Wool & Words

I've picked the July projects...for now. Nymph Pi, Pippi Kneestockings, and the TKGA swatch-a-thon. I've updated the sidebar and will get some photos up soon.

It feels good to know where you're going...and what knitting you'll be taking along.

Of course, the 10 balls of Sinfonia (in a lovely shade of rose) that I picked up this afternoon at the Hobby Lobby ($1.99/skein--212 yds per skein--a bargain for yummy soft mercenized cotton) are doing their best to seduce a way into the knitting bag. But I say, no! Back vixen! You must stay!

After all, if I bring the Sinfonia, then the Cotton Fleece in Prosperous Plum will want to come, and then the Elsbeth Lavold Cotton in that great blue color that I can't remember the name of will be begging for a ride...the next thing you know, I'm riding on top of the car while the stash is driving us to Louisiana.

Of course, I could maybe make room for this:

This yummy silk/wool blend is burning a hole in my cedar chest, itching to be knit into something special. I've got about 1400 yds of it...ah, the dreams, the dreams.

Posted by KnitNut at 11:08 PM | Permalink

Lots of errands to do today as I prep from my month in LA. One of the hardest things to do on my list? Choosing The Perfect Knitting Projects for my trip. I'll be musing on that today and will fill you in on my choices.

One may involve the Cotton Fleece I snagged from Oregon Trail Yarn in Prosperous Plum...mill seconds because of minor dyelot streaking, which I plan to remedy with triage dying if necessary (or I'll just suck it up and cut out the yucky parts...oh, the Great Weaving of the Ends). I've been wanting to knit Bonne Marie's Gigi, so that's one option.

So much knitting, so little time. Off to run those errands!

Posted by KnitNut at 10:49 AM | Permalink

I'm going to be away for 5 weeks. My next teaching assignment will take me to (gasp) Louisiana, where I'll be traveling most likely between Lake Charles (ugh) and Baton Rouge (double ugh) while staying somewhere between these two towns with my parents in New Iberia.

I must say this has thrown me for a serious loop as I really hadn't banked on being sent out of state. I knew it was a possibility, but I guess I wasn't seeing it as a probability. So now I've got to make arrangements to be gone for a month or so.

I'm learning quite a bit about myself and my need for control. Good heavens, am I a control nut! LOL. I feel utterly at the whim and mercy of my bosses which for me is really uncomfortable. I knew something was wrong when I started obsessively watching HGTV and TLC's home shows. They're an oasis of calm in this orderly chaos.

Posted by KnitNut at 10:23 AM | Permalink

I purchased Derrick Jensen's Walking on Water: Reading, Writing, and Revolution in a fit of extreme brain tickle. I saw the book in Borders yesterday, was intrigued, and couldn't get it out of my mind. So today I picked it up and brought it home. I'm on page 71and can't decide how I feel.

On the one hand, Jensen is a master of the honestly profound teaching statement, the kind of statement young idealistic teachers find honestly profound, so profound that they blog about them. I speak of statements like this one:

As I've written elsewhere, grades are a problem. On the most general level, they're an explicit acknowledgement that what you're doing is insufficiently interesting or rewarding for you to do it on your own. (71)

Now, Jensen doesn't totally eschew grading, but the point he's making is one that resonates with me as both student and teacher. And the book is full of these types of observations, all couched in (and this is the part I think I have trouble with) Jensen's accounts of his teaching experiences in freshman and prison writing courses. Lots of classroom histrionics, the kind of stuff that to me, quite frankly, screams "Look at me!!! I'm the cool teacher!!! I'm the only one who really gets it!!!" Ego, thy name is writer and thy form is writing instructor.

But that's what writing is all about anyway, isn't it? Ego. Abstract placement of self outside of self. I write this blog not only because I want a record but because I want a PUBLIC record of what I do, what I think, what I read and knit.

Anywho, that's what's tickling my brain right now. What I really need to be doing, though, is prepping for my classes tomorrow night. Or prepping dinner.

But I think I'll read some more of this book.

Posted by KnitNut at 07:19 PM | Permalink

Whew! What a week! I'll update starting BEFORE I got sick...the sick days really aren't that exciting.

A couple of Wednesdays ago I met up with two buddies for lunch.

I met Lisa and Thomas in one of my past career lives; I was working in HR/recruiting for a computer consulting firm and they were both candidates I had quite a hand in hiring! I still think Lisa's a bit miffed with me for convincing her that Birmingham, AL was the right place for a Northeasterner, but now that she's in Atlanta, I think she's feeling the big city vibe that the 'Ham just can't offer. Thomas was recruited out of TX and eventually moved to Atlanta too. The occasion for our lunch was a wee goodbye; Thomas has decided to return to Houston, where he'll be continuing in his new career as a scriptwriter for anime. Lunch was rushed, but lots of fun, and I hope to keep in touch with Thomas as he settles into his new home!

The next day started my 4 day teaching cycle. I'm starting to get used to the schedule (Thursday in Snellville, Friday in Alpharetta, Saturday/Sunday in Columbia, SC), but of course it's going to change in a couple of weeks when the next session starts. On Saturday while in Columbia I got a splitting headache and the thunderstorm that started up that afternoon didn't help my general disposition. As I was leaving the teaching site to head back to the hotel, I got to witness my first-ever lightning strike, which I wrote about in the last entry.

I went to bed early that night because the headache was really killer (so killer, in fact, that I'm sure this is the night I screwed up the Estonian Lace Shawl, losing 10 stitches...grrrr). The next day I taught my three classes and began to feel pain in my throat somewhere in the 2nd class. I taught on, but my throat felt worse and worse. By the time I got to the hotel, I could tell that I was not well and took shot of NyQuil to try to get some rest.

After a very fitful night, I checked out of the hotel and drove to Atlanta, where I had a faculty meeting to attend at noon. By the time I arrived at the meeting, I knew that this was no ordinary sore throat and that I would have to visit a doctor ASAP. On the way home, I stopped off at an office park near my apartment, found a GP, and made an appointment for the next morning. My fears were confirmed with his diagnosis--strep throat. I started my antibiotics and settled down in front of the television to watch lots of HGTV and TLC (I'm addicted to home dec shows).

I went back to teaching on Thursday, only doing part of my schedule since I was really wiped out by being ill. Steve came with me to SC for the weekend so that I could rest on the drive up. It was so great to have him there; we got to have a really nice dinner on Saturday night (Bull Market Restaurant in Columbia, SC--if you're ever in that town, check it out. Fabulous Greek restaurant.). This summer is offering us few opportunities to go out on "dates," so it was great to just walk down the street window shopping, chatting, and holding hands while deciding where to have supper. We also stopped at a brew pub (I've forgotten the name) where I had a cocktail and he had a beer sampler for (gasp) less than $5.00 total! We laughed that we'd never gotten out of a bar individually for that little!

The drive home last night was brutal and I know that Steve is probably feeling it today at work. I'm now sitting in my jammies at 11:20 A.M. (slug that I am) typing this missive. Whew! What a week and a half!

I do have some knitting to show!

This is the Two Toned Cotton Tank I've been working on. Seed stitch edging, mindless stockinette...around and around. This may actually just become another EZ pullover, with a bit of decorative lace treatment at the neckline and three-quarter sleeves. I've got time to figure it out!

I haven't had the heart yet to rip the shawl, but I'll have to set myself to that task today. As consolation, I bought a skein of Cotton Fleece in a pewter-ish color and a pattern for a Sampler Purse--why do we do this to ourselves, planning another project when we have so many to do? LOL.

So that's what's up with me. Oh, I've gotten some new knitting books. The latest Amazon/Ebay finds:

At Bonne Marie's instigation, a copy of Knit to Fit was delivered last week. I love textbooks!

I've also picked up Alice Starmore's Tudor Roses. Steve got The Celtic Collection for me as an anniversary gift, and I just love her patterns! Someday when I'm a Big Girl Knitter I'll be working on one of these intricately colored beauties!

The Knitting Pure and Simple patterns have caught my eye as well and I'm looking forward to someday (soon, I hope) starting on their summer cardigan or the neckdown tee. Ah, someday.

So much yarn, so little time. Merc & Zeus eagerly await the next project:

Posted by KnitNut at 11:24 AM | Permalink

So last weekend on my teaching run to South Carolina, I decided to whip out the Estonian Scarf and knit up a lace pattern repeat. This apparantly was a bad idea, as last night I realized I've somehow lost 10 stitches. I think it happened on the purl rows--I have a sneaking suspicion that 5 sets of two stitches decided they wanted to be forever snuggled together in the shawl.

I know now the painful truth of this summer. My brain is too preoccupied with the rigors of this teaching to even consider working on complicated knitting projects. I see rounds of boring stockinette in my future, endless rounds. If only I had the yarn for the Pi Shawl I'm going to knit for Steve's mother...but, alas, my old LYS has yet to receive the order.

I know that the onset of the case of strep throat I'm recovering from had something to do with my knitting gaffe. On Saturday I had a horrendous headache, exacerbated by my witnessing of a lightning bolt striking a telephone pole as I was driving down the street. EEK! In all my time living in South Louisiana, I'd never been that close to lightning, and the experience was plenty for me. When the lightning hit, there was a flash of that electric blue, then lots of sparks. I was really concerned that there might be a live wire loose, but that turned out to not be the case (whew). The weather was awful, the hotel was not the best (rooms were really humid), and I was tired and lonely. Sniff.

Not the best time to pick up Complicated Knitting. Even for a lace pattern as simple as this one.

Lesson learned. Nothing but stockinette in the round for me when I'm traveling, nothing to worry about except moving the stitch markers and measuring the length.

Now to frog that shawl...grrr.

Posted by KnitNut at 10:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Very ill I am. Small feeling am I. Bed me calls.

Wake me up when I'm human again.

Posted by KnitNut at 07:20 PM | Permalink

Shanked from I don't remember who...how many have you read?

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
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, 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 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 García - 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 - CandideVonnegut, 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 must say I'm disappointed in myself. Cervantes and Dante have been on my shelf for far too long waiting for their day in court. But where's the D.H. Lawrence on the list, huh? How do we get Ford Maddox Ford and no Lawrence? Hmmm...

Posted by KnitNut at 10:00 PM | Permalink

I'm
a Ravenclaw!

Thanks katyknits for the link!

I'm enjoying (finally!) Order of the Phoenix, although I'm a bit hazy on the events of book 4 since I read it so long ago. I've been extremely unwilling to discuss any Hogwarts-related business since I've not been able to read Book 5 until now...can't wait to complete it!

Posted by KnitNut at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I just got back from knitting at my new LYS. So rejuvenating. I just sat in a rocker for 3 hours knitting, eating malted milk balls, and chatting with great women! We even had a rug hooker join us, so I got to learn a bit about that craft...I see a rug in my future!

As I type this, I realize I'll have to start taking the camera with me to get photos. Lois, one of the knitters and a teacher in the shop, is working on a triangular shawl in Jagerspun Zephyr which is just lovely. The rug that Lorraine was hooking (her own design) was really gorgeous (colorful flowers on a dramatic green field), and all was merry and delightful.

Yes, I really should have been home unpacking boxes or preparing to leave tomorrow. Yes, I could have gotten a lot done at the house. But it was so nice and calming to just sit with some nice folks laughing, chatting, and enjoying my craft. Life is too good sometimes.

Posted by KnitNut at 08:49 PM | Permalink

Ah, rain. It rained all night last night and the sleep I got was wonderful. It's really peaceful out here. The neighbors seem to be almost non-existent, the mail comes in around noon, and the sun is gently screened by the trees overhead.

I did have an odd sleeping experience though. At the beginning of my sleep cycle, I started having a dream about an altercation with someone in what appeared to be a classroom situation. The dream ended with me trying to bite the hand of the student who was now grasping mine firmly as he tried to take something from my other hand. I woke up when I realized I was actually biting my own hand.

And I've been having recurring dreams about my hair falling out in clumps in the shower. Perhaps I need to see someone about anxiety meds. Or maybe I should knit more.

Posted by KnitNut at 11:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Posted by KnitNut at 11:04 AM | Permalink

Almost done with my first week of teaching reading enrichment classes. I'm exhausted! This is nothing like any work I've ever done. Challenging, frustrating, humbling--oh, and I never seem to get to eat anything and when I do get a chance to eat, I have no appetite. I keep forcing myself to eat food, but it's not tasting all that great. I never thought I'd be too tired to eat.

Or knit. I think this night in the hotel will be spent catching up on blog reading and watching tv till I fall asleep.

Posted by KnitNut at 06:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So I'm in the new place for good now. Furniture has been placed in almost-permanent homes (pending at least 2 months of living in the current arrangement), meals have been cooked in the new kitchen, pots of coffee have been made...and consumed. The only think left to do is to take my first new home stitch.

And I am paralyzed. As I sit here surrounded by the icky boxes, the ones full of papers to be sorted, knick knacks to be placed, pictures to be hung--decisions to be made--I find myself unable to pick up my knitting needles in this house. I think I'll feel guilty if everything's not done before I start knitting.

So I'm heading off to the LYS (really awesome shop in my new town) for Tuesday night knitting. See ya!

Posted by KnitNut at 06:09 PM | Permalink