Clever titles are overrated.

No package full of fun yet, but it was a very eventful day.

There was a thing at work where we had the option of wearing jeans, so I did just enough to look like I was participating. We had pizza for lunch, courtesy of the company, and then I went with my friend Emy to her sonogram. Our manager wanted to go with her, just because, but she couldn't so I went instead. I got to see the baby's big head (Emy is now even more nervous about the whole pushing out a baby thing), and her heartbeat and stomach, and her little leg. I am still convinced I'm not even remotely interested in having a baby at this point. Just in case you were wondering.

Then more work, which was boring, but luckily didn't last long.

Then to the library! I was a shelving machine today. For which they were very grateful, because Library-Boss-Man (Hi, Bill) said they'd gotten a talking to about being behind on shelving. So I was going as fast as I could, just shelving everything in sight. I like shelving juvenile fiction best. There's just so many of them that I remember reading, and remember fondly. So it makes me happy to go back through them. So many of those books meant so much to me, and a lot of them still do. I checked out Alices's Adventures in Wonderland, because I've been wanting to read it again before Tim Burton's movie comes out. I want to see how faithful he'll be to the original. Plus, I haven't read it in so long, and I've been in the mood for strange stories lately.

Anyway, tomorrow should be good, too. We're going to see "Wicked" tomorrow night, and I'm hugely looking forward to it. All this time and I've still never seen it. Yay!

Spoiler alert!!!

Sort of a spoiler alert, anyway. The card from my Christmas in July swap gift came today!!! (Ignore the fact that it's August. July sucked for a lot of people on the Completely Pointless and Arbitrary Ravelry boards.)

My swapper was the lovely and awesome Jillygirl, of the fantastic gummi-bear ravatar. I've meant to tell her for awhile now how much I like her ravatar, but haven't gotten around to it. I'll tell her when I'm posting about the actual package.

Anyway, like I said, I got the card today. I'm hoping the actual package will come tomorrow, although I'm sort of worried they might keep it at the post office, since both Boy-Creature and I will be working in the morning. They've left packages with next-door-neighbor-girl before, so maybe they'll do that again. Fingers crossed.

Especially since she mentioned something that's in the package, which I am now super-hyped up about. She sent me a spindle! I can start learning to spin yarn! And it's totally not my fault! I've fought it for this long without caving in to the desire. Until Jillygirl came along and gave me a little push!

Now I have to go do some roving shopping over on Etsy.

The lazy! It has me in its grip.

I had every intention of going to the library to actually get something to read today (and maybe the first disc or two of Doctor Who), but alas, I did not.

So I'll go tomorrow.

I have been monumentally lazy since I finished I Capture the Castle. Haven't read a bit of fiction since, and it's weird. I am still reading, but only non-fiction. I haven't gone this long without any in ages. I did end up sticking with the Peter Mayle, French Lessons, but that didn't last long. So I'm down to only one book, which is equally as weird as not reading any fiction.

What I am reading is Richard Dawkins' Unweaving the Rainbow. For several years now, I've had this passing interest in physics. I hated the math side of it when I actually had to take it in high school. I tend to only like math when I can put it in use. Like with stitch count in a gauge swatch for a sweater, or calculating how much overtime pay I should be getting. I'm great with that kind of math. But the actual science of it fascinates me. What little I know about it does, anyway. For ages, I've wanted to read more about it, so I'd keep buying science books all through college, but I never had the time to read them. So now that I'm out of college, I'm finally getting to them.
There's just so much that's fascinating about it. There's very little that makes me geek out the way quantum mechanics does. And astronomy. I used to leave the television on the NASA channel when they were showing their video files taken from satellites. There were some shots of this one ice shelf in Antarctica (which I naturally can't remember the name of) that was completely mesmerizing. And this book is written to exactly that purpose. We live in an amazing universe, and people tend to forget that when faced with all the theories and complexities and whatnot. People forget that science is crazily interesting. Like Calvin said, there's treasure everywhere.

::sigh::

Remember the thing that now looked like this:


Yeah. It doesn't anymore. Yet again, it wouldn't fit. As in, I couldn't even get it close to my heel, much less over it. I'm starting to worry I might be sock cursed.

But I will press on. I've got the next pattern to try all picked out, and I just be way more diligent with the gauge swatches and trying it on as I go.

I will knit some socks.

Eventually.

Bloglove, with a hint of encouragement

Saturday slipped past me, and I felt a wee bit guilty for not doing a booklove update (although not as guilty as I feel for not having any other kinds of posts for what has now becomes weeks, instead of just days). And then I was sick most of the day Sunday, so I didn't care that it was slipping past me.

Suddenly it's Tuesday, and I'm beginning to pay more attention to what a lazy blogger I've been lately. Especially if I ever want this blog to be anything special, which I do. I have all these ideas and visions for what I want it to be. It's far from there yet. But I'm working on it. Slowly.

Anyway.

The knitting has been going fabulously lately, what with finishing the aforementioned first sweater and finally getting to cast on new things. I'm working on another sweater, which is almost done. It's much thicker yarn, on much bigger needles, and it's a much smaller sweater, so it has flown past. I wanted to try to finish it tonight, but the summer weather has thwarted me. It's just a wee bit too warm and humid to be knitting with thick, squishy wool. So I shall wait until it cools off some. So in the meantime, I blog. And oogle other people's blogs.

This new one that I love, I found through a fellow knitter's profile page on Ravelry. It's owl in the dark, and she's a knitter and singer (maybe not necessarily in that order, though). I actually already had one of her patterns in my favorites from some time ago, but just now made my way over to her project page. Her stuff (and her blog, with her lovely cats and music) makes me feel all girly and ruffly, which is pretty unlike me, so that's saying something. She seems like something out of fairy tale.

Which is enormously encouraging to me. I like knowing that it is possible in this world to build a life that is full of whimsy and little bits of wonderful. Because that is pretty much all I want from this life. To fill it with all the little bits of wonderful and extraordinariness that I can get my hands on. As someone who is stuck in the 9 to 5 life and only pursuing the things I love in my spare time, for the time being, I'm constantly reminding myself that it doesn't just have to be this way, and that it won't always be this way. I just have to keep working to make sure of it. That's all.

Booklove

Oh, it's been a long week. Very, very full of busy, and knitting, and actually not a whole lot of reading.

I finished I Capture the Castle, which was lovely and funny all the way through. I want my mom to read it, too. I probably could have finished it last weekend, right after I started it, if I'd tried. I got a third of the way through it on Saturday, and the about two thirds through on Sunday, if not more. Like I said, it was a busy, busy week, so all the rest of the reading I did was in little spurts of a few pages before I fell asleep (I can't sleep without reading something. Anything. I just need words to sleep). But it stretched through the week.

And now I can't decide what to read next. And the library is already closed today. They close very early on Saturdays. So I'm stuck with all the books I already own. What torture. Just kidding.

I have a feeling it'll end up more Peter Mayle. I bought French Lessons the last time I was back in Texas, and I wandered through the first few pages the other day. It seemed to go pretty well (as has all the Mayle I've ever read), so I'll most likely keep going with it.

Honestly, my mind isn't much on books today, anyway. Because I finally finished my first sweater!


That's where most of my time has gone this week. The only thing left to do is weave in the yarn ends, and that's it! Done! Triumph!

Introducing: Booklove Saturdays

While there has been a tremendous lack of blogging lately, I have still been doing a lot of thinking about blogging, and what I want to do with it. I have some ideas. Mainly, to blog more. So I am tearing myself away from the fantastic book I'm reading to type a bit.

One of those ideas I had is that I want to start doing some weekly things, to trick myself into at least doing that much (anyone who struggles with their creative processes will know the value of tricking oneself. Bribes work, too). One for books, and one for knits.

It's been a good weeks for books, so I'll start there.

I finished The Thirteen and a Half Lives of Captain Bluebear, by Walter Moers. And it was ok. I don't think it quite measured up to the critic's quote on the cover comparing it in one go to J.K. Rowling, Douglas Adams, and Shel Silverstein. I don't think Mr. Moers is quite in their class, but then again, how many people can be? Those are some big literary shoes to fill.
Anyway, it was largely enjoyable and it went by fast, so I'm mostly happy with it, in all its fluff. I did like the pictures. Especially the one of the dragon that went on for eight or nine pages. That was a good one.

I also finished Used and Rare: Travels in the Book World. And of course I liked it. It was about books. Really nice books, which the two writers, Nancy and Larry Goldstone, collect. As one who is happy with the beat-up old library discards that cost a dollar or less, I don't anticipate ever becoming a serious book collector (never say never, though). My strategy with buying books is to get as many as possible for as little as possible (Yay for Half Price Books, my favorite bookstores yet). Where I found three lovely and well-loved copies of Andrew Lang's Fairy Books (Blue, Red, and Green, the first three in the collection), a boxed set of the Griffin and Sabine trilogy, and once a signed copy of Stardust, which I'm still sort of kicking myself for not getting. So Used and Rare was an interesting look at how people get started down that road of spending hundreds, if not thousands of dollars on a single book at a time. I tend to like my books about books with a little more history, like in Nicholas Basbanes' stuff, but it was a nice read.

I'm almost done with Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of his Time, by Dava Sobel. I have Galileo's Daughter, which is probably her best-known work, but I haven't gotten around to reading it yet. The giant Half Price Books in Dallas has their cartography books shelved right next to the genetics, and I was looking for Richard Dawkins when I came across Longitude and picked it up on impulse. And it sounded interesting, and it is. I started reading it while I was still visiting in Texas, one night when the time-change had me up later than everyone else. And then I didn't want to go to sleep, because it was so interesting. It's only in recent years that I've started really branching out into more non-fiction, especially into science and history writing, but this has been one of my more successful forays. Who knew men puttering around their workshops, inventing clocks that changed the world would make for such lovely reading?

And finally, the mailman rang my doorbell this morning to hand me my copy of I Capture the Castle, which I've been waiting impatiently for all week. I actually visited four bookstores last weekend without finding it, and then finally came home and ordered it off Amazon, along with the newest B-52s CD, "Funplex", which I still have yet to listen to, because I can't seem to stop listening to the newest Regina Spektor CD, "Far".
Nevertheless, I am already four chapters into it, and adoring every word. I wanted to read it after Brenda Dayne talked about it during her Audible spot on her brilliant podcast, Cast On. She mentioned that she fell in love from the first sentence: "I write this sitting in the kitchen sink." It's about a genteel British family, post WWII, living in a crumbling, centuries-old castle on less and less money every year, and that's about all I know so far. But it's very charming, and I'm dying to get on with it. I fear it'll be another weekend in which I don't even leave the apartment.
I must say, as well (and this should make you happy, Mama), reading about how they get by in a castle that's falling apart around them, only reminds me just a little bit of how it's always been in our house, with one unfinished project or another going on. I still wonder if the wall in living room will ever be finished, or if it'll just be studs and drywall until someone buys it as-is. I'm not even going to mention how many of the self-appointed deadlines have gone by on when the house in Louisiana was supposed to be done.

The other literary thing going on this week, is that I started volunteering at the public library. Since I've not only decided to go to grad school for library sciences, but have started narrowing down which schools I'll apply to I figured I ought to get a little experience. So far I like it. They had me start with re-shelving children's books, which was nice. And then they had me throw a bunch of out-dated reference books in the dumpster, which was a little bit traumatic. I did not expect to start my library career by trashing good books. But such is life, I guess. Out with the old. Although, I now know the combination to the padlock at the library's dumpster, and don't think I didn't seriously consider going back to rescue some of those books.
My triumph for the evening was when I sent The Hundred Dresses home with a little girl, just by telling her how much I loved it when I was her age. I hope she loves it too.
And then that was overshadowed by almost getting myself locked in the library and setting off the alarm. I thought the staff would stay a little while after closing to finish up what they're doing, but it turns out they run for the door at closing time. So while I was in the stacks, straightening books and whatnot, I was forgotten, and I didn't come out until they had almost turned the alarm on.
That's a mistake I'll only make once.