Best Quote I Heard All Day
I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. --Oscar Wilde

Now, is this a good-looking man, or what?


Mr. Knitted Condomhead. Sublime. Ridiculous.

I love my gay brother and we had such fun together this past Saturday. It was time for a road trip to New Hope, having missed out on going down to see Carol in Cape May due to crummy weather.

The world's best espresso, made by Thaddeus, then lunch at our favorite Thai place in Lambertville, Siam, and then. Twist. What else? (We left Thaddeus at home.)

Deb was on vacation but Steve was there, always witty, always sweet, even when he manages to screw up the shop swift.

Since I'm on a fairly tight budget, it was a sock yarn diet for me. I bought the same Regia KF sock yarn as did Joe. Despite my reservations about the striping, it's still nice yarn. Joe likes the stripes. I dunno. The jury is still out.

What the fuck. They're only socks. Not objets d'art. I do like the colors.

Twist and Stix-n-Stitches are my true local yarn shops, even though they're not exactly local. (Deb needs to get herself a web site.)

Ravelry
Well, I finally gained admittance yesterday to the beta site, so if you're looking for me, I'm Knitcurmudgeon. How fucking original.



Although I won't go to the lengths of listing my stash--that's more work than it's worth--I think this site has a lot of value to knitters, particularly in connectivity. I belong to LinkedIn, a similar type of community for business, where you can network with business associates.

This is the future of the web. For those of you in IT, we know it as Web 2.0. Now, the Luddite part of me says, I just want to be left alone to knit and spin. The techie part of me says, this is incredible technology.

There is so much information floating out there on knitting, I doubt that it can all ever be consolidated. However, that's OK. Ravelry is a step towards this goal and I hope that it may rise above being a repository for KnitDweebish knitting projects. Reading the forums, though, tells me a couple of things.

First, from what I can see, this is a very young crowd. New knitters, mostly. Haranguing against "yarn snobs." Defending knitting with acrylics with the kind of passion that should be directed perhaps at the state of our government, rather than at knitting.

Second, these forums tend to attract the RAOK types that I can't be bothered with, being a cranky old bitch. In fact, I don't ever post to forums. And don't read them either, as a rule.

So I'll use Ravelry to the degree that I need to. But the blog remains my forum. And yours, if you care to comment.

Happy Birthday, Mammy!
Tomorrow, the Senior Knitting Curmudgeon celebrates her 84th birthday.

I love this picture of my mother, knitting in hand, spouting an opinion on some damned thing or other, taken at my sister's last Christmas.

Now, for those of you who follow our Maroon-in-Chief's lead and whine that it's "too hard," this woman has just finished a complicated Jean Frost jacket and is ready to embark on an equally complicated Lavold.

As Ma puts it, she keeps planning projects because as long as she knits, she ain't going to the LYS in the sky. As it is, she's got 2007-2008 mapped out, pretty much. The doctor figures she's good for another 20 years. From his lips, etc.

I've always been fearless but Ma certainly encouraged that quality. Well, as long as I didn't bleed profusely. She hated the blood stuff. I would frequently let a grass cut dribble down my leg until it was sufficiently bloody to upset my mother. In fact, I did many things that sufficiently upset my mother. But as long as it did not include bodily fluids, she was usually cool about it in the long run.

Love ya, Mammy. You're the true rare and handy person in our family.