Weeknotes 90 - Going to the hotel

I’ve had the best holiday. There was no pressure to go anywhere or do anything, so we just did whatever we felt like each day. Baked some bread, made dinners, ordered dinners in, dirtied the kitchen, cleaned the kitchen, stayed up, slept in, goofed off, watched films. I wish there was more time to do more of that.
We do this thing we call “going to the hotel” where we basically act as if the bedroom is a hotel room. We put our robes on and watch films or TV shows in bed for the evening, pretending that the living room doesn’t exist. It feels luxurious, like a fancy treat. Powerful branding for what is essentially just going to bed early.
Whenever I knit from a pattern I tend to use yarns I like rather than what the pattern suggests. I knit test swatches on different needle sizes to get the density and feel of fabric that I want. Usually this results in a different number of stitches and rows per 10cm test square to what’s specified in the pattern (you have to match the number of stitches and rows per inch, otherwise you will end up knitting the wrong size). There’s some maths involved in working out which size instructions to follow to get the size I actually want, based on the difference in stitch counts. I’ve been using an online calculator for this for the last fifteen years, but when I tried to find it the other day it seems to have disappeared off the face of the internet. That made me really sad.
The maths is really simple, and could be done on paper, but in reality it makes my head hurt. The cost of making a mistake at this step is potentially huge, since some of the projects take me months to complete. I make the calculation rarely enough that I’d have to re-learn it each time. My partner took pity on me and made me a custom calculator, Stitchy, based on my instructions. I used it as an opportunity to play with CSS again to make it a bit less 90s looking.
I wanted Stitchy to have dark mode so I can use it in the evening without it searing my retinas. I used the Solarized palette and its dark/light background principles. I’ve been a long time fan of Solarized as a palette for my terminal and vim. Using individual colours in a project that can switch modes made me appreciate the thought that went into designing it, not just the aesthetic.
I bought some decorative guords. The flat looks so seasonal.