Category: Knitting
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A Project I Can Handle
2014 has been a hell of a year. I don’t mean that the year has been bad, but it has been very full. Full of planes and trains, hotel rooms, conference panels, deadlines (more often missed than met, unfortunately), packing and unpacking, writing as much as I could as fast as I could, and a…
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GradHacker: My Dissertation Sweater
“If your dissertation were an object, what would it be?” As I write in my first GradHacker post, published today, I had to answer this question a couple of years ago when I attended a summer school at Heidelberg University (ah, Heidelberg). I replied that my dissertation was a hand-knit sweater, which turned out to…
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Partial Progress
Chapter 5 is now … uh, 76% done … but the Hitchhiker scarf is finished! I put it down on Sunday evening with only four (long) rows left to go, so after dinner last night I popped in a DVD and polished them off. If it weren’t unusually warm today (70 degrees and very sunny)…
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Still Life on a Sunday Afternoon
[Posted on a Monday morning because the Internet here was cranky last night and I only have so much patience—meaning, very little.] On the screen: Chapter 5 of my dissertation, about child welfare issues during the first years of the People’s Republic of China. Approximately 75% finished. On the needles: Hitchhiker scarf. Approximately 90% finished.…
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February Recap
Not a whole lot to recap for this short month, which was interrupted by the Chinese New Year break. Though we officially had a vacation of seven days, a lot of people were away from Shanghai for the full fifteen-day Spring Festival, or even longer. The owners of my favorite dumpling shop around the corner…
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January Recap
At the end of every year, journalist and photographer Howard French posts a list at his website of all the books he read during the preceding twelve months. I decided I wanted to start doing that in 2013, but the end of December seemed too far away—when I’m excited about a book, I want to…
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Socks With a Story
I could feel her creeping closer to me, watching me. The subway car was almost deserted, and I had been entirely alone on a long bench before she boarded the train and sat down at the other end. But over the past minute, she’d slid closer and closer until I could feel her within a…
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 