What is this "week-end" you speak of?

I've discovered this wondrous thing called a "weekend." I don't know if the rest of you have heard of this thing, but there are days in the week where you can pretty much do what you want to. It's crazy! I mean, you can do things like watch television and knit lace. You can even vacuum the living room!

Oh! Oh! Do you know what I did today? Get this:

I made my bed.

I didn't change the sheets or anything, but I saw that the blankets were messy and then straightened them. Things are wild at the deBugs residence, I tell you what. I finished an altar cloth that I'd originally planned to sell, but decided to keep, and then spruced up my altar and did some praying - mostly for Japan because damn. I am impressed, however, with how many lives were saved by their preparedness. I bow to the awesome in that.

The biggest thing I did this weekend was to update my stash in Ravelry. Now all the yarns are actually the yarns that I have. Here's a picture of the whole kit and caboodle. On the left is the kit and in the middle is the caboodle. I think that bamboo is dead.

(please ignore the box behind the basket. nothing to see here. move along, move along)

 

The basket has all the partials in and the shelves are arranged in some logical order that I forget right now. I think the really nice stuff and lace yarn is at the top and it looks like cottons and plant fibers next. There's a sock yarn shelf, to be sure, but I forget how I chose to arrange the rest. I assure you, it's very logical and straightforward. Much like this:

 

Though it looks like a weird kind of sudoku, this is actually a data matrix. [Insert The Matrix Trilogy jokes here.] Anyway, this is what it looks like when puny humans try to make sense of biological organisms and arrange them into groups so that we can give them names. It kind of mostly works and, really, that's the best we can do. We phylogeneticists talk about species concepts all the time, but I don't think there's really a "right" one. Species are a human construct, an attempt to put organisms that refuse to conform to our ideas into neat categories. Once you think you've got it figured out, Nature shows you that you either forgot about something or that she's got a trick up her sleeve that you didn't even know about. For example, Ernst Mayr once described species as being:

groups of actually or potentially interbreeding natural populations, which are reproductively isolated from other such groups

This popular species concept kind of glosses over the fact that there are a heck of a lot of organisms that don't reproduce sexually. Also? How do you really know if two organisms can "potentially reproduce." Really Ernst? Really? He was bird guy, so never really had to deal with the complexity of say, insects or algae. What does he know anyway? Birds. Bah.

You know what's better than a whole passel of species concepts? (nice transition, Jess)

Circle socks by Anne Campbell, knit in Regia Silk (Ravelry link)

Socks.