My father points out that I haven't blogged in a while. This is indeed the case. Now, while he is important to me in a narrow biological and a much wider social emotional way, he has a certain objective importance. In despair at the kind of handbasket we are all riding in, and because there is less and less review of books in the print media (and somehow Oprah never covers scholarly works), he has started The Internet Review of Books, q. you should v. And if you have expertise in anything and would like to review books, you might drop him a line. He has been enjoying (in the sense of surfing a small, not terribly destructive tidal wave) making the contacts to get the books and to review the books and editing the reviews and Getting It Out On Time. I think one of his first real jobs was as a reporter for the Dallas Times-Herald of blessed memory, so it is kind of cool for him to be getting it and writing it and putting a headline on it (albeit in a wholly other medium. Or not -- it's still written words) like he was maybe 60 years ago.
I am coughing much less. I have not needed to kill my boss at all lately; it is very pleasant feeling we are on the same side. The number of snow days has not been a bad thing, either. I had the Miraculous Conjunction of Taking Minutes for Two Board Meetings in One Day again last week. I realized that if I hadn't been taking minutes I would have been completely unable to pay any attention to the proceedings whatever (for I am a weak mortal damaged by original sin, or maybe just an uncaring dilettante with a taste for cafe life instead. Or both.)
I am having a weird desire (not unaffected by meeting a OneLaptopPerChild laptop) to learn Linux. Mostly I have hate and fear and love Microsoft; I am getting good at Word and although I want to leave him, I still think maybe if I love him enough he will quite acting like a vicious, kludgy monopoly....
I have finished a pair of adult-size Coriolis socks. I think the pattern might work better if you were using fewer than five stitches per inch, as the sexy band might not interact with the heel the way it did in my socks and the way it didn't in Sarah's.I was going to write about the almost unruffled calm joy I was getting from making them (though this was also due to the lovely soft green Jager Sock yarn, over to whose proprietors I may have to deed my house next festival. Then I had a Little Problem with the second heel. Like six times? I don't blame the pattern, although you can get really tired of flipping pages (Go to heels, p. 120. Do Step Four. But if you're doing the reinforced heel, go to p 124. Where it says, "Step Four (same as in Plain heel.")). While you are doing this, don't skip a step. It shows.
Sarah, however, reports, that her Coriolis socks, despite their beauty and perfectly distributed band, twist on her feet like tube socks and don't act like they have a heel. I haven't worn mine yet.
Now I am making a hat for me mum. I also had an epochal experience on the sewing machine -- I didn't want to throw it out the window even once!!! This is a first. It does not hurt that I had found the manual for the machine, that I was well rested (this was last Monday's snow day), and that I had good stuff (I had the brainwave of asking Sarah if she had a cloth-scrap stash. She does. It contains stash she stole in her infancy from her mother's stash, and scraps from her grandmother's, so although it is confined demurely to one plastic bin, there was a lot of stuff. Some of it's mine now, NOM NOM NOM. Now I have a start on a decorated shirt and two tea cozies (and I also cut out the lining for a felted wool vest (June 5, 2005, you don't want to hurry these things)). I promised to make an embroidered tea cosy for Alice, for whose mother I made one in 1997. I have also just bought a book on Beaded Embellishment, because although I don't have enough books I do have almost enough beads, and Sarah is having The Joy Of Almost-Instant Gratification making beaded stitch markers. It is fairly obvious from this post alone that Effectively Blogless Sarah and I are co-enablers of the worst kind.
It was delightful to have scraps and feel all Craft-Magazine and cheap and not have to buy stuff to do all this (though I did buy the yard of batik I used for lining last fall because it was beautiful, and I was right; there was a use for it eventually). Now all I have to do is sew the patches onto Doug's shirt, sew the lining into the vest (I bought seam binding and the right color thread. Isn't that the same as doing the actual work?), and embellish the tea cozies. And get the pins out of one of them, it keeps biting.
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