~ late sleeping ~
It's always really hard to get up on time on Monday. I'm sure you can all relate, but the prospect of getting out of bed so that I can spend the whole day at work is not very appealing. It's too bad that work can't begin with some awesome activity to facilitate the getting-out-of-bed. Weekends are totally different. This past Sunday, I had my alarm set for 7:00 a.m., and instead of hitting the snooze button over and over like I do on Mondays, I jumped out of bed and excitedly got ready for a bike ride. I hit the pedals by 7:45 and proceeded to do my Floating Feather Loop which is about 32 miles.
Incidentally, my Floating Feather Loop is one of my 'in town' favorites. It covers mostly flat roads, and I could see how someone might find it boring, but I enjoy spinning my legs and riding at a faster pace. Also, I find great joy in my cyclecomputer. I play different games with myself during a ride, for example, where I'll get going at a certain speed and try to maintain the speed for a certain distance, or I'll slow down and see how fast I can speed back up. I've also been working on my downhill skillz, and it's fun to climb one of the foothill neighborhood roads and then speed down. After which, I like to see what my top speed was. Anyway...
School will be starting soon. I'm taking two classes that I am rather excited about - - public land policy and state and local policy. The first, public lands, it should be evident that I am all about the public lands. And state & local, I've become more interested in local policy in recent years. Also, I have heard excellent things about the profs for these classes, which should be a nice refreshing change. I've started working through the readings and I do wish that we could skip the basic theory and dive into the topic. I realize that not everyone in the program has a political science BA, but still, we always spend the first few classes on basic theory refresher and I wish that (a) we didn't have to repeat curriculum, and (b) that basic theory be a prerequisite that if people don't get, they learn about on their own time.
In knitting knews, I have finished my Inishfern, which you may or may not recall my writing about previously. I don't have photos yet, but hopefully soon. This weekend, I had a bit of a button-fiasco - - my original plan for fastening the cardigan together was to employe hook & eye's, but quickly discovered that one should not use 'hooks' with a knitted fabric, especially one knitted at a looser guage. After throwing the hook & eye idea out the window, I had to consider buttons, and thus, buttonholes. Even though I claim to be of the anti-planning persuasion, I admit the utility of planning certain things in advance...for example, buttonholes. As I had not planned for buttonholes and the knitting on my Inishfern was complete, my options were to rip out the edging and rework with buttonholes or fashion buttonholes onto the already knitted edging. I opted for the lattter. By using my crochet hook and the rudimentary crochet skillz I learned from "the crochet edging" of my Nantucket Jacket, I clumsily crocheted some buttonholes for Inishfern. Amazingly, it worked out. Though, I have such little understanding of crochet that I don't even know what I'm looking at when I see it - - I always think to myself "Oh, that looks weird...it must be crochet" - - and so I am certain that my crochet buttonholes are really really bad crochet, but I have no idea. They are functional as buttonholes and they are rather invisible (handy, considering the bad crochet), so it works.
I also ripped out my garden scarf because the center cable panel was coming out particularly disjointed-looking and I hated it. Nothing worse than disjointed cables. I rewrote the cable chart to align with my sensibilities and began anew. I also added two more cable panels to the sides, as I decided that I wanted a wide scarf. These additional cable panels are of the celtic-style cabling, of which I am very fond. Also, bobbles! The yarn for this project I am not sure about. It is Ella Rae Bamboo Silk which I procured almost 50% off at a big yarn sale last weekend - - and just during the knitting process I am noticing a tendency for it to shed. Aside from that, it is quite glorious.