Toilet plunger + elongated egg beater + timelord = must-knit scarf

My dad's birthday is November 19, and he will be 50 this year. Clearly this would be a good year to knit him something special and meaningful. So I cast on for a Dr Who Scarf yesterday. When I was younger, we would watch Dr. Who every Friday night on Iowa Public Television. (Preceded by Jack Horkheimer's Star Hustler, too!) So I thought something a little Who-related would be nice. If I have time, I may try to do a knitted Dalek as well. (With a toilet plunger in one hand and an elongated egg beater in the other, Daleks are some of the deadliest cyborgs in the galaxy. — ThinkGeek)

I'm going for the season 16 colors, but not nearly as long. In season 16, the scarf ends both reach the ground, and have a knee-length loop. That's a 15-foot scarf, I'm thinking. And that's a walking hazard. My dad's not always the most graceful of folks, so I'm going to give him less of a chance of tripping himself and knit it to only (!) ten feet or so. So far, I've done six bars of color, or 96 rows. Did I mention that this scarf is entirely garter stitch? Talk about mindless knitting.

And yesterday, my geekdom surpassed itself. I was knitting the Dr. Who scarf, at 42* stitches wide, while watching Firefly. Maybe I'll knit it to The X-Files next.

Also, I've been working on a wedding present for a couple of my friends. They're getting married October 20. I'm doing a little something-something that, like the Dr. Who scarf, involves garter stitch. (Really, a fancified garter stitch was the only texture I was pleased with. Lace was too big, and the other was just too fiddly.) Size 3 needles, 59 stitches, Elann Canapone 100% hemp yarn. It will be a pair of items, probably around 24 inches long.

I have no photos. My camera's still lost in No Man's Land.

Oh, and I forgot to say that I got a very interesting book, Mark Dunn's Ella Minnow Pea: A Progressively Lipogrammatic Epistolary Fable because I'm a bit of a nerd.

*That's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy speaking. 42 is the answer to life, the universe and everything.