Towards the End

These socks are taking forever. I have enjoyed doing them, but the leg is making me a little crazy. I'm not sure when I want to stop. I keep saying, "One more inch," but then I get there and I think about how much I like longer socks. So it's one more inch.

A woman (a very young woman, a woman who qualified as a girl not that long ago) last night at the knitting group, saw me knitting with my ball of gray Regia and thought for a moment that all of this was color work. Can you imagine? I'd be one miserable person if that was the case. I said, "No. It's self-striping. But I ran out right above the ankle, so I'm continuing on with this gray until they're long enough." I've also changed to a K3 P1 ribbing, which is more tolerable to me than the K2 P2 was. (Why is that? More knit, I guess.) I think I need to do a quick pair of stockinette socks to clear my head and prove to myself that it's not horrible to do socks. I have enough sock yarn to last me for a while.

I probably said something about this before, but I got some really nice sock yarn from someone who is fairly famous in certain circles. (There's little chance of her happening by here, but there's always Google, so I won't type her name.) Anyway, I'm going to use that to do up a pair of Brother Amos socks for a friend after I do the stockinette socks for myself. That will be a nice challenge and I'll enjoy the pattern and the yarn.

By the way, I was recently listening to Knitters Uncensored and Cashyie said something disparaging about Regia, which I have several balls of. I support snobbery. I have my own biases. But it got me thinking. I did a search on Ravelry and there's actually a Regia group. A group for people who love Regia! There's also a group for people who love stockinette socks. There's a group for everything, but I was surprised by those two. So I had a moment of Regia shame and then I moved on.

Fish Update: This afternoon, I found both sick fish floating. So that drama is over. They were doing that death dance all evening Friday, they made it through the dinner party on Saturday without looking the slightest bit strange or ill, and then on Sunday and Monday it was more of the same death dance. It took forever for them to expire. A woman named Sue wrote and said how difficult it is to watch. It is. Our fish are generally very healthy and well taken care of. Then they get sick and...they're goldfish. They die. They had good lives. I'll miss Methuselah.

I just keep watching the two surviving fish. I wonder what awareness they have, if any, about the fact that their roommates were acting funny, barely moving, moving strangely and are now not there. We'll get some new ones on Saturday. I've heard they have a memory span of three seconds, but I don't believe it.

I did an interview this afternoon with a woman in charge of a big expansion of a museum here. It'll be in a magazine coming out in the summer. It's sort of exciting to hear about the expansion. Apparently it's a pretty big deal. She talked to me and referred to me as "Press." I got a kick out of that. Things like that are funny. I have very little experience with stuff like that on an official basis, but I just walked in and "acted as if." It worked. Of course I know what I'm doing, and it was just talking about the museum, what's planned, what the history is and everything. I sort of talk for a living anyway with my job teaching English. But it was nice.

My day today was sort of like what I'd like it to be more of. The writing, the interviewing, the riding around town in the middle of the day. Dealing with dead goldfish not so great, but things are going in the right direction.