Fiber Dreams

It’s one of those basic things. Planned for, knit for, tested, tried and true. But a part of me is still more than a little surprised that the socks I knit actually fit my foot.

I’m sure that a large part of this is because I have short feet, and since my feet got to this grand size of 6½ when I was in sixth grade, store-bought socks have always been too long.

So now, when I knit one (or a pair!), and put it on my foot, and it is the correct length, I’m still a little startled—pleased, to be sure—but a bit surprised, all the same.

The second sock is on its way. Ribbing? Done. First full pattern repeat? Done. It will progress more later today.

Books

“Need” is such a relative term. Don’t you agree? One would think, if one weren’t a major book person, that two people with as many books as we have would never need any new books. There are enough books in this house to keep us both entertained for decades. No fooling. Yet when Dave read that the Orange County Register was having a book fair, giving away books the newspaper had received from publishers for the last year or so, limit five per household, we jumped at the chance. So, yesterday morning, at the appointed time, we took ourselves down to the newspaper office.

As we’d suspected there was basically no order to the books they had. The books were tilted on their sides so the titles could easily be seen—at least they started out that way—on eight (nine?) long tables. Both sides. Yup. Book-lover’s dream. They had a wide variety of titles, including books on such topics as weight loss, exercise, pregnancy, having babies, fertility, adoption, parenting, single parenting, coaching lacrosse for dummies (no fooling—can’t imagine too many people buying that in the store, can you?), travel, history, culture, cooking, a smattering of fictional works, and more. Most books were first editions, some were advance reading copies, some were uncorrected proofs.

This is what we came away with: Book Business: Publishing Past, Present, and Future by Jason Epstein, How to Get Ideas by Jack Foster, Flawed by Jo Bannister (a Brodie Farrell mystery), and Black Ships by Jo Graham.

The best, the absolute best book of all, one that I definitely did not expect to see there, thinking that if it even had been there that by the time we got there, got to that table, that it would be long gone: Things I Learned From Knitting by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee. Score!

I’ve been doing pretty well on the book front lately, haven’t I? So much fun.

Whine

Our next door neighbors travel. A lot. At times it seems that they’re gone more than they’re home. Often they’re just gone for a couple of days. We wander next door, scratch the dogs, make sure they have food and water, talk to them. They do much, much better when left at home than in a kennel. When they’re going to be gone for more than a couple of days they make other plans for the dogs, they feel bad about asking us to care for them so often, especially when they’ll be gone a while. Like this time. They’ll be in Europe for a couple of weeks. Arranged for two different people to house-sit for them, take care of the dogs, you know. That stuff. Day before yesterday their first week house-sitter backed out on them. They called up. Asking. Begging. Pleading. Will we do the first week? Week two is still handled… Of course!

Yesterday, before they left, they gave a call to tell us to check the front door when we got home—we were out getting free books. We thought, gee, how nice. They’ve left us a bottle of wine. We got home to this fabulous gift basket. Not just wine, but a wonderful looking zinfandel, Zinfusion from Castoro Cellars in Paso Robles, a pair of hand-blown Polish wine glasses (check out how huge those glasses are!), and a generous gift certificate to be spent at Whole Foods. What a nice little note from the doggies, too. We have wonderful neighbors.

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