I'm knitting in the rain

Just knitting in the rain... What a glorious feeling... OK, I'll stop singing (now that you all have that song stuck in your heads *evil cackle*). Anyway, you might have noticed that I'm happy. It rained all weekend, and it's supposed to rain most of the week. The drought is over. Our garden is happy, despite the lower temperatures (thanks here is due not only to the rain, but also to Taz, who has been using his two weeks off for the betterment of our living conditions). Also, rain is just plain beautiful (at least when it's not causing flooding like this). And best of all, I was able to take off the wrist brace for long enough intervals this weekend to make some very respectable progress on x-mas surprise #2! Which, I've decided, I can feel free to show you. It's for my mother, and I'm 99.9% sure she never has time to read my blog, and even if she does, she already knows what she's getting, since I had to ask her for her foot measurement. In case you haven't figured it out by now:



Socks. My second pair ever, and I'm proud. It's really true that once you get an idea of the "architecture" of a sock, the pattern seems soooo much simpler. Cuff...heel flap...heel cup...gusset...foot...toe! Yay! And the holes in my gusset corners aren't even that big this time (though, perfectionist that I am, I may still decide to go over them with a bit of extra yarn at the end). The color reminds me of a late winter twilight. Perfect for a Christmas gift. Now if only I can figure out what to give her for her birthday, which is a month sooner. Leave it to me with my holiday knitting obsession brilliant time management skills to start the Decemer due-date project before even thinking about an inkling of an idea for the November due-date. Doh!

I also promised you a book review. Last week In finished Goodnight Nobody by Jennifer Weiner. In under seven hours. Two round trip train rides to NYC (plus about 45 more minutes). Yeah, it's a quick read, to say the least. Did I like it? Yes. Love it? Almost. It was fun. There were a few parts that made me laugh out loud. And the solution to the mystery did surprise me, partly. But the mystery itself didn't quite draw me in as much as I expected. By the end of the book, I did really like the protagonist and her best friend. But for some reason, I found that mostly, the book made me feel I should be very wary of marriage and especially of having kids. The outlook was so negative and depressing. Now, I don't think of myself as a rose-colored-glasses kind of woman, but I do still honestly believe that marriages can be real loving partnerships, and that it's possible to find and make friends with other women (mothers or otherwise) who won't expect me to define myself through my partner or my (potentially-someday-but-not-yet) kids. I guess a good first step is not marrying someone you only like because the person you love isn't into you. Lucky for me, that's a non-issue, since the person I love with all my heart also loves me.* Anyway, not a bad book, but I think I'm going to have to read some more before I can issue a verdict on how I feel about chick lit as a genre.

Now, there have been several quizzes going around, and I felt compelled to take two of them. First, thanks to Zarzuela's link, it appears I am a knee sock:


You quite like socks, but you're not overly-obsessed
with them. You would have been a pair of
knee-length socks in any colour, and probably
stripy or something to make you that little bit
more interesting.


What type of sock are you?
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Then, I take the next quiz (thanks to Jenn's link), and much to my surprise, I discover that I am:


You appear to be a Knitting Guru. You love knitting
and do it all the time. While finishing a piece
is the plan, you still love the process, and
can't imagine a day going by without giving
some time to your yarn. Packing for vacation
involves leaving ample space for the stash and
supplies. It can be hard to tell where the yarn
ends and you begin.
http://marniemaclean.com


What Kind of Knitter Are You?
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I just soooo don't feel I deserve that title. But hey, fake it 'til you make it, right? Or something like that...

*Disclaimer: This is not some subtle way of trying to tell everyone I'm getting married--I'm just talking about the concept, okay? So cool yer jets, any anxious family members (especially of the elder generation) who might be reading this. All in good time, all in good time.