See that? That’s what Firefox looks like on my computer right now. I recently discovered Personas and am officially in love with them. There’s a bigger, better shot of my current skin here. I’m thinking about uploading it to the Personas website for use by the community, but am somewhat shy of doing so. Sometimes I am a delicate flower. Don’t judge.

The colors are off in that picture, but the idea’s there. I’m about done with the first sock in a pair of braided-cable socks. A author of mine gave me the yarn (Scout’s Swag in the Glampyre colorway) as a release-day present, and I just love it. I hadn’t been knitting much for a while, and these socks have made me realize how much I missed it. I can’t wait to start on the next one in the pair, and I’m already waffling between two ideas for my next pair.

Of course, what I ought to be knitting is the Mother’s Day shawl that I’m knitting for my mother. It’s just a Pi shawl, and I’ve worked in patterns that she said appeal to her, but I just dread working on it. I’ve just started the final section, but somewhere in the middle of the last round I’ve made an error. I’m trying to figure out where it is, but socks are so much more appealing and enjoyable than the shawl is! Who wants to knit boring shawls when you can make wonderful, practical socks? Not me, that’s for sure.

Out of interest, knitterly types, what’s your favorite sock yarn? I tend strongly toward long skeins in solid or semi-solid colors–I think that this is the first time I’ve ever used a variegated yarn, and while I love how these are turning out, my next few ideas are very cable-intensive and won’t work with variegated. My local yarn shop is a wonderful place for many reasons, but they have very little solid-color sock yarn. I can’t blame her for it, but it makes shopping difficult, since I hate buying things that I’ve not touched. Any suggestions?

Possibly also telling is the fact that Monday night we put Maura in bed and sat down to chat, and then the next thing I knew it was eleven at night. Reading that, you may think that we just talked for several hours, but you’d be wrong, because what we’d actually done was fallen asleep smushed together in the middle of the bed.

Anyhow, it seems that the summer storms have hit us, which always leaves me wanting to curl up in my bed with books, tea, and my knitting. I can’t say that recent circumstances have helped that urge–my friend Emily recently sent me Margaret Atwood’s Writing with Intent, plus the new Knitty came out.

I’ve only just started that Atwood, but I’m really enjoying it. I have yet to read anything of hers that I wasn’t engrossed in, so I suppose that I shouldn’t be surprised that a bunch of bite-sized chunks of Atwood are every bit as wonderful as the nine-course feasts that she generally lays out. Reading this is making me think that I should go back and reread her other works–we own a great many of them, some of which I’ve probably not picked up since I first read them more than a decade ago.

Of course, to start rereads, I feel like I should finish my to-read pile first, and since that never diminishes… Someday I’m going to win the lottery, and I’m going to chart out a rigorous schedule: up at eleven, read until half past twelve, lunch, read until two, ninety minutes of nap, an hour of internet, a nice walk, supper, a few hours with Maura, a few hours of free time for knitting and television and internet, and then reading and knitting until bedtime, right about three.

I wish I had time for more knitting and reading than I do, really. I prefer to do something else while I knit–talk on the phone, talk to someone in the same room, or even watch television–so it sometimes becomes the last thing on my list. I’m working on the shawl for my mother, though, and also a pair of socks that I’m hoping to finish up sometime this summer, at least.

I’m also starting to think about Christmas presents again. I owe my mother-in-law a Peace Shawl, which looks like it will be lovely, if tedious. It won’t be Christmas, but I expect that it’ll be her big knitted thing for the year.

Knitty’s latest issue has a gorgeous sweater, Honeychurch, that I think would be gorgeous on my mother. I don’t usually make clothes (outside, of course, of socks) but this might be the exception. The sweater looks fairly easy, like it might be nice, mindless knitting that I could do while I read. (Yes, I read and knit at the same time. This only rarely causes me trouble.)

I’m a little bummed that this Knitty only had two pairs of socks, and that they’re both top down. I rather like the look of Outside In, but, again, don’t like knitting top-down socks. I could adapt it, but…well, but I’m lazy, and if I’m going to go to all the trouble of adapting things, I’d just as soon use my own pattern and call it a day, I guess.

Maybe it’s a bit premature to be planning new knitting projects when I’ve not finished anything since–er. Easter? Slightly after? On the other hand, maybe this is what I need to get myself started again.

• We saw Pixar’s Up on Monday, and it’s prompted me to get going on my long-threatened series of posts on why I don’t like Disney. So far, it’s looking like it’s going to be about seven posts, probably spread out over the course of two or three weeks, both because it’ll take me a while to write it all and because it’ll probably get posted with other things too.
• This is something that I would like every author, publisher, and other content producer/provider in the world to understand: number of (pirated) downloads of a book do not equal number of sales lost. Some game companies have found that for every a thousand pirated copies they thwarted, they only saw a single sale. To rephrase, one in a thousand people who pirated the game were willing to purchase it. I don’t expect that number is terribly different for books. Additionally, talking endlessly about your “lost sales” and how “those pirates” are hurting you financially is absurd. Your readers–the people who are going to be reading your blog or newsletter–probably aren’t pirating your books, and the ongoing discussions of piracy read less as a productive discussion and more as whinging about the inevitable. You want to sell more books? Write better books. Market yourself. Build a relationship with your readers. Stop whinging. (I have much more to say about this at a later date; someone remind me.)
• Thankful and grateful are not interchangeable. You can’t–or, at least, shouldn’t–say things like “Gratefully, he got home before it started to rain.” Gratefully means with appreciation or with thanks. Thankfully means with thanks or “let us be thankful for”. People get this wrong all the time, and it drives me crazy. You want “Thankfully, he got home before it started to rain.” You’re saying “Let’s be thankful that he got home before the rain started!”
• I’ve started knitting a new pair of socks! A friend of mine gave me some lovely sock yarn, and though I’m not yet done with the shawl for my mother, which is taking forever, I decided that I needed some easy knitting, which for me is always socks. I’m not far on these, but I’m really enjoying them.
• It’s rained for the last three days, and my garden looks fantastic. Nothing’s died yet! It’s amazing.

It seems that all of my garden plans are being questioned, really. I’d thought that I was going to put in a bunch of raised beds, maybe four, each with between four and twelve plants in it. Since none of my plants have died yet, though, plus I was hoping to buy a few more from the nursery, I seem to have crossed the line into needing to plow up my yard and turn things into a proper garden. I have suspicions about this–I can’t help but fear that it’s going to make me want to do things like weed, or start worrying that the wildflowers (by which I mostly mean dandelions, and also those maybe-forget-me-nots from a few days ago) have are taking over the yard, or become the sort of person for whom gardening is serious business that requires time and planning and attention and other things that I do not really feel much like giving my yard.

The latest plan, then, is to buy soil and mulch and to put a few inches of good soil down, then to put mulch over it, and then to transplant all my baby plantlings into the soil and mulch combo. I’m assuming that this would be sufficient to kill the grass under the soil and mulch, as I have no desire to rent a till and no way to get one back to the house even if I did. I could, I suppose, purchase a pitchfork and attempt to turn some of the dirt over, but that again sounds alarmingly like the sort of thing that might cause one to get calluses, or possibly dirt under one’s nails. And I have a thing about touching dirt, which is to say that I do not do it, at all, ever, unless I absolutely can’t avoid it.

The garden continues to grow, even if it’s still in pots and my head so far. At last count, there are three kinds of tomatoes, swiss chard, cucumber, watermelon, beans, peas, bell peppers, purple carrots, orange carrots, and quite probably some things that I’m forgetting. I’m hoping to add another kind of tomatoes, eggplant, probably some more beans, basil, thyme, rosemary, cilantro, and maybe some fruit bushes at some point. (I tried to start the herbs listed from seed, and failed miserably.)

The other thing that I’ve been thinking about, of course, is finding a way to convert the whole yard from grass (which I find unattractive, boring, and annoying) to some sort of low groundcover that can take a fair amount of foot traffic. I noticed several types of groundcover that were specifically indicated as potential lawn replacements with the ability to withstand “heavy” foot traffic, and I’m wondering what you’d have to do to convince that to take over. (Heavy is in quotes, btw, because “heavy” means “three to five times a day”. I’m not sure what that means, so more research is in order.)

I saw my mother over the weekend and did not give her the Mother’s Day shawl that I’ve been working on, mostly because it is not yet finished, or, really, anywhere near finished. Had I realized how much work circular shawls are, I think that I would’ve chosen a different pattern. I’m going to have to pick up some socks or something else that’s fairly immediate-gratification-y to work on as I continue on with the shawl, as the feeling that I’m not making any progress is starting to get depressing–what’s the point in working on it if you’re not getting anywhere, right?

Plus, okay, a friend recently sent me an amazing gift with several balls of sock yarn in it, and I’m desperate to play with them. But they’re so gorgeous, and just begging to be made into socks! Now I just have to figure out a pattern…