Mr. Hacker's Hats.

My own dear Mr. Hacker was known as "The Jewish Settler" at his place of employment due to a certain cotton hat that his devoted wife had knit him and which he was prone to wear many days out of the week (he works with some weird people, most of whom have no notion of what a Jewish settler may actually look like--several are from Idaho). I decided he needed a new piece of handmade haberdashery to round out his collection (in addition to three lovely driving caps), and I wanted to play around with cables, so I made up this pattern as I went along. I bought the yarn and cast-on way back in March of '06, knit a few inches and then abandoned it. I pulled it back out in September and finished it in a day or two. The cables aren't all exactly the same number of rows, but you can't really tell. The hat is now an integral part of the mystique of Mr. Hacker, and no one has mentioned Israelis for some time.

Also: here's a photo of Chicken Shashlik's first grade class on a walking field trip to the downtown library (via Temple Square and TRAX). The air that day was so bad (Monday of this week) that Miss H. bought the kids toxic fume masks to protect them from all the smog. They saved the masks and looked at them under microscopes the next day, and found a lot very interesting and very yucky fine particulate matter (and germs). Walking as we were just a few blocks from the state capital building, we inadvertently made quite a political statement and drew multiple comments from the many passersby.