etc.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, Mark Haddon
Unabridged Audiobook 2003

Haddon has done quite a remarkable job with this book. It is told from the point of view of Christopher Boone, a 15 year-old with Asperger’s Syndrome who lives with his parents and attends a school for kids with special needs. When the book opens, Christopher finds the body of his neighbour’s dog on her front lawn with a pitchfork sticking out of it, and he takes it upon himself to find the dog’s murderer and write a book about his investigation. Haddon is amazingly deft at getting you inside Christopher’s head, revealing his idiocyncracies (he likes prime numbers and hates the colours yellow and brown), and sympathetically exposing his unique view of the world. My favourite part? The way he manages to communicate Christopher’s difficulty in relating to and dealing with the people around him, as well as the trials those same people go through in dealing with Christopher.

Well. That badass cold that had me laid up over the weekend has been downgraded to a cough, and that’s OK because there is an aisleful of low-dose pharmaceuticals at my drugstore for exactly what ails me now (see “Chesty Cough”). Which is a nice change from my futile searches for appropriate medication for the Cold/Fever/Sinus Ick/Limb Weariness/All-Around Malaise I was feeling last week.

You’d think that with all the downtime I’ve had that I would have been knitting maniacally, but I haven’t been at all. I blame the Limb Weariness for my inability to hold the needles for too long, and the Sinus Ick for the numbing headache that limited my ability to concentrate. I did better last night though, almost through sock 2, which is the second of a pair that I’ve been calling The Buffy Socks, Seasons One Through Three. I shouldn’t need to explain that.

I do owe you some pictures though, don’t I? Remember the Top Secret? The Kittyville? I’ll throw those on and do a little modeling for you to-night. Or to-morrow.

How to be Alone, Jonathan Franzen
Unabridged Audiobook 2003

review soon

The thing of it is, I remember quite clearly when Buffy the Vampire Slayer premiered on television. I remember thinking to myself that Fall that it might be a show I would like, that I should give it a try and watch the premiere. But I didn’t, I missed it. And then I caught an episode somewhere towards the end of the first season, and it had some appeal then, but I didn’t pursue it because I’d already missed most of the first season and felt that there was no point in trying to jump in late. Besides, my television roster was already full.

I’ve always regretted having missed the Buffy revolution. So as soon as one of my colleagues broke the news that she had the first six seasons on DVD, I pounced. That was about 10 days ago, and the mister and I have already made it through a season and a half, with season 3 looming as our “Coming Attraction” on Monday. We’re completely, utterly, devastatingly hooked, we’re sucking each season’s DVDs dry with fanatical zeal, and already looking forward to the inevitable re-watch that will come at the end of all this. Have you had a look at my Amazon wishlist lately? It’s maddening.

Of course we picked the worst time to develop an addiction that is worth some 230 hours of time. Final preparations for the course were scheduled for this week (I’m done), there is a sock that is pining for a partner, and it’s the mister’s birthday to-day and neither the vest, nor the socks, nor the toque I had planned to knit him have been knitted (knat!) yet. And did I mention that somewhere between 2:30 and 3:30 pm yesterday, I developed a cold?

Still. I can’t complain since I have The Best Mister Ever, a title granted on the grounds of him wanting to do nothing other than take care of his ailing missus and watch old episodes of Buffy on his birthday. Happy birthday, Best Mister Ever!

a sock!

Blogrolling has been down for a few hours, and I really shouldn’t begin to describe how disconnected I feel when all attempts to access my regular reads are thwarted. Lucky for me, I’m back on the RSS wagon these days, enjoying the convenience of desktop delivery via FeedReader, which is a rather low-tech, zero bells & whistles aggregator, but fine for someone who switches aggregators weekly. Which is to say that with Blogrolling’s downtime, I have been managing just fine in most areas except for the knitblogs I frequent. Not enough knitbloggers are doing the RSS thing yet, and so I’m considering putting out a plea to said non-rss-publishing-knitbloggers to take heart and select that rss option for the sake of the rest of us. In fact, that was it right there, my plea.

And so now, cut to confessional.

Most regular readers know that I don’t apologize for much around here, but to-day, I do have a wee something I need to get off my chest. You see, I started knitting Gatsby, as I mentioned in my last post, and I did quite well for about the first 16 rows, and then I started noticing some minor irritation on my right-index finger, the one the yarn feeds off of. At about the same time, I also became acutely aware of the latent irritability that was gnawing at me, an irritability that grew with every stitch I knitted (I, too, wish the past tense of knitting was knat), in fact I think I frowned through all 16 rows. You see, I really don’t like this yarn. I knew when I picked it out that I’d have to make something large and roomy out of it, something that would afford complete coverage beneath because it’s a fairly coarse wool and, you see, I’m a bit allergic to wool. What I didn’t realize, however, was that I wouldn’t even be able to put up with holding the knitting in my hands. Not only was the fabric irritating my fingers, but I also experienced a lack of enjoyment that I have not known while knitting before. It was dire. I still haven’t made the final decision to scrap this project and look for another home for the Briggs & Little (want it?), but I think it’s pretty obvious where I’m going with this.

The upshot of this (other than the predictable lesson-learned thing) is that as soon as I cast aside the ill-fated sweater, I picked up a pair of 2.5 mm bamboo double-pointeds and some Fortissimo sock yarn and cast on for my first pair of socks (for the 4th time, all other attempts were done with aluminum needles). Wish you had seen it, it was like I’d been knitting socks my whole life. I’d always sort of had a feeling that, for me, sock-success was merely a set of bamboo needles away, and I experienced heady rushes of enjoyment and fortification at how right I was. I may never knit anything but socks again!

So now I’m putting together a plea for instant beatification for the wondrous soul who thought up self-patterning sock yarn.

It seems as though France just might be more godly than the rest of the world. Take to-day for example: there are 17 saints celebrated in the Roman Catholic church to-day, 6 of which are French. There’s some scattered representation from the Mediterranean (Greece, Italy, &c.), one from the British Isles, and a couple from the Balkans, but SIX from France. It gives me pause.

In knitting news, I swatched for Under the Hood from Stitch n’ Bitch last night using Mission Falls cotton instead of the fuzzy wool blend the pattern suggests (which looks lovely), and I’m pleased to report that I got gauge on my first try. However, I was frankly repelled by how it looked. I’ve used MF cotton before, to mostly good effect, but this time around it seemed too uneven and nubbly for such a nice pattern. Instead of labouring over it, I moved on right away, this time to Gatsby from Interweave Knits Spring 2003. I first ran across this lovely beast at Emily’s and liked it instantly, so when I was at the knitter’s fair this past weekend, I picked up a copy of the magazine, along with some Briggs & Little that I was certain would work. And, happily, I was right. I didn’t quite manage to get gauge so I decided to go up a size, which shouldn’t be much of an issue since I’m rather fond of roomy knits anyway. So, Briggs & Little Heritage in a heathery blue, imagine it if you could while I’m still cameraless.

No doubt you’ve noticed that etc. is now sporting Fall-ish colours and a marked absence of image headers. As you already know, my design tastes seem to flow in cycles and I’m currently re-entering a simplicity phase, so I decided to strip away the attention-grabbing elements for something more pared down. Again.

And, lastly, a couple of links that I’m happy to have stumbled over lately: the knitter’s guide to copyright, a superbly comprehensive list of free poncho patterns, and a wonderfully indexed collection of sock patterns (last two links via knitomatic).

I’m somewhat out of sorts. I have a mountain of yarn to trot out and a completed kittyville too, but none of it is getting trotted out to-day (or any day this week) because I left my camera at my parents’ house. Take my word for it, the knitters’ fair was a sensory overload, and I walked away with a considerable amount of Briggs & Little, Soho Summer, a little Noro, and a lot of homespun, hand-painted merino. Take my word for it.

I’m not sure what sort of folly it was that made me think it was ok to go on vacation for the last 2 weeks of summer. My first day back at work was Tuesday, and I arrived on campus to loud throngs of frosh, hard-hatted engineers, football players, and other sundry newbies, purveying their finest school spirit, and all I could think was “I’m Not Ready!” And indeed, I wasn’t ready. And I’m still not ready, and classes started yesterday. Never again with the vacationing in August.

And here’s some news for you: I have not knitted in 4 days! Nothing on the needles! I’ve spent the last two evenings scouring my patterns, magazines, and knitting books for inspiration for the large-project sized quantities of Mission Falls, Linen Drape, and Solero (Schachenmayr tactel microfibre stuff) yarn I have stashed away, but I’ve come up with nothing at all, which has left me feeling decidedly disenfranchised. On my way in to work this morning I made a mental decision to have a go at the Kittyville hat tonight, because I simply can’t go another night with bored hands.

The good news, however, is that to-morrow should provide all the inspiration I need, along with a sizeable deviation from my self-imposed yarn procurement rules (don’t worry, I planned for this), so I expect to be back here on Sunday with a little knitting and a lot of fibre to trot out.

Oh and, there’s a new Knitty you should know about.

i wore the organic cotton sweater for the first time to-day and thought it would be remiss if i didn’t use the opportunity to photograph it on for you. so here you go.