etc.

I enjoy vacation grocery shopping more than any other kind of grocery shopping. Today we strolled the aisles like we never have before and I found salt water taffy in the bulk candy bins and black tea infused with real vanilla bean.

It’s day two of vacation and I’ve done a few things. I’ve stripped and painted more furniture, assembled some patio furniture we bought at rock-bottom, cleaned some things, knitted, and not read a page of anything. It has been somewhat restful but not as restful as I’d like since I have a talk coming up in a couple of weeks (at Vaughan Public Library on fiction, fantasy, and the Middle Ages) that I’m only just starting to give any real thought to, and I’m feeling a wee bit of anxiety since I’ve never done anything quite like this. Things will get more restful once I’ve got something down on paper.

And I took it as divine intervention that 20 balls of this arrived on my doorstep as I was frogging the poncho I restarted with the recalculated-single-strand math I worked out. Why? Because it’s just the right weight and gauge that the pattern calls for (it’s true, I swatched it). So I cast on the recommended stitches and finished the two rectangles in a day. It’s a lovely charcoal grey (bought on ebay from this excellent retailer) and all that needs to be done now is a little seaming and some light fringing.

I’ve been taking pictures, and even downloading them, I just haven’t gotten around to the selective uploading part yet. If you don’t believe me at all, I understand.

Hello. I’ve been neglecting the camera lately, haven’t I? And there’s a lot to photograph too. Well, I’m on the threshold of 9 days of rest so image catch up is on the menu.

If you are of the library persuasion and have been wondering about the lack of direction and all-around disappointment that has been bibliolatry.net lately, wonder no more.

“disclosure.ca is a growing collection of photographs that explore Canada and what it is to be Canadian.” [via marmalade.ca]

This morning, sunny and humid in my city of home and dense air, thick cloud and damp sidewalks in my city of work. Some days it feels like I travel between two different ecosystems, 60 kilometers away from each other and 40 minutes on the highway.

The work on the house is winding down with a slight hum of a circular saw. The two flat roofs are done, the new deck is all but done, just a couple of boards waiting to be nailed in place to form a step. The inside bit, where they pulled out the old window and put in a new window (much bigger, opens like a door) needs a bit of drywalling and reinstallation of the baseboard and our earnest contractor, Pierre, tells me it will be done today. He even saved the old baseboard, bless him! The place is due for an updated round of pictures so keep an eye out for those any day now.

Which brings me to news of the poncho. As I confessed in the comments yesterday, it has been frogged. I couldn’t bring myself to rip apart the already completed rectangle yet, for sheer lack of will, but the second one, half way done, has been reduced to a couple of balls, tightly-wound, centre-pull, awaiting further instruction. The going was good for a while, I was sure I could make do with my feckless attempt to rewrite a pattern, but what got me in the end was a yarn shortage. And since the stuff I’m using is way too expensive to replenish, I’ve decided that my only course of action will be to start over with a single strand knit, not what the pattern calls for at all but I’m stubborn.

Dogged perseverance or self-inflated hubris? We’ll see.

look, it’s a meme. i said i wouldn’t get involved with these, but this one is about books so how could i resist? copy the list and highlight what you’ve read [via at my knits end]:

Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua – Things Fall Apart
Agee, James – A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane – Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James – Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel – Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul – The Adventures of Augie March
Bronte, Charlotte – Jane Eyre
Bronte, Emily – Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert – The Stranger
Cather, Willa – Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey – The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton – The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate – The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph – Heart of Darkness

Cooper, James Fenimore – The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen – The Red Badge of Courage
Dante – Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel – Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel – Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles – A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor – Crime and Punishment

Douglass, Frederick – Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore – An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre – The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George – The Mill on the Floss

Ellison, Ralph – Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo – Selected Essays
Faulkner, William – As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William – The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry – Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott – The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave – Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox – The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von – Faust
Golding, William – Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas – Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel – The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph – Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest – A Farewell to Arms
Homer – The Iliad
Homer – The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor – The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Hurston, Zora Neale – Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous – Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik – A Doll’s House
James, Henry – The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry – The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz – The Metamorphosis

Kingston, Maxine Hong – The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper – To Kill a Mockingbird

Lewis, Sinclair – Babbitt
London, Jack – The Call of the Wild

Mann, Thomas – The Magic Mountain

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia – One Hundred Years of Solitude

Melville, Herman – Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman – Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur – The Crucible
Morrison, Toni – Beloved
O’Connor, Flannery – A Good Man is Hard to Find
O’Neill, Eugene – Long Day’s Journey into Night
Orwell, George – Animal Farm

Pasternak, Boris – Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia – The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan – Selected Tales

Proust, Marcel – Swann’s Way
Pynchon, Thomas – The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria – All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond – Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry – Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. – The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William – Hamlet
Shakespeare, William – Macbeth
Shakespeare, William – A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Shakespeare, William – Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard – Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary – Frankenstein

Silko, Leslie Marmon – Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles – Antigone
Sophocles – Oedipus Rex

Steinbeck, John – The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis – Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher – Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Swift, Jonathan – Gulliver’s Travels
Thackeray, William – Vanity Fair

Thoreau, Henry David – Walden
Tolstoy, Leo – War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan – Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire – Candide

Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. – Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice – The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith – The House of Mirth

Welty, Eudora – Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt – Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar – The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee – The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia – To the Lighthouse

Wright, Richard – Native Son

I have some sort of unhealthy fixation with Audrey Tautou so of course I’m going to love this film. It’s an excellent snapshot of immigrant working life in London, even though one of the main plot lines was tied up a bit too neatly in the end, even for me. Still, definitely worth watching.

I used to think that the first sign of true summer is when I start tossing a handful of bluberries into my breakfast yoghurt. I tossed a handful of blueberries into my breakfast yoghurt today. And now, 12 hours later, it’s damp-cool and there’s thunder and lightening outside my window. What do I know?

It turns out that knitting with two strands instead of one does not halve your gauge after all, but you already knew that. I swatched for the poncho, made nice with my calculator, adjusted my stitch count accordingly, and I was still way off on my measurements. How hard could it be when the pattern calls for two rectangles? I’m going to plug away while the going is good, I’m at the stage where I’m just loving the feel of this yarn while it feeds off my fingers. Pictures soon.

I’m supposed to read a 700-page book for my book club meeting on Wednesday, so off I go. Bid me godspeed.

oh, good lord. in case you’d haven’t already figured out that corporations are taking over the world [via my sister, via kottke].

one of my favourite local yarn stores (and knitters!) is featured in a local paper today. go Haley!

Funny. Especially if you live with cats. I think I probably liked the first one better but boy was I relieved that they didn’t cop out on ugly in the end (not too much of a spoiler, is it?).