iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Melissa D. Hellman @hellmanmd.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

@99pi.org Yesterday, I finally listened to the episode about the Ambassador Bridge. I got to drive over the beautiful Gordie Howe Bridge, the week it opened. It might be a little soon still, but I’d love an episode updating the Detroit/Windsor crossing situation sometime!

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Melissa D. Hellman @hellmanmd.bsky.social · 19/04/2026

Hello to a bunch of my favorite people! This is what @ccrchemist.bsky.social and I did yesterday, for the first time this year!

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Melissa D. Hellman @hellmanmd.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

Hero. Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/u...

Screenshot of the first bit of Betty Reid Soskin’s NYT obit, with a photo of her holding her ranger hat

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Melissa D. Hellman @hellmanmd.bsky.social · 27/11/2025

Thanksgiving Eve, morning and afternoon.

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Melissa D. Hellman @hellmanmd.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

It’s here, complete with proof that I got a first printing! @kateatherley.bsky.social

My just-arrived copy of Kate Atherley’s book Math for Knitters sits on a red and blue garter stitch blanket. The apology for the cross-reference page numbers is on top.

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Melissa D. Hellman @hellmanmd.bsky.social · 10/09/2025

If you smell the nuts toasting, it miiiight be too late already. This might not be a post about baking.

Pecans that might just be a tad burnt are on a piece of parchment on a wooden counter.

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Melissa D. Hellman @hellmanmd.bsky.social · 17/08/2025

On this hot #Caturday, Puma wishes you all a sofa top to spread out and nap on.

Puma the black cat is sprawled on the top of the sofa, which is covered with a chartreuse sheet and in front of a white wall.

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Melissa D. Hellman @hellmanmd.bsky.social · 12/08/2025

Rigatoni, 201?–12 August 2025 Always the best dressed, most elegant cat in the house, even with kitty litter crumbs on her adorable little nose. Always willing to get on any counter if there’s food available there, regardless of any house rules imposed upon her. Always well loved.

Rigatoni the tuxie cat’s face with her adorable black nose.

Rig the tuxie cat lounges on the bed, looking bored and slightly miffed, as one does when one is disturbed.

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Melissa D. Hellman @hellmanmd.bsky.social · 21/07/2025

The thing about the Commanders (and the Guardians) is that Trump is on the Epstein list.

Screenshot from The Athletic with the start of an article about renaming the Commanders and Guardians

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Melissa D. Hellman @hellmanmd.bsky.social · 29/06/2025

Here’s a headline from The Athletic: “Achilles injuries have vexed the NBA. A Hall of Famer reflects, and doctors analyze.” This is nothing new to those who follow gymnastics! It could make for an interesting comparison, though. (Right, @gymcastic.com?)

The start of an article from The Athletic. The headline reads “Achilles injuries have vexed the NBA. A Hall of Famer reflects, and doctors analyze” and there’s a picture of a Black man with glasses and closely cropped dark curly hair and a graying goatee wearing a dark royal blue jacket, white dress shirt, and yellow tie and pocket square.

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Melissa D. Hellman @hellmanmd.bsky.social · 29/06/2025

I admit to liking cake better than pie, but there’s something marvelous about cherry pie made with sour cherries that you picked and pitted yourself just a few hours before turning them into pie.

A piece of cherry pie sits on a small white plate with a green rim, atop a yellow placemat on an oak table.

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Melissa D. Hellman @hellmanmd.bsky.social · 29/06/2025

I hope everyone is having a relaxing Saturday evening, hanging out and chewing your cud in a shady spot.

A doe is curled up next to our patio by the stairs up to the deck, resting quietly.

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Melissa D. Hellman @hellmanmd.bsky.social · 26/06/2025

The summer concert season has begun!

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Melissa D. Hellman @hellmanmd.bsky.social · 05/06/2025

Strawberry lemonade bars from @kingarthur-i.bsky.social. I’d do these again! Recipe: www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/stra...) I can most easily find freeze dried strawberries at Aldi.

Two bar cookies, each about an inch wide and four inches long, rest on a small white plate with a green rim. Each bar has a yellow interior and a tip coating of brilliant pink frosting.

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Melissa D. Hellman @hellmanmd.bsky.social · 31/05/2025

These are all American stories and American history. Gift link; I’ll put one for Canadians in the comments. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/t...

A screenshot of the beginning of the linked article, showing part of a portrait of a white guy with short brown hair

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Melissa D. Hellman @hellmanmd.bsky.social · 01/05/2025

Happy May! Will I be courting disaster if I take the mittens out of the car?

A pair of pink and white handknit mittens sits on the black seat of my car.

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Melissa D. Hellman @hellmanmd.bsky.social · 26/04/2025

This is the face of a cat who stole a piece of cheese off my plate and ate the whole thing without sharing any with her brother. She feels no guilt. Happy #Caturday to all who celebrate!

Rig the tuxie cat is on my lap. A PWHL game between Ottawa and Montreal streams on the laptop in the background.

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Melissa D. Hellman @hellmanmd.bsky.social · 26/04/2025

This morning, I was in the 1850s kitchen at Genesee Country Village, making a variety of Wheatley’s goods on a wood-burning stove. We also churned butter. A major part of my contribution was beating eggs very light with a birch twig whisk, something I hope to never need to do in modern life.

All our goodies are on plates in the middle of an old wooden table, on ceramic plates or in wooden bowls.

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Melissa D. Hellman @hellmanmd.bsky.social · 26/04/2025

I spent this afternoon in a workshop taught by Guy Gane at the Genesee Country Village & Museum. We learned how to make Civil War–era buttonholes. I am not a sewist. Yet behold: my first buttonhole! My favorite part was using a chisel to cut the hole open before edging it in buttonhole stitch.

A dark blue scrap of wool broadcloth has a keyhole-shaped buttonhole edged with red thread. Above and below the buttonhole, the same red thread is used to baste the layers of cloth together.

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Melissa D. Hellman @hellmanmd.bsky.social · 21/04/2025

That headline didn’t age well, @wsj.com (And yes, the date on the paper is today, 21 April. I was surprised to see it on the rack still.) Of all the popes whose tenure I remember, Francis is the one whose actions have made the most sense to me.

The front page of today’s Wall Street Journal. There is a large photo of Pope Francis riding in the open back of a vehicle, with the headline “Pope Emerges From Convalescence on Easter.”

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Melissa D. Hellman @hellmanmd.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

I think I just found my first Hebrew typo. This is a box of Streit’s egg matzos. They got it correct in the upper right corner. If I’m not mistaken, the last line of the inset box missed the first letter. My Hebrew is less than basic, but I think what’s there translates to “Sing Passover”. Dayenu?

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Melissa D. Hellman @hellmanmd.bsky.social · 09/04/2025

Not as good as being there, but a lot easier and cheaper.

I am sitting in front of the television with my knitting (gold sweater) on my lap and my feet on an ottoman covered with a green towel. On the TV: the broadcast of the USA-Finland hockey game from Women’s Worlds.

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Melissa D. Hellman @hellmanmd.bsky.social · 06/04/2025

From the pin to where I am now = 1 Rochester of sock.

The start of a cuff-down hand knit sock, on the needles, rests on my blue Jean–clad leg. The yarn is light blue with touches of royal blue and chocolate brown. The pin is a couple of rounds past the ribbed cuff. The knuckle of my index finger is at the pin, and the leg of the sock goes about to the end of my finger.

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Melissa D. Hellman @hellmanmd.bsky.social · 26/03/2025

New reading material, picked up from @riversendbookstore yesterday! (I’m SO excited about this one!) And it matches my knitting! And my jeans! Can I get any more exclamation points into this?

The book on my lap is Pittsburgh in 50 Maps. The cover has a black background (with a faint gray street map in it) overlaid with the three rivers the color of my blue jeans and the city’s shape in gold, with black lines for streets. My knitting is gold, almost exactly the color of the Pittsburgh shape on the book cover.

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Melissa D. Hellman @hellmanmd.bsky.social · 22/03/2025

I don’t know that I’ve ever seen this on a hockey broadcast before. It’s beautiful!

Blake Bolden, a Black woman dressed in a green suit, interviews Laila Edwards, a Black woman in a Wisconsin hockey uniform, at first intermission of the Minnesota-Wisconsin hockey semifinal.

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Melissa D. Hellman @hellmanmd.bsky.social · 16/03/2025

No cheating, post the last photo of your pet

Puma the black cat perches on top of an Ikea chair covered in a blue and green striped sheet. The footstool in front is covered with knitted lap blankets.

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Melissa D. Hellman @hellmanmd.bsky.social · 16/03/2025

My hockey season started by showing you 1 Potsdam of sock. My hockey season is ending with showing you 1 Ithaca of sock, minus 1 restart caused by my early and momentary inability to successfully count to two, 32 times in succession.

The start of a cuff-down sock: about 3/4” of a variegated blue sock, on the needles and resting on my denim-clad leg. My left hand holds a yellow measuring tape on the knitting.

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Melissa D. Hellman @hellmanmd.bsky.social · 14/03/2025

Happy Pi Day! (Photo stolen from today’s NYT article on math, on the front page of their website. If you want a cookie cutter, a donation to mathemalchemy.org will get you one!)

A red fruit pie, with a top made from pi-shaped cutouts made with a cookie cutter that tiles perfectly

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Melissa D. Hellman @hellmanmd.bsky.social · 22/02/2025

Puma is having such a lazy #Caturday that he ignored the stinkbug buzzing on the window below him and left it for me to find and remove.

Puma the black cat lounges lazily in the lower portion of his cradle by the window, which is lined with a light blue towel. Behind him through the window, mountains of snow were pushed up by the plow coming down the street.

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Melissa D. Hellman @hellmanmd.bsky.social · 20/02/2025

Socks completed! This was the pair I started back in October on the way to a UVM women’s hockey game at Clarkson. Ends woven in during tonight’s game between @pwhlsceptres.bsky.social and @pwhlsirens.bsky.social. Yarn is Opal sock yarn, colorway based on Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night.

Socks! Mostly blue with swirly stripes of reddish and deep green. I’m holding them in front of my laptop, which has a hockey game on the part of the screen not covered by the socks.

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Melissa D. Hellman @hellmanmd.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

In today’s the-end-of-the-world-is-near adventures: more darning, this time with the Speedweve and sock reinforcement thread to fix a wool balaclava. It’s getting easier and I think the results are looking better. I used chalk to draw some guidelines before I started, and that seemed to help.

Getting started with the Speedweve. It’s attached with rubber bands, the verticals are all in place, and I’ve started with the horizontals.

Almost done! The verticals are full and I just need to get the Speedweve removed and the top loops tacked down.

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Melissa D. Hellman @hellmanmd.bsky.social · 17/02/2025

One of the little things I appreciate about Luisa Weiss’s latest cookbook, Classic German Cooking, is that the book stays open on its own, so I can read it while I try to finish this sock. And also that it contains a recipe for cheese soup where one recommended cheese is Appenzeller.

A cookbook is open to a spread featuring a photo of handled soup bowls filled with a pale cheese soup garnished with rye croutons on the verso and the recipe for käsesuppe, mountain cheese soup, on the recto. A ball of blue and brown sock yarn with a more than halfway completed sock-in-progress lies over the recipe.

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Melissa D. Hellman @hellmanmd.bsky.social · 14/02/2025

Yeahhhh. Every one of my US6 knitting needles is 4.00 mm in diameter, except the one that’s 4.25 mm. Guess which one I used for my swatch? Guess I’ll be doing that again if I want the sweater to fit. 😕

A selection of circular knitting needles of varying lengths, all labeled as U.S. size 6. Most are 4.00 mm in metric sizing, except for the one on the right, which is 4.25 mm.

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Melissa D. Hellman @hellmanmd.bsky.social · 12/02/2025

The barred owl made a return visit this morning! I couldn’t get a good photo through the window screen, but it was right there on a different tree when I got out of the shower. It hung out there, turning its head to and fro until it had enough of the crows harassing it and flew off.

A fuzzy photo of an owl perched in the tree. The grid of the window screen is visible in the foreground.

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Melissa D. Hellman @hellmanmd.bsky.social · 09/02/2025

I feel compelled to post last Sunday’s Superb Owl again today.

A barred owl sits on a snowy tree branch.

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Melissa D. Hellman @hellmanmd.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

New bird for my list! I was sitting at the dining room table, looked up, and there it was on the railing. It flew to a nearby tree, where I snapped its picture. Barred owl #1 for me! I love owls and this is the closest I’ve been to one in a very long time. #BirdsOfBluesky #OwlsOfBluesky #Owl

A barred owl with its feathers slightly ruffled by the breeze perches on a tree limb with a little snow on its top surface. The dish of its face is directly facing the camera, with its concentric brown and white circles and big eyes staring towards me.

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Melissa D. Hellman @hellmanmd.bsky.social · 10/01/2025

My first clam pizza. This one’s from Pepe’s. 👍👍

A slice of clam pizza is on a white paper plate on my lap, as I sit in the car.

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Melissa D. Hellman @hellmanmd.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

Spotted on the boards at tonight’s PWHL game: an ad for something (turns out to be a brand of paper towels we don’t see here south of the border) featuring some adorable floofy white cats with blue eyes, who are likely deaf! (Somehow, they aren’t advertising that.)