Old Technology

But first... it's sunny!  I opened the curtains this morning and look!  There's a big, yellow white ball in the sky shining its beneficence down upon us poor damp, rained on humans.  Ahhh.





Sometimes when you want to "read" a book, you have to put away your iPod and Kindle and just go with the traditional.  I had to do that the other day.  Lala recommended a book, Fresh Water, which is a compilation of essays by women about living around the Great Lakes.  The library only has it a copy of an actual, old-fashioned, paper book.  Years ago when my rate of knitting ramped up but before I had any way of playing an audiobook Durwood gave me a book holder for Christmas.  It's been a while since I used it but I knew where it was so I dug it out, put it into my knitting bag with the book, and set it up on the desk at work.  It worked great, especially since I was knitting something fairly brainless so I could knit a few stitches without looking while reading a few paragraphs.  Retro but totally workable.

What I was knitting on that day was the first half of Sudoku Maize #9, and last night at the BLKG meeting I got within one row of starting the decreases.  That means I'll have four of the nine colors of blocks done when I bind off this square.  The next two colors, Almond & Stone, need four squares knitted each, then it'll be knit eight each of the last three colors, Berry, Snow & Violet.  I'm getting there.

I'm also five rounds from the end of the third pattern repeat on the Virgo Hat and then comes the crown decreases.  I like the way this hat looks and I'm not minding knitting it with DK yarn, although I did find a big yarn, big needles hat pattern I plan to make as soon as this hat is done.  Kind of a palate cleanser after knitting a whole, adult size hat with tiny-ish yarn and small-ish needles.  Maybe I'll crank out a pair of mittens with bulky yarn too.  In fact I should probably just have a small, quick to knit project as my second one since I want to focus on the Sudoku throw as my main project.  I always have to have more than one project, it's my late-onset ADD (self-diagnosed).  I can't do only one thing at a time.

After I got up this morning I stirred up some semolina bread dough.  It smells good and yeast-y in the kitchen now, and it'll smell even better tomorrow when I bake up a loaf of it.  Mmm, homemade bread.







Last night at knitting guild someone said she didn't knit socks because she hated knitting the second one.  I asked why she felt she had to knit a second one and the people in the group that know me demanded that I show her and the newbies why I asked the question.  So I did.

September 11--George Abe, New Venture.  Ethan stood in front of the painting alongside two other men.  They weren't together and none of them spoke but they stood in a row and first leaned to the left and then to the right, shrugged, and turned away.  It had been like that since the exhibit had been hung.  Large canvases with broken rainbows and flat cubes of buildings joined by flat planks of bridges, some with a solitary figure, others without a human seemed more confusing to the viewers than uplifting.  Ethan wasn't a real art lover but he'd heard about the exhibit and its controversial art so he came to see for himself.  At first he didn't like the paintings, he walked quickly past them, but he stopped when one of the tiny figures in a topcoat and fedora seemed to be looking out of the painting straight at him.

Aw, man, I knew I shouldn't have said anything, now the sun has been buried behind clouds.  *sigh*  And I can't figure out how to make Win 8.1 play a DVD.  Can anybody help or do I need to go out and borrow a neighborhood 'tween?  Except they're back in school, aren't they?  Drat.
--Barbara