We were hit with a little bit of snow a week or so ago, but it has gradually melted away thanks to the combination of rain and warmer temperatures. I have not run into one person who has been sorry to see it vanish. We may get another week of mild temperatures before getting absolutely socked with several inches of snow — but of course the predictive models aren’t as accurate as they used to be, with our having broken the climate and all. Today it looked and felt like mid-March outside, not the end of December. March in Wisconsin is a damp yellowish brown, with marshy soil and patches of mud. It’s not particularly pleasant, and I hope that the flora and fauna don’t get their signals crossed and start acting like it really is springtime.
I haven’t checked in a while, but I’m pretty sure that my copy of The Mists of Avalon is still sitting in my home library, marked at page 766 and starting to collect dust. The holidays have kept me busy lately, but I would like to pick up the book and get to the end of it this week. Imagine — a whole year spent reading two novels about King Arthur, and I only have two more King Arthur novels left to go!
On the other hand, I have been doing more work on my scholarly/writing project: ordering more materials via Inter-Library Loan, evaluating the loaned materials I already have, downloading and reading articles on my subject, and creating photo albums of my visual documentation. I’ve also come across a couple of writers who are/were not only the authors of references that I’m using, but models for me of how to write on somewhat technical topics with a flowing, inviting style. One of them wrote a praiseworthy book that has actually been on my shelves (unread, I’m sorry to say) for more than a decade. Now that I have an additional motivation for reading her book and noting her style, I will be trying to fit it into my nonfiction reading schedule.
Knitwise, I’m either done with the second pink section on my scarf or I have knitted too much and I need to take out a few rows, depending on how you look at it. This last week I kept trying to make time for knitting between the tasks I was doing to welcome guests over on Christmas evening. I was measuring my progress on this section by looking at how much yarn I had left, and it looked like I still had several rows to go before I was done. However, when I set up the scarf for this week’s progress shot and measured it, it seemed that I had gone four rows past the mark that would have made the pink sections the same length. When I counted the rows in each pink section, it seemed that I had actually gone eight rows past the mark.
Now, what does a knitter do? Well, it depends on what kind of knitter you are. I could tink a few rows of perfectly good knitting to make the sections mathematically equal. That will give me a small ball of leftover yarn that I really don’t need. Or I could switch to the next color stripe right now and call the sections “close enough” to the same length, which gives me a smaller ball of leftover yarn that I don’t really need. Or I could keep knitting until I’ve used up as much of the pink yarn as I can, then switch to the other yarn for the stripes that finish off the scarf.
Which kind of knitter am I? The one who’s knitting a scarf and not a mathematical construction that needs precision in order to keep my neck warm. And the knitter who would like to finish this scarf and make something else.
Chocolate Sheep 