Best Quote I Heard All Day
Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple.--Barry Switzer

The quote has nothing to do with nothing I'm writing--I just like it. Barry Switzer, by the way, was a football coach. Odd analogy for him to use.

But it is baseball season and I'm waiting for the Yanks to overpower the Bosox in the standings. This will happen shortly. Bosox fans can bite me. They're still pissed about losing A-Rod.

Life After Knitting
I actually have other interests besides knitting. "Interests" is perhaps too bland a word. "Passions" might be more in order. As you know, I love baseball. Playing pick-up games with my brother Rich and the neighborhood kids are some of my happiest childhood memories. All those lost balls in the Cornells' yard. Heh. Old man Cornell screamed at us every time we invaded his rhododendron to retrieve a homerun.

I play poker and gin vociferously, mostly on Pogo.com, where I don't gamble with money, I gamble with tokens. You can find me there at some point most evenings.

I'm passionate about history and politics. I'm passionate about music, mostly rock but I studied classical music growing up and those roots run deep. I'm passionate about my friends and family--there's nothing I won't do for them, short of murder. I'm passionate about my Johnny, who's the best thing that's happened to me in a long, long time.

I love flowers and miss the gardening I did when I owned a house, so I'm trying to turn my little 10x5 townhouse deck into a tropical paradise. My kitchen windowsill is filled with plants.

And of course, my passion since childhood is writing. In some way, every job I've had, with the exception of Psychiatric Technician, has depended upon my writing skills.

Knitting alone makes for a dull girl. Combined with everything else, it makes me happy.

Aunty Cotton
OK, so I said I don't knit with cotton. Generally, that's true. However, as I mentioned in a previous blog entry, Trendsetter Taos is an interesting, subtlely variegated 3-ply cotton with a thin, thin binder thread, also variegated. The binder thread was, I thought, metallic. At this point, though, I'm thinking that it's actually the sheen of the poly-whatever that it's made of, that fooled me into thinking metallic.

This is the kind of "fashion" yarn that I find appealing. And although it's cotton, the binder thread provides a certain cohesiveness to it so that I don't worry about it stretching. Putting the yarn together with a simple slip-stitch pattern really gives the cotton the structure it needs.



The garment will be a simple shirt with a rolled hem. That's all the yarn needs. I really like the woven effect of the slipped stitches. Yes, this will go into the book. I'm not doing much these days that won't.

Saratoga
I needed the trip badly. But I don't need a mental health excuse to go up to see Em and Mitch and their kids, Owen and Zach. Emily knits also, so it gives us something to do while the Boyz In Da Band play their guitars.



That's Mitch on the left in the shades and JohnnyBGoode on the right. We spent a wonderful, sort of '60s afternoon at Moreau Park, not far from Saratoga. It was just the thing for me to do, after being worn out from the Job Wars. And incidentally, the Job Wars ended up with me going to Eagle Rock. I'm finished at TCI. Long story but it just wasn't going to work for me, staying at TCI. As John says, "Bad karma."

Bad karma, indeed. So I need to be rare and handy at some other place of employment. Works for me.

PS--We're back to the Haloscan comments.