My mood is like the weather, warm and fresh and full of hope. I felt utterly overwhelmed when I went to bed last night—the sort of overwhelmed where you start fantasizing about how great it would be to get sick because you’d have an excuse to stay in bed—but this morning everything seems perfectly manageable. Sweet little Sparky curled up next to me in the middle of the night. (I love snuggly, lap-claiming cats, but for some reason seem to raise very independent little beasts, so I’m always glad for their cuddly moments.)
I have been knitting washcloths in a take-no-prisoners sort of frenzy, so I’ll have lots of pieces to photograph this weekend, along with links to the patterns or notes on where the stitches can be found in various stitch dictionaries. I am just goofy for my cheap cotton yarn at the moment—can’t get enough of it. Colors that I might find insipid or glaring at other times suddenly strike me as refreshing or lively. I’m thinking of sharing some of my photos with the Walker Treasury Project, a great on-line project to get colored swatches of all the stitches from Barbara Walker’s various books.
Today is my last teaching day of the winter quarter, then I have a bit of a break (though lots of class planning and other work as well) until spring quarter starts April 2. On the 29th I’m doing a “How to Write the Perfect Love Poem” workshop for high schoolers attending a writing conference on campus. I always like to broaden the possibilities some by giving a wide range of potential recipients—including one’s self. Maya Angelou’s “Phenomenal Woman” is a great I-love-me poem. Next quarter, I’m teaching a Composition class called “The Democratic Essay,” a class that aims to teach students how to write in the context of developing the skills they need to be active members of this democracy of ours. It’s a fun class because I try to follow the students’ lead in terms of topics. As a result, they’re usually quite engaged with the material and I have an excuse to spend hours at a time poring through the NY Times on line and finding other good source material from various educational and non-profit web sites.
Before all that work gets going, I’m hoping to update this blog (with Melissa‘s genius help, of course). I’ve got my eye on several web/blog rings I’d like to join. I’d also like to assemble a really good page of links, both knitting and non, to help people connect with blogs I particularly like and to try to entice them into some of my other areas of interest, like 1930s-style quilting, lemur conservation, and animal rescue.
I’ve just ordered a copy of Socks for Clogs and Sandals, which I found by way of the blog On and Off the Needles. This is the book for me, as I am a committed clog and sandal wearer. (If the shoe goes all the way around the back of my foot, it makes me sad. That’s just the way I am.) Wow, does that book open up some possibilities!