Eaten any good books lately?

My husband and I are both readers. Big time. For Phil this means starting the day with the local newsrag, reading a little in the evening, and dropping off to sleep with a book in hand. He gets his books from the library, an eclectic mix of nonfiction, murder mysteries (Walter Mosely, Harlan Coben) and weird contemporary novels. He also reads Atlantic Monthly, a few woodworking magazines, and the New Yorker when he's on the road. I drink my coffee with the New York Times online, then during the day read from two or three novels-- science fiction or historical romance-- along with blogs, science stuff on the internet, Newsweek, etc.
Here comes the confession: we both read while we eat. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. At the table. With each other. In fact we can hardly consume a meal without books at hand, unless we go out or have company. We even have book weights to hold the books open while we eat. When my daughter was growing up, of course, books were verboten at the table-- one had conversation. This fell apart after Andrea went to college. You can't really talk with your mouth full, and we really have lots of other time together. I come by this addiction honestly. When I was growing up, although when Dad was present there was no reading at table [and no hair curlers or pajamas], whenever Dad had a meeting in the evening my Mom and I had the guilty pleasure of reading while we ate our Swanson TV Dinners. Phil's Mom spent several years driving the local bookmobile, so he had it in his genes too.
I was a bookish, geeky kid with knobby knees and red braids, and way too big a vocabulary for social success. I grew up in suburban New Jersey in a time when summers were hot, sticky and endless. The library was the first building in town to get air conditioning, closely followed by the drug store a block from our house, which had a whole wall of comics. We knew the store owner, and he'd let me sit on the floor by the comics and read for hours as long as I didn't wrinkle them and occasionally bought some Neccos or a Skybar. In fifth grade I incurred the wrath of Sister Infanta by hiding a novel inside my math book. Every night I read by the light seeping through the door of my bedroom from the 40 watt bulb in the hallway, until I heard my parents on the stairs and whipped the book under my pillow. The library folks gave up on keeping me out of the "grownup" section when I was twelve, and discovered Robert Heinlein. In fact my first paying job at fourteen was shelving books, for 75 cents an hour.
I approached reading like playing piano and learning French; by ear, and with as little honest labor as possible (to this day I know only present tense French verbs and can't read music.) This meant reading the Comics Classic version of weighty stuff like the Scarlet Letter, Red Badge of Courage, and anything by Charles Dickens so there would be more time for the Black Stallion series or whatever I was obsessed with that year.
I still go on author binges; when I find somebody I like I have to read everything they wrote until I overdose. In my early knitter days, all of two years ago, this meant scarfing down all the Yarn Harlot books and every knitting magazine at Borders. I'm more selective now; if there's not at least two patterns I would really knit the mag stays on the shelf. But a few weeks ago I discovered Georgette Heyer. I'm sunk. All her novels seem to have been reissued in larger format softcovers that cost twice the price of a regular paperback, the used book store hasn't got any of them, I can't wait for Amazon, and I'm deeply addicted. I've stopped buying yarn and lattes in order to get these books. It's not that they are great literature-- far from it; she wrote about 40 historical romances, mostly Regencies, in the 30's and 40's. But the characters, especially the women, are finely drawn and fresh, people you just want to sit down with. Her writing is funny, brisk, and full of plot, and for those who happen to love this period, wickedly accurate (if awfully heavy on exclamation points.) And, best of all, you don't have to flip through pages of breathless sex to get to the good parts. I have nothing against a little steaminess where it's warranted, but could we get on with the story already? There are after all only so many ways to Do It, and at my age I already know most of them, so the repetition just gets in my way. Sexual tension is not, after all, a plot, for cryin' out loud. So, if you like the genre, by all means try one of these refreshing stories.
Thank heaven people keep writing books and publishers keep printing them, or I'd be reduced to chewing my fingernails in withdrawal. And if you have to have a vice, this is pretty benign--- it's not like I'm collecting hundreds of salt shakers or swigging rum-- and it's still legal!

See, there really are FOs

Here's the striped vest:

I had to reinforce it with several rows of crochet to make everything fit, so I worked the buttonholes into the crochet border. It comes out awfully 60's retro, but will be fine for an extra layer.

I knit the wavy scarf (Liecester/Finn) in about three days, in with other things, so it's fast. [I didn't think you needed a closeup of my chins.] It drapes nicely and stays where it's put.

If you are a podcast listener, I strongly urge you to try out the Electric Sheep. It's a British weekly cast, by Hoxton Handmade, and she has a great voice, a terrific sense of humor [humour!] and knows how to put together a good cast. I'm trying to put a list of blogs & podcasts to the right here if I can figure out the thingys.

Organizational

There's been a lot of organizin' goin' on--- I sorted about 1/2 of my yarn by weight into rubbermaid bins; DK, sock, etc. Lordy, I have a lot of sock yarn. I say 1/2 of the yarn because I seriously underestimated the volume of same. Will pick up more bins this week. The object is to get all the yarn into the same room.

Autumn bits:

---Cool brisk breeze, deep blue sky, bronzing leaves, and a faint chitter of crickets. North Carolina summers are so damp and buggy that I forget living in the South can be a good thing during Fall and Spring. It's not Vermont of course, but it's not too shabby; and it isn't followed by gobs of snow.
---I have pots of mums on the front steps. They look nice against the brick and I like the deep toned varieties. I was picking off spent blooms this afternoon and saw that several fat, hairy caterpillars were chowing down on the flowers. Not the leaves, mind you, but the flowers. What nerve!
---Our local gym closed, and I have to find a new one fast. I've been almost two weeks now without a workout and I can feel the pudge creeping up my legs. Apparently they didn't have enough membership to pay the rent, which says something about our fellow Sedgefieldians. The other options are farther away and cost more, but I'm on a roll and have to keep going.
---Wonderful visit with Andrea, Jeff, & Cate in Seattle. They rented a beach house for the few months in between houses and while small it was a fun place to be in summer. Cate at 2 1/4 is a most imperious young miss and totally cute. She reminds me soooo much of Andrea at that age! Although I think she is more into pink and frilly things. The next year will be exciting with new house, Cate growing, and--- other wonderful things!
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I'm in finishing mode with knitting. There are so many projects and I just have to get some of them done and off the books, so to speak.
---Finished the Noro striped vest, which I am not crazy about but it is good enough to wear. Want to make one now with a proper pattern instead of making it up.
---Almost finished the Winter Blossom shawl, or my version of it; intended just to keep me warm in winter at home. Not making the whole length or it would reach my knees. Slight gauge problem due to using DK instead of laceweight.
---Almost done with a wavy scarf out of indigo dyed handspun I got at Rising Meadow Farm last weekend. This is fun and I will probably make another; it's knit sideways in feather & fan so it waves like a river.
Soup for supper and the smell is driving me nuts -- beef vegetable with wild rice. Since I started using the crock pot I've not burned any soup, which is a good thing as we eat a lot of it in winter. Have some wholegrain bread from Freshmarket to go with. Drool.
Phil is painting the interior of the shop today. It looks so professional! Once the electrician has been back to do the plugs and lights, and we epoxy the floor, it will be time to move the saws and drill press and all those goodies in and then he can actually make something. The first thing will be closets and new windows in the "attic" [room over the garage] so we can finish it off. It will have heat and AC, room for all the Christmas clutter, and probably accommodation for overnight guests. I've thought about making it my studio, but I don't know if I want to be isolated up there. Right now the office where I knit is also Phil's office, and right by the kitchen-- it used to be the formal dining room. The solution might be to have more yarn storage built in here instead of going upstairs. Who doesn't need more yarn storage?

Some things

Two weeks is a bit too long for Phil to be gone. I really don't mind at all when he goes away for a few days; I'm a natural hermit and like the time alone. But the longer he's gone the weirder I get. I stay up late, spread my knitting all over the house, watch weird movies, eat strange things and generally revert to the wild.

He's in Colorado, riding a mountain bike from Telluride to Moab [Utah] with five other guys. I call this a grunt-n-sweat trip, but actually they're all pretty nice well-mannered folk since they all work for USDA like Phil. They've had some bad reactions to the altitude (camped the first night at nearly 11,000 feet) but they're doing fine. He's been able to call me a couple of times.

Phil is a natural athlete, agile, coordinated, muscular, and actually enjoys exercise. I'm the complete opposite-- my natural position is sitting down, I lack coordination, I'm a physical coward, and no matter how much time I spend in the gym I huff & puff hiking up hills. I "run to fat", as my Dad used to say, and I hate to sweat. I can't bend my mind around the desire to beat the crap out of yourself for six days on a bike. Yet I deeply envy them the ability to do it. The one thing I was ever good at was canoeing-- I can paddle all day-- and I would love to go on a few more river trips.

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I've been messing about with a lot of yarn without accomplishing a lot of knitting. I'm playing with holding two different yarns together to enhance the colors, use up sock and lace weight in my stash, etc. I like the results, but so far it's mostly swatching. Not sure I have enough of either combo for a long vest, which is what I want to knit. There are two piles of yarn, one burgundy/navy/purply and the other teal/blue/green/purplish.

Here's what's on my [way too many] needles:
---Phil's cardigan. Still working on the back.
---the Noro/Cascade striped garter side-to-side vest. Very nearly done with the body, then it will need a button band.
---Hate to admit it, but a cotton cardi from summer still has four circs hostage-- the sleeves need finishing-- and since I know it isn't going to fit very well I can't muster the energy to finish it. I keep leaving it out in prominent places to spur the guilt.
---A wrap sort of thing with cables and lace, just a few inches along, to use up yarn. Pretty golden colors.
---latest start--- the Sine/Cosine sweater, in a combo of burgundy and navy yarns. All garter knit on the bias, fun to knit.
---patiently waiting in the closet, the white lace shawl I started last winter, which I will pick up again when it's cooler.
---and at least one baby blanket, just in case there's another baby some time.

So do you think I have a problem????

Sock Summit Junkie

I didn't go to Sock Summit; the timing wasn't great and I didn't get into any classes, and wasn't going to cross the country just for the marketplace. But the idea of it intrigued me, and I'm a fan or Stephanie Pearl-McPhee's blog, so I spent the weekend reading every post and snippet on Ravelry and other people's blogs and generally being obsessed with the event, to the extent that I practically feel like I went. It might even inspire me to get out the skinny needles and knit another pair of socks (I've started many but only completed one pair, which is too big.)
I do love sock yarn and have acquired an awful lot of it. Some goes into scarves, some just sits and looks pretty. I'm playing with two strands of Trekking and Cherry Tree Hill held together to make a shrug-- it's the color of grape soda, not my usual sort of thing but intriguing. Of course I have no idea whether I will have enough yarn, and doubt I could get any more of those colors, so it's a bit of a crapshoot.
Cool rainy days this week, a real relief after the sweltering heat. Phil's packing to go on the mountain bike trip in Colorado-- six guys for a week, camping-----oh dear. I am happy that my attendance is not required. Meanwhile I get two weeks to knit in solitary splendor and can hang out at the yarn shop every day if I want, since there will be no cooking. When Phil's gone I don't cook and rarely eat meat, just live on salads, fruit, and a little chocolate.

The Summer of '75

I drove down to Troy this morning to pick up Phil after he had ridden his cycle the 60 miles there, and as I watched 220 spool away into the heat I wondered if the current budget crisis has stopped a lot of roadside mowing-- things are looking pretty shaggy along the highway, and NCDOT generally prides itself on landscaping. Which made me think of my stint with a mowing and maintenance crew in '75. As a college senior (kind of an old one) I needed a summer job; I was hired as the Very First Female Maintenance Crew Member of Greenbelt Park, MD. Given the decades I grew up in, and being in the field I was in, I did a lot of Very-First-Female [fill in the blank] jobs.
I learned to sort of drive a tractor that summer, although after I almost put it through the back of the garage they mostly had me on the riding mowers. I painted a lot of buildings and fences with a mysterious tarry brown substance called "cooping oil" [later figured out it was Cuprinol, a wood preservative.] Whenever things were slow we'd take a trash bag and walk the trails and parking lots, "picking sanitation"--- their curious term for collecting trash. The low point was periodic weekend garbage collection duty, going in on Sunday with the big truck to clean up the messes made by Saturday picnicers. For some reason church groups were the worst. Actually anybody who had a crab feast was totally the nadir. Crab feasts are endemic to Maryland; you buy a bushel or three of live crabs, end their lives in boiling steam with a sprinkle of Old Bay seasoning, and dig in with beer on the side. Then all the shells and gooey bits get thrown into a thin plastic trash bag, the sharp shells poke holes, it sits in the hot sun fermenting, and when you try to pick up the (always too full) bag the whole mess gets dumped on the ground. Such fun!
When I left for the fall semester, the foreman 'lowed as how he'd likely hire him a few gals the next summer since I had worked out purty well. Oh, the progress.

And one more bug

They're getting their revenge. Seriously. I was driving from Old Navy down to the grocery, and felt something on my leg-- yeah, a spider the size of a quarter. I slapped at it and brushed it away, freaking out in traffic, but thankfully keeping the Honda on the road. But now there was a Live Spider. In My Car. With full, unfettered access to my delicate person. I got to the grocery, jumped out, did a pat-down and shook out my hair just in case, and then took the car apart. Of course, no spider. So I talked myself down from the adrenaline party, did my shopping, came back and searched the car again (I fully expected to find it in the driver's seat waiting for me.) This time I spotted a somewhat condensed and probably dead arachnid and made SURE it was dead with a napkin. Whew. But you know what that means? It means I killed that spider with my bare hand. Ewww, gross. Bleh. Urk.

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A few pictures to make up for the blankness of recent blogs-- the striped shrug, closeup of same, current potholder mania, and an incidental shot of backyard greenness.