and now, deep thoughts

First I must take a minute and ponder the odd event that was taking place during my lunch hour. As is usual on beautiful sunny days, I walked down to a small pond (the one the crazy man drove his tractor into a few years ago) for a picnic lunch. But upon nearing my destination, I noticed a hoard of children, lining the edge as if prepared to jump in all at once for some sort of simultaneous cannonball record. Upon closer inspection, I determined that the children were fishing—I assume this is some kind of public works program designed to reach out to the DC community. Problems with this:

This isn’t a real pond, it’s just an overgrown puddle.
The water is about a foot deep, if that (you can actually see the geese standing up in it, the tops of their little legs clearly poking out above water).
The only fish I’ve ever seen in there are minnows.
It’s full of seaweed and algae and other green blobs that aren’t fish.

This grand event also required the city to line the pond with port-a-potties, which made it very difficult to find a place to eat that wasn’t occupied by a fishing child, tourist, trashcan or toilet. I finally located a bench that wasn’t downwind of anything and watch ill-behaved kids haul green blobs out of the water for about 30 minutes. So, with all of that entertainment going on, you can understand why I didn’t get any knitting done.

Speaking of knitting, you know what’s hard? Taking a picture of your own foot. My foot looks decidedly misshapen in this photo (I promise I have normal looking feet in real life!), but you can see that it is in encased in a sock—Pomatomus!



Finally, one sock done. I promise to have better photos (and hopefully a new camera) by the time sock #2 is done. I also managed to finish the front of the greedy Lotus Blossom Tank, and have about 9/10 of a ball of yarn left to finish the back—I don’t think it’s going to happen.

Now, I promised to wax poetic about my blogging experience since it is my blogiversary after all (I disagree with the button, I think it should be spelled with an “i”—but it’s hard to debate the spelling of a non-existent word), so first let’s check out my very first post (well technically my second post; my first post was just a welcome post, nothing much interesting to comment on there). When I started this blog, I had nearly been scared off of knitting forever by a box of useless junk masquerading as a knitting kit, and I hadn’t really moved beyond scarves; now I have several pair (and a half) of socks and a cardigan under my belt, and even a hat with some mediocre color work, among other things. But I think my biggest accomplishment over the last year is that I have stopped reading patterns and saying to myself “oh, that’s too hard, I’m not even going to try to learn that” (well, ok, I still say that about steeking. Seriously, cutting up your knitting?!?). I may not jump into each new technique immediately (or even grasp what they really mean—knit into the row below? What is that??), but I now assume I will try it and master it one day (maybe even steeking).

And the best thing about blogging has to be “meeting” people. I know some people have been reading my blog since the beginning and are always leaving thoughtful and funny comments, and in return I read their blogs (except a few of them, sadly, seem to be on hiatus. Boo.) and feel like I’ve found some kindred souls, some people I would be friends with in “real” life, even if we didn’t have knitting in common (I want to do some shout outs here, but I’m terrified I’m going to unintentionally leave someone out, so best skip it—I’m sure all 4 or so of my loyal readers know who they are!). So thanks to all of my readers and friends, I hope you’ll keep reading—you’ll want to be here if I ever tackle steeking. I wonder if you can hear frantic shrieking through the Internet?

[And prize winners, I’m having a difficult time hunting down a few of you on Rav, and not everyone has a blog or blogger profile set up that I can stalk you on, so if you don’t hear from me, please send me an email!]