Saturday, November 10, 2007

Right...that school thing

It's been a week since we last chatted, and to be honest, I haven't gotten a whole lot done. After the whirlwind knitting weeks I described last week, I guess I just ran out of steam.

Part of it may have been that I was in Amsterdam for 3 days. I didn't want to risk getting knitting needles confiscated, so I didn't bring the. (No checked baggage for me, when I can avoid it.) I'm glad I did decide to leave my knitting at home, because two of our party were thoroughly searched. I was only patted down. Sigh. Clearly my life as a knitting delinquent could be so much more exciting. Don't worry, I'll put up some pictures of Amsterdam soon. Since we were there for such a short time, I don't really have much to say, except that I love the Dutch. And their bikes!

But now I'm back. It's reading week, and I thought I'd have a nice break from my (not so strenuous) classes. A whole week to knit, sit in the park, go to museums. A week in which I could shut off my brain and just enjoy myself.

Hah.
That right there is several THOUSAND pages of reading I need to do in the next week and a half. From bottom up, Swann's Way by Marcel Proust (for my Moderns class), Ulysses for the same class. (Joyce...not easy reading...), Jane Eyre for my idiotic Women's Lit class (don't get me started, the teacher not my favorite, and I feel my life is worthless after we discussed Frankenstein.), The Periodic Table by Primo Levi, and last but not least Middlemarch by George Eliot. Oh god. Typing that out made me hyperventilate a little bit.

If anyone would like to prevent a college student from going off the deep end, send cookies. And yarn. Mostly cookies though.

Because, yarn is not my friend lately. I managed to get up to the neck on the Sweater O' Doom
and I take back everything I said in the last post about how easy it was. You see, I have now put the front 48 stitches on a holder, and must work the next two inches flat. Which means purling the fair isle pattern. Okay, not a problem.


What is a problem is that the charts are all wonky. My brain hurts just thinking about it but I will try to explain. Take chart one. You don't need to know what it looks like. It's a chart. Checkers of black and white and all that. A cryptic language only we can understand. My row does not end at the end of chart one. It ends in the middle of a repeat, which is fine. It looks fine, it acts fine, it's fine. No hissy fits have been had by either myself or the chart.

Until now...
You see, now I must purl chart one, working backwards. Working the chart the other way. From left to right instead of right to left. Are you seeing a problem? I don't know where to begin. And I'm too peeved to figure it out right now, so Doomy Sweater O' Doom, bringing grey clouds of doominess into my life, is sitting on the floor. We are currently not speaking.

I will, of course, sit down and figure it out. It is reasons like this I keep a bottle of whiskey on my desk.

(I'm half joking about the whiskey.)

2 comments:

Laiane said...

Proust! Ah, I love Proust (I've even been to his grave in Pere Lachaise in Paris -- twice).

Nope, I'm not a Lit Nerd, nosireee.

Enjoy. Swann's Way, compared to some of his later writings, is much more accessible. I thought so, anyway.

I've never made it through Ulysses. I'm thinking your whiskey could help me with that.

Catherine said...

I'm more of a Middlemarch/ Jane Eyre fan myself, so all this modern stuff is a bit boggling. Which is why Proust remains unopened, and Jane Eyre is being reread in a different context.