Yarn redux, plus book and library things

One last measure, pre-frog:


Yup. Much too big. Delusion will only take you so far. And after frogging, I had this:


Or this:


Which may help explain why I love this yarn so:


And fortunately, it's very forgiving of being frogged! I won't say I enjoyed frogging it, but handling it, perhaps ... and I only started it Monday night, and ripped Thursday, so it isn't a huge time investment. Today at lunch I started Mitten Mark II:


Mitten, yarn, and the row counter my grandmother passed down to me at Christmas ("Do you think you might use this, dear?" What do you know, I am, and it's so helpy!) I cast on 32 stitches instead of 44, and I also went down to smaller needles (from 6 to 4, hence the slippy slippy metal needles, yeep, but it was that or stay with 6 or go to 2, the next size down I have in bamboo). Hopefully, I will end up with a mitten that is closer to my size without going under, but only time will tell. Isn't knitting something? I probably should have only changed one variable, either needle size or number of stitches, not both, but I felt like living on the wild side.

Yes, this is me getting wild. You may insert your own joke *here*.

Now, in other news, I got a picture book out of the library after reading that it had a knitting/sheep thing going on, and it's really cute! If you have a sheep-loving child around, or would like to make one out of some not-so-sheep-loving child, may I suggest Woolbur?

Woolbur is a young sheep who does things his own way, to the chagrin of his parents, and I love his cheerful attitude: his response to every argument against his nonconformity is "I know. Isn't it great?" He reminds me of the title character in Robert Munsch's Stephanie's Ponytail, and her refrain of "It's my ponytail and I like it." Fun.

At the library, they wanted to verify my contact information, and the librarian told me they do that every 5 years. That means I moved back to Massachusetts five years ago! Wow. I can hardly believe it, but then I don't really believe that it's 2008. The number does not compute.

While I was there, I looked quickly through the audio books, since I just finished listening to Stephenie Meyer's Twilight*, and though I've requested New Moon, it isn't in yet, and what should I see on the shelf? Stephanie Pearl-McPhee Casts Off. Unabridged, read by the author ... if anyone was watching me, they might have said I snatched it off the shelf, as if someone else was nearby and reaching for it. Woo! It's so good, and hearing her read it really brings even more depth to the subject. I am enjoying. I'll have to buy it at some point, but for now, listening is enough.

*Which was SO good. I've re-read it several times, but the thing about audio books is that they make you listen to every word, not just skim along to your favorite parts, and sections that didn't make the biggest impression on the page can stand out in a whole new way. Another one I'll have to buy someday.

Finally, I've read about this on a couple of blogs, just one of those things but it caught my eye. No one tagged me with it, but I felt like doing it anyway, and why wait to be invited to the party? What you do is turn to page 161 of the book you're reading, and see what the fifth sentence is.

I'm currently reading two books (I know! Only two! I've been more monogamous with knitting recently as well. What's up with that?). The first is Alta, by Mercedes Lackey, which I thought was the second of a trilogy but it turns out there's a fourth one, so I'm re-reading the first three to refresh before reading the fourth. I really like this series, and probably read it again every year or so anyway, so no hardship. It's fantasy, dragons and magic and all:

"Then maybe we can bring you back as you and we can say that your Gifts have all gone."

The other I just got out of the library, Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which you may have read about as I have in various spots. I really like some of her books (some more than others, certainly), but this one sounded interesting and when I saw it the other day, I picked it up to dip into. It's a bit more dense than I thought it was going to be, not heavy-duty but not light, and so far I'm only kind of skimming through. It's only a 7-day book, so I knew I likely wouldn't finish it in that time, but anyway:

"Our own supermarket back home stocks the brand, so over the years our family may have purchased milk that came from this barn, or at least some molecules of it mixed in with milk from countless other farms."

She's thorough, I have to give her that.