Knitting Update, April

 Remember last month, when I said I'd started a new pair of socks and was planning to adjust a toe-up crew sock height pattern into a pair of cuff-down ankle socks?  Yeah, I had too much other stuff going on (like having a 3 yr old and a 1 yr old for two days and nights while their baby brother was born) plus came down with a cold (a gift from the grandkids), and was basically mentally fried and ended up ripping out the entire 30ish rows I had knit on the sock because somewhere, somehow, the pattern was off and the desired design wasn't appearing the further I knit.  It was just a garbled, unrecognizable mess.  Which, since I was using solid color yarn, tells you how badly it was going.  I mean, with wildly dyed yarn that has lots of short color changes it's not hard to have the pattern get lost.  But yarn that is all one color, without even tonal changes?  Yeah, it was turning out that awful.

So, start again.  But this time, because I knew I was brain-dead and just wiped out, yet I still wanted to add a new pair of short socks to my wardrobe, I picked a pattern that was SIMPLE and written cuff-down.

This time around, I am making the Churfirsten socks from the book Operation Sock Drawer, although I am altering them to be only ankle socks.   I have an entire 19 rows done at this point, woo hoo!  17 of those rows are the cuff, so pretty easy and repetitive stuff. So far, so good.

I finished reading Beer and Loathing by Ellie Alexander (good, good, good, as usual from her) and managed to read two more books, one of which was very short:

Neurodiversity: The Birth of an Idea by Judy Singer.  This is basically her doctoral thesis that apparently helped to spawn the phrase 'neurodiversity' but, I felt, it didn't really go into the detail I had hoped it would.  It was pretty short, so I did plug away and read the whole thing, but it wasn't what I had hoped it would be when I requested it from the  inter-library loan system.

Canary Girls, by Jennifer Chiaverini.  This one was interesting, partly because I like history, and partly because my own grandmother had worked in a munitions factory in WWII (the book takes place in WWI in England, so not exactly the same time or locations as my Grandma's southern US war experience) for a while until she turned yellow too.  Overall it was a good read, although I do have to say that in parts it felt like reading a high school history report--you know the kind, when you'd look up facts, try to put them in your own words and fit them into the outline your teacher assigned--more than a novel.

Right now I'm about 100 pages into The Tattered Quilt by Wanda Brunstetter.  It's okay.  Not great (although I tend to be a bit pedantic when it comes to assessing writing), but I will read it all the way to the end.  Mostly because I've all ready predicted what the ties between characters will develop into and I want to find out if I'm right.  LOL.