To make amends for my little rant yesterday -- oh, and btw, thanks for all the bah-humbuggery appreciation y'all sent me, did my little heart good to know that humor still rules the world (I wish! It could do a better job than certain White (And Other-Colored) Men are doing at present, but that is a rant for another day) -- and did you see that Wendy commented (be still my heart, a celebrity comment! wOOt! (and did you read when Norma (yay! Norma!) blogged that "wOOt" is Webster's Word of the Year, except that they spelled it wrong, all the Kool Kids know it's spelled "w00t," not "wOOt") Thanks, Wendy!) -- I'm putting up this little YouTube number:*
Highlights to watch for:
- The sweet knit hat -- intarsia? stranded? -- worn by one of the graffiti artists. Yeah, I later realized it is really a ski mask, but still, it is an objet d'knit, and we all loves us some objets d'knit, doncha know?
- The awesomely perfect circles! drawn freehand! by that same artist;
- The skyline of NYC looking like something is missing, and we all know what that is, and it saddens us.
That album -- or "alblum," as my dear MIL used to pronounce it, and so did my husband, who argued with me for an amazingly long time that "alblum" was a perfectly valid alternative to "album" and whom I only convinced otherwise when I dragged him, alblumming all the way, to the dictionary -- came to live in my iTunes a week or two ago and I have been listening to it and smearing the music and lyrics all over myself, it is so good.
[ascends soapbox] As much as I love that song, I keep disagreeing with the underlying sentiment, that his generation is waiting on the world to change. The counter-culturalists of the 1960s and 1970s didn't wait. They stormed the bastions of convention helter-skelter and willy-nilly and Nelly-bar-the-door, and nowadays many of those counter-cultural values are mainstream, although sadly not so much universally practiced as universally proclaimed: ecological awareness, recycling, organic food production, planet-friendly practices, multiculturalism, tolerance, diversity, social justice. One cannot simply wait for the world to change into something that better suits one; one must be the change one wishes to see™. [/descends from soapbox]
On the other hand, the sentiments in "Belief" seem to me to express a profound truth that the world would do well to grasp:
But, hey, I'm not all about the lyrics. Listening to his pre-song comments in this video of "I'm Gonna Find Another You" I realized that, Doh, of course I like that song, it's... blues.
* * * * *
Now, as promised, a little knitting.
My first preemie hat for Jeanne:
Go on, knit her a couple. Quick, easy, stash-busters. You know you want to. Deadline is January 15.
Yarn: Lion Brand Cotton Ease (50% cotton/50% acrylic); Lake, Lime, and Berry.
Needles: US#6
Pattern: Basic hat from Ann Budd's A Knitter's Handy Book of Patterns, preemie size.
I was a bit unhappy with the size and shape it turned out to be, thinking that it was too wide for its depth, but an emergency e-mail to Jeanne and I was tactfully informed that 1, babies come in all sizes and shapes (well, within limits), and b, even preemie babies grow and often continue to need little hats. Babies grow? Who knew?
The uneven stitches smoothed out nicely after a quick run through the washer and dryer with the other laundry.
Yesterday's knitting scene:
In the interests of full disclosure, I must tell you that the New York Public Library mug does not contain coffee, nor even Sleepy Rabbit tea, as it did yesterday. Nope, that is Worcestershire sauce-tinted tap water, concocted to re-create the scene more accurately. Do I have mad food stylist skillz or what?
To remove the taste of the forgoing awfulness, please fondle the virtual cuddliness of the knitting:
#2 son asked me to knit him a pair of socks. Listen! Hear that? Hell freezes over.
He has steadfastly refused any and all of my offers to for him. He's a fashionista in his own way, that boy, and his self-image brooks no mother-produced garments. Oh, except for that Dulaan-destined hat he swiped from me last winter. And that glow-in-the-dark scarf I so laboriously knitted him last year at his request and which he wore about twice. Grrrrr.
But I am A Knitting Mother -- ya know, the ones who want to wrap the world in hand knits? So I immediately agreed to make him a pair of socks.
No wool, he said, Wool is itchy.
Okay, no problem, I said, and showed him a recently-received color card of Knit Picks Shine Worsted (60% Pima cotton/40% Modal®). He picked out the terra cotta and cream shown above. One reason I was able to agree so readily was that I had discovered the extreme speediness with which worsted weight yarn knits up into socks. Wham! Bam! Socks!
He sent me a link to these socks to show how he wanted his to look.
Don't guys have silly-looking legs? Why do they pose like that, so their legs look even sillier than necessary? Why do I care?
* Diagram that (so-called) sentence!
