when it rains, it pours

It's Monday morning and everyone needs something to read. But again, I don't have nearly as much time as I would like for commentary. The fun never stopped this weekend! (No, I'm really not being sarcastic.) I took a fabulous trip out to The Fold with Mimazu. Ran into Emily and some other fabulous folks from the MDK party way back when (arghk! I can't find the right blogs! Could you point me in the correct direction?) I was successfully cute at a birthday party, attended church and a special meeting without whining, and supervised C as he made the second rhubarb pie of the season. His efforts outstripped my own. I'm trying not to panic about that.

There's also a slew of random knitting items to catalog. Remember when I said I just couldn't find a project to get motivated on? That I hadn't been knitting? HA! Those days are so over.

Since last week, this unassuming sock has grown a leg and a heel.


And I've been narrowing down my choices on what to do with the yarn haul from Loopy.

Ribbon scarf, obviously, but when?


I don't even know quite how many balls there are because they are so tangled in each other. I was hoping for a short sweater, but Dana set me back on the path to reality and said, "Maybe a shrug."


Shell? Floofy baby gear for one of the breeding friends?


Tank top? I thought about making a skirt but I don't think I have enough yarn to cover my behind.


Gym bag. No, really; I carry a teeny bag that's big enough to hold my humbug, my gym card, and a lock when I go to the gym. (I don't shower there, because, ew.) My old one is cotton and looking stretchy and strange. Hopefully if I can get the gauge down far enough this will hold its shape.

This last one, from The Fold on Saturday, I have no words for. It just walked home with me, I swear.

Knitting gods, help me.

what the girls are saying

Sometimes I get too caught up in my reading (and saving my reading) to take any time for writing. I have yarn pictures, though I don't have them in the machine yet. Here's the old style "web log" for you this week. And yes, it's a cross-post. But since they're all good links, shouldn't everyone get pointed to them? Without ado:

Julie at A Little Pregnant remarks on the Catholic schoolteacher in WI who let on that she conceived using IVF and was subsequently fired.

Jessica at "Cancer, Baby" passed away last week. Orange Tangerine was kind enough to pass on the news and provide a primer for those of us who never got to read her in real time. I now firmly believe that everyone would benefit from reading her analysis of mood oglers, either as a cautionary tale or as ammunition for the next bozo who comes along.

Sundry: Mela suggests it's time to bring out our very last option for impeaching President Bush. Funny. New York gals are calling out street harassers on a public blog. A White Bear muses on plagarism, both in print and online.

All yesterday and today I've been reading about the WaPo article "Forever Pregnant". As a public-health chick, this seems like an expedient plan, if not the ideal one. Bitch Ph.D partially exonerates the CDC, but methinks they'll watch their phrasing in the future as they prepare for more angry letters.

Finally, what the girls are not saying: Jeff points me to an article about the 14 y.o. Ohio girl who is being held in custody, without counsel, for refusing to be a material witness to a molestation case. Sometimes it's all in what you don't say.

good fences make good neighbors

This morning I popped out my back door carrying the large bag of kitchen trash to find the sidewalk to my alley completely blocked off by the construction project next door. This construction project has been the bane of our existence for several months, as it has not only made a lot of noise, but torn up our garden, landed things onto our roof, pilfered our water, blocked our parking, hidden our trash cans, and left cigarette butts (ew! ew! ew!) on our lawn. Not only that, but when finished it will populate our neighborhood with yet more luxury SUVs and well-meaning yuppies carrying petitions to shut down the BBQ joint because "the smoke bothers us; doesn't it bother you?" Far from believing that the wafting scent of food or the park next door are assets, they want to regulate and sanitize--which I suppose might be how I felt if I were silly enough to drop half a million on a piece of property that doesn't even have land for a garden. All of these thoughts may, I admit, have been playing out on my face as I stood on my porch and held my bag of smelly garbage.

The man operating the backhoe in the middle of this travesty caught my eye and must have read this. He turned around with a "Yo!" to one of the hard hatted men and used a work glove to gesture my way. The guy in the hard hat immediately jogged over, clambered over the rolled-up chain link fence which was blocking the sidewalk, and held out his hand for the trash. "Don't worry, ma'am," he said. "I've got it." I was charmed. Completely charmed. I don't care that he ma'am-ed me, I don't hardly care that he may or may not have been as nice to my spouse, and for one glorious minute I forgot about the swath of my garden that had been destroyed. I just thanked him warmly and tried to ignore the juice oozing out of one edge of the trash bag.

***

I've been reading over the Harlot's "Knitting Rules" (yes! I read straight through books of knitting instruction for fun!) and have just gotten to the hat chapter, where she explains neat tricks for estimating the size of someone's head. I've been trying these out and giggling like a toddler when I discover they're true. Did you know that the circumference of a person's head is about three times the length from thumb to pinky on an outstretched hand? Go ahead, try it. Put your pinky fingers together and hold your hands around where your hat brim would sit. Imagine that third handspan on the back of your head. Tell me if it makes you a little surprised and gleeful. If it doesn't do that, tell me how long it took one of your coworkers to ask what crazy thing you are up to now. Or, if you're shy, duck down in your cube/office/kitchen so you don't get spotted. Because sometimes good fences do make good neighbors.

and today I begin swatching for my next big project

Never fear, D. I was sitting at dinner tonight and I felt the knitting come back. Yesterday amid the madness I went out and bought a couple knitting books, despite being on somewhat of a yarn diet. Mimazu tempted me with the work of Mlles. Mason and Dixon, but I didn't find that one and walked home with "Knitting Nature" and the latest Yarn Harlot offering. After just twenty-four hours of paging through those, I started getting ideas again. Tank top ideas and more shawl ideas and baby blanket ideas. (Notice that I never have any dishcloth ideas; these are pretty high-investment experiments. I seem to be a risk-tolerant knitter, as evidenced by the sweater graveyard in my closet.) And possibly I will begin an even bigger project. Time will tell.

I've figured out that I post MUCH faster without putting in HTML or pictures. This one fact may be responsible for my beginning and end as a knitblogger.

not dead

Just busy.

I haven't even gotten the yarn haul onto the camera yet, much less into the computer, so that will be a tick before you see it. I'm hoping to beg forgiveness with some Sunday Pie Blogging... the rhubarb is back, and we made the first pie of the season! But I'm still recovering from all my fun and drama, and my sudden desperate need to buy yarn books (yes, Dana, I got the Knitting Nature book! You temptress, you!) and the big ideas I got out of last week's KIP. Which was just like Old Home Week--it was so cool to see everyone back! Details soon.

What? and, ew.

Many people have asked me since C got his appendix out: "Was it a planned surgery?" I got confused about how much planning they meant. We did, after all, plan to have the surgery after he got diagnosed that morning and then spent eleven hours sitting in a hallway. No, they clarify. "Had it been getting bad for a while?" Um, no. Appendectomies aren't really like that, to my knowledge. They're emergency-only, like an evolutionary Plan B. The first time someone asked me I was sure of that; after the fifth or sixth person asked me that, I started to question what I knew. I must thank Aramis again for setting me straight!

Nothing compares to this week's comment, though. Someone who was a little late to the medical-news party heard about the bad appendix and asked, "How bad was it? Did you see it?" Um, no. And for anyone else who might be curious: we never did lay eyes on the rogue digestive organ. So we're kind of taking the surgeon's word that it's actually gone.

In a similar vein (har), I had a conversation with the inside of someone's purse today, when I called her cell phone and it answered itself. I began shouting loudly at the person I was calling, because I could hear her saying something about laser eye surgery. I caught the phrases "dicing and cauterizing" and "right next to his contact lens". Then I paused, and she paused, and she said clearly enough as if she were talking to me: "So, how are YOUR eyeballs?" I get majorly squicked out by eyes. I said her name once more, to be sure that she hadn't picked up the phone to draw me into the conversation, and when I didn't get a reply my eyeballs and I hung up. We need neither dicing nor cauterizing, thankyouverymuch.