Kiss My Knits!

Average evening for some, special night for me.

Knitting, TV mania, obese cats, and kidless holiday!

In which Tvini acts like a complete idiot but hopefully does a good turn.

So while we were gassing up the car, Emily decided we should get a car wash. She used to enjoy it, but has been nervous about going through the machine for about a year, so I decided to spring for it.

Unfortunately, the filling station apparently hadn’t recycled their water in quite a while, because now my car smells like a bowling alley shoe at the end of the night. Disgusting, with just a hint of lemon freshness. Worse, since my driver’s side window doesn’t seal all the way, the scumwater leaked onto my sleeve and pant leg. Now I smell like Swamp Thing.

Well, at least nobody’ll be invading my personal space for a while.

Two days ago, I taught Emily to play checkers. She was actually interested, which is good, since sometimes it’s tough to get her attention on these things. I think her familiarity with chess was helpful. Also, the Groovy Girls checkers set probably didn’t hurt.

Yesterday, she asked to play twice, and looked like she was thinking about her moves. Could have been coincidence.

Today, we played and I explained why I was taking some moves instead of others. Then she’d put the pieces back on and experiment with looking at how the different outcomes played out.

Tomorrow she’ll probably be beating the pants off of me. Smart kid!

Haven’t updated in a couple of days, so here we go!
Click for sentimental ramblings.

Had a gift certificate, so I got Newsradio Season 4 on DVD. It’s the last season with Phil Hartman, and includes some of my favorite bits, as when Mr. James’ flop of a business book (Jimmy James, Capitalist Lion Tamer) was translated into Japanese (Jimmy James, Macho Business Donkey Wrestler) and became a bestseller there. So he had it translated back into English and gave a reading.

Good times, good times.

Click For Summer Fun, Star Trekkin’, and Miscellaneous Knitting.

It was impossible to pick out the toe of the socks, so I frogged them (rip-it! rip-it!) and started over. This time I’m also carrying along a strand of reinforcing wool/nylon for the toe. Toes of steel! Mom will be able to kick some serious booty without worrying about her footwear unravelling.

The only issue is that now I wonder if it’s too narrow. I used the magic cast-on from Knitty and cast on 18 stitches – 9 top needle and 9 bottom needle – and began increasing every other row as indicated by that cast-on. However, it looked like it was too pointy, so I started doing an increase, increase, straight pattern of rows instead. So now it’s got kind of this flower-basket thing going on at the bottom. As long as it fits, I don’t care if it looks a little funny, because it’ll get stretched when it’s on her foot anyway.


It’s a blurry picture, but you can still see where the socks are in relation to my foot. It’s hard to gauge whether it’s as it should be, because my toes are really significantly wider than hers are. And I’m not up to the total number of stitches for the body of the foot (which, by the way, I’m dropping down to 54 from 60 this time). So maybe I should just keep knitting and see what happens. I would just hate to have to rip this out a second time. Not because I don’t want to do the work again, but because I don’t want the yarn to get all fuzzy.

I’m going to post this to and see what they may have to say. If you’ve knit socks before, I’m open to suggestion and comment. Otherwise… well, I guess we’ll just see what happens!

Tonight at about 8:30, just as daylight is fading, my daughter gets out of bed and opens her door. She’s holding a tiny book of funny things kids say, like you’d pick up at the register of a bookstore, titled “What We’ve Learned So Far.” And what’s so urgent as to pull her out of bed?

“Mom, what’s ‘dissect’?”

My daughter was reading in bed until the last possible minute and got up to ask me what “dissect” meant. I love it.

(Context was: “Never dissect something in science before you eat lunch.”)