Kicking Butt

My friend and talented knitter, the witty Eskimimi, has started a group on Ravelry designed to help people like myself, who lack blogging motivation and self-discipline. I'm interested to see what hints and tips will turn up that will help me improve this blog. Mainly, I'm hoping the group spirit will guilt me into actually posting properly - frequently and regularly.

Of course, these last two weeks, I do have the excuse - I mean, reason - that my father's home from Honduras for a few weeks. He's having his house rewired, and so nearly 30 years' worth of clutter and junk needed to be removed from his loft and then sorted. He hired a skip, and I admit that we were exceedingly wicked ....we were throwing out a lot of books. I'm not sure that there is any greater crime. To balance that, my mother had been the main hoarder of books; she bought many from the ex-library sales. I wish I could ask her why and when did she ''Teach Yourself Persian''. Bizarre, but this is only one example of her random book-buying compulsion. My father tried everywhere to find a home for these books - charity shops, colleges, prisons. Nobody wanted them. OK, I understand why the prisons didn't want her vast array of true crime murder/mystery books. But, have books in general lost their value, their meaning, interest to people ? Surely somewhere there should have been a loving home for ''Certificate Needlework'' and her sisters, the ''Golden Hands'' magazines ? I live in a house designed for dwarves, with no storage, or else I might have rehomed these lost and lonely repositories of knowledge. But, no, we hardened our hearts and turned our faces away from the pleading of dedications made in 1899 or whenever. Perhaps we should have hung onto them until November 5th, pretended we were some kind of revolutionaries, and bonfired them. But that would have been too public an admission of our shame.

So, my routine (such as it is) is completely out of whack. The most knitting I've done was on Saturday, when I babysat for my neighbor's baby. The baby slept through, and so I started and finished the RH front of a baby cardi in pink. The back and sleeves had been sitting there for a while, since I'd run out of the yarn. I ordered a ball of what I thought it was - Stylecraft Special DK in pale rose (scroll down about halfway to see it). It arrived and totally was not the right color. My sister visited, fished around in my on-the-go project bag and found a ballband for this, Baby Rose shade 867, Hayfield Baby Bonus DK (there's no picture of this shade on Sirdar's site, can you believe it ?). So no wonder it didn't match. The importance of keeping one's ballbands with one's projects as opposed to just chucking them straight in the trash is now clear to me. It's not a Mistake, it's a Learning Experience. See, all those Human Resources seminars over the years did have some use ......