extreme heat or cold somewhere during the course of its travels can exhibit this type of fragility. Another possibility is that the machine that forms the cord tips was not venting properly when your kit was being manufactured. This can allow air bubbles into the material and cause weak spots. Either way, we'll send you out a new set of cords right away.

Our manufacturer has made some hidden improvements to the tips over the past year, and he's also being extremely careful with the air/material mix as well as humidity in the material when he's making them, so these new ones should do just great on even very heavy projects. We have considered making the cord tips metal, or having the internal part be metal, and I'd like to see something like this happen, because though the breakage is normally very rare, it's still NO fun when it happens!! Thanks for your input on this.

We'll get the new cords right in the mail to you. The post has gone for today, but these will be in tomorrow's. Many apologies again, and please let us know if you ever have other questions or feedback. Happier knitting ahead!

All the best,
Emily McKeon

info@knitdenise.com
http://www.knitdenise.com
888-831-8042




How fabulous are they?!??? It makes me glad given how much I tell people to buy these things. Last night I was having a moment where I was worrying that I had given away many of my INOX and that I was now going to have to buy a new set for my heavy projects. Nope. I'm perfectly happy to believe them that these tips are stronger.

At least until one breaks on me. :)

My very first project

Once that last post went up I realized that my blog was sadly lacking in photos. So, since we haven't taken any new pictures (that I still have), I dug up a photo of the very first thing I ever made out of yarn. Of course it is crochet (how many people knew I learned that before knitting?) and it is Red H***t, but it was before I knew any better. Plus it went to a dear friend of mine who likes to machine wash things to death so I'd probably still use an acrylic yarn to make her a blanket today (just not that acrylic). She and her husband use it to cover and frightening chair they own from the late 60's/early 70's that is in no possible way ever going to be "retro."

Note: I think that yarn is excellent when used for dog blankets that will be seriously abused so I don't completely hate the stuff.

Denise needles breakage

Today I had a cable from my Denise needle set break. This is the second time this has happened to me. Both times, I was over half-way done with an afghan (so the project was getting heavy) when the black connector piece just snapped in half. I'm generally a huge fan of these needles but I'm beginning to wonder if anyone else has experienced this. Perhaps I need to keep my heavier projects on other needles from now on (even though I know the company will replace the cable asap and I own both of the super long cables that they make just for afghans).

Of course this happened at a knit group I was visiting in Santa Monica and anyone who heard the snap immediately started checking to see if they had a substitute needle that I could borrow. Fibery people are really wonderful sometimes. For all they knew I could have made off with their needle and never shown my face again (because you know that's just the sort of person I am).