Reading Material

First the obligatory proof of knitting:

These socks are pretty slow going, but that might be due to a pesky thing called “gainful employment” rather than my skills as a knitter. I only manage to get a few rounds done at a time with these, due to decreased free time (see above), kiddie wrangling, and the desire to do, you know, other things. On weekends I get to lock myself in my laundry room and knit furiously for a few hours, but honestly I can’t do that all day or all weekend, even if I did have the time. Short attention span theater, what can I say? I am enjoying this pattern, it has enough going on to keep my flighty attention and isn’t so complex that I’m getting frustrated by it. I like this yarn, I think it was perfect for these socks. Nice and smooth with a little smooshy-ness to make the twisted stitches really pop. So there you are, knitting on the knit blog.

A few days last week, I walked down to Powell’s (aka the Happiest Place on Earth) and wandered around to kill time and soak in the books. H knows my desire to wait until closing time, hide in the stacks and run wild in the store all night. They can’t check all the aisles. I love to read and I love books, but majoring in English burned me out on reading more than I realized it would. An average of ten books a class, and three lit classes per semester makes for at least 30 books I was responsible for reading every four months. I’ll go ahead and be honest, no, not all of those books got read, but at least 90% did. By the end of college my brain was fried on the written word and I started knitting. This was great for the first year, and after the second year of not reading much of anything I began to miss books so I bought some. And didn’t read them. (I can buy books like a champ. The fact that I’ve walked out of Powell’s three times this week without a book in hand is nothing short of a miracle. Are you contacting the Pope yet?) Now I’m a little irritated at myself that I’ve hardly read anything in the past year worth mentioning (Suite Francaise being the shining example that I do still have a brain in my head), and the last book I read was A Clockwork Orange, which took an embarrassingly long time to get through, but at least I now know it is not a children’s book nor is it about violence (it’s about the threat of Communism). And there was that short mid-century French existentialism attack earlier in the year. But I need to do a little better. I miss reading. I miss characters and improbable plot twists and magical realism. I miss the good stuff and I miss literary trash. So I have a solution.

It’s a clip to keep the pages open, hands-free! Now I can knit and read the major works of the 20th century at the same time. And yes, I am a huge dork. Thanks for asking.