FO: Monkey socks for me

Yarn - I honestly don't have a clue. bought it a long time ago to make socks for someone else online, proceeded to mangle it into a Gordion knot, and then shoved it in the back of my yarn cabinet to hide from the shame and failure of it. Grabbed it this Christmas and determined there was just enough to make a short pair of socks with it.

Needles - I believe size 1 addi turbo circulars

Pattern - Monkeys from Knitty. I made a pair for Tamar before, now I have a pair for me. Worked them toe up with a short row heel so technically the monkey stitch pattern is upside down.

Spring Break! Girls Gone....Lazy!

I'll get to SPRING BREAK in a second. First, guess who got their present.....


....Tamar the Other! She says they fit well and are much-appreciated. See her cat in the first picture? Sniffing her feet with that intensely inquisitive expression? That cat has a thing for feet.


See? She can't help herself. The first step is admitting you have a problem, Wuzzle.

Ok, back to SPRING BREAK!!!!! So what am I doing for SPRING BREAK, and why in god's name do I seem to keep hitting the caps lock? Well, dear reader, I am using the cap lock to denote my UNBRIDLED EXCITEMENT and doing ABSOLUTLEY NOTHING! I lied and told the professors I was doing research with that I was going to be out of town and that email was going to be spotty at best. Which, of course is patently untrue. But goddamit, I held focus groups and coded transcripts straight through Christmas break...which meant it was no break at all...which meant I'd been working non-stop for six months. So I thought a little deception was in order.

My real spring break plans are:

1. sit on couch until couch-sores develop
2. watch a lot of mindless TV
3. eat a lot of ice cream
4. knit until my hands turn into twisted, gnarled little claws

Man, this is gonna be sweet.

Homework - 0, Socks - 1

I finished Tamar's socks!
Aren't they lovely? She picked out the yarn and the pattern, and I have to say she's got a good eye. The really short color repeats in the yarn kept it from pooling, which kept it visually interesting without competing too much with the rather subtle lace pattern. I can't really do the socks justice here as my feet are smaller than Tamar's. Hopefully, they'll be a bit less lumpy on her.
Yarn - about 2 1/2 skeins of Lane Cervinia Calzetteria (70% wool, 30% nylon; 150 meters) in color 904. I didn't particularly like knitting with this yarn, because I could feel the nylon in it, but I think it'll hold up really well. I do, however, like the ball band.
I know it's blurry, but look closely! It's a woman hanging out with some sheep in what looks like mountains in the beginning of The Sound of Music with some sort of basket attached to her like a turtle shell. This wouldn't be that remarkable if it was Austrian yarn, but it's apparently Italian. I find it very amusing.
Needles - I worked the ribbing on size 2 addis, and the rest on my trusty size 3 addi turbos. Don't leave home without them!
Pattern - the Monkey Socks from Knitty, with virtually no modifications besides going up a needle size

I have seen the future, and in it I am a crazy cat lady

So, with that in mind, I thought I'd get a head start on my Crazy Cat Lady-hood with this post. Because, guys? I'm kind of an over-achiever and I really enjoy getting head starts.

Now I had this epiphany earlier when I was working on Tamar's monkey socks, which are coming along quite nicely:

Look how much I got done at the psych conference! I finished the first one and then got all the way through the leg of the second one. See, I'm not usually the kind of girl that knits during events. I've never knitted in class, and typically reserve my public displays of knitting to airplanes and movie theaters. But, I was totally zonked for a lot of the conference, and ended up taking my knitting with me to the symposiums The repetitve nature of knitting helps me focus sometimes, and also kept me awake.

The conference, by the way, went well. I dressed like a fancy-schmancy adult, and my poster was well-received. I think I may have even networked a little bit, but I'm not entirely sure. I'm new to this kind of thing.

"But," you ask, "how does being a young, professionally dressed, psychology-conference-attending go-getter make you destined for a life of Crazy Cat Lady-hood?"

Good question, dear reader. I'm destined because this has been the highlight of my week so far:
Yes, the sight of my cat grooming Tamar's sock set me all a-tizzy today and I took a bajillion pictures of it. Jon looked at me like I was crazy. This cat, though, she's something else. Every morning I have to find all the skeins of yarn and single handknit socks she stole from my knitting basket in the wee hours of the night in a haze of catnip and good taste. In all honesty, she's kind of a klepto with some major drug dependency issues.

And because every Crazy Cat Lady has to have multiple cats, I give you Fatty:
Who is apparently embarking on a career as a bookend. Is it coincidence that he's chosen this esteemed occupation just as his namesake has applied to library science programs? You decide!

Oh, for the love of sweet Moroccan mint tea...

Ok, first I'm really sorry about the delay, but let me tell you, grad school is hard. Not like oh-man-I-wish-I-didn't-have-to-study-for-this-midterm hard, but dear-god-in-heaven-why-can't-I-ever-finish-working-before-2AM hard. And I'm not good at existing on less than nine hours of sleep. So, I've essentially been a zombie for the last week or so. Zombies have no brains. And you can't write a knitting blog without brains, ask anyone.

Now back to the point. Why does my boyfriend pick the least attractive yarn in the store every single time!? Case in point, the local yarn store was having an awesome sale, so I forced Jon to drive me there. As a reward for the chauffering and waiting patiently as I browsed with glee, I let him pick out some yarn for himself. So, he grabs a couple of skeins of Rowan Harris tweed and demands a hat. This is as far as I got with it:
Now, it's clear from his deranged, unfocused grinning that he adores this yarn, but look at it! Look at those terrible colors! Does it remind you of something?
Vomit perhaps? Rowan refers to the colors as 'lewis grey' and 'thatch'. I refer to them as 'hideous sweatpant gray' and 'sick kitten.'

But, there is good news! Have y'all heard about the psychological concept of flow? Now, I try not to delve in to psychology too much since this is a knitting blog, but bear with me. Flow experiences are times when you're doing something you really enjoy and time disappears. We've all had this happen, right? You get really immersed in something and BOOM! It's an hour later.

Well (shockingly enough), I've had flow experiences with knitting. See?
Pretty! I finished up the Bayerische socks a couple of days ago. And I totally flowed right through the second one. I was just knitting and reading the chart and knitting and reading the chart and knitting....until the wee hours of the morning. But they are totally worth it. Check out this closeup:
And this one!
Yarn - Louet Gems Pearl (100% wool, 185 yards) in citrus orange
Pattern - Eunny's Bayerische socks. So much fun to knit, in a weirdly masochistic way.
Needles - 29" size 1 Susan Bates quicksilver circular. The only substantial modification I made to the pattern was going up a needle size, as the pattern is written for a size 6 foot and mine hovers somewhere between an 8 and 9 (but, curiously, not an 8 1/2...feet are strange).

You wanna know what else I have flow experiences with?
Statistics. Seriously. In the last weeks, I've been working on a couple of different projects that are in the data analysis stage. So, I'll head to the computer lab after class and plan to just run a couple of tests, shouldn't take me more than twenty minutes or so.....and realize that an hour and a half has just flown by and I've done maybe a half dozen MANOVAs complete with pairwise contrasts. And it's fun. As if there wasn't enough mounting evidence of my inherent, overwhelming dorkiness out there already.

Back to knitting. I've also started the socks for Tamar, my Other.
They're the Monkey socks from the current issue of Knitty. Since the yarn she picked out is just shy of sportweight and she has biggish feet for a girl, I'm knitting them on size 3's. And as glorious as knitting the Bayerische socks was, I'm enjoying the easy-to-memorize lace pattern and quick progress of the bigger gauge. I'm going to a psychology conference this weekend in Memphis, so I'll have some prime airplane knitting time to knock these little babies out.

I'll leave you with one more thing:
Moroccan mint tea! As many of you know, I studied abroad in Estonia and Morocco as an undergraduate, which fostered a love of tea. I got my taste in black teas from Eastern Europe and mint tea from Morocco. While in North Africa, I drank the mint tea at every meal, several times a day. For me, at least, it was an acquired taste because it's prepared with a truly amazing amount of sugar. Seriously, there's no sense of too sweet with this stuff, just not sweet enough.

I bought the teapot and dried mint and green tea for Jon. Despite the fact that the unmarked package of dried vegetable matter gave me some trouble going through customs, he never used it (bad taste in yarn and tea, that one), and I fell out of the habit of drinking it.

I've started drinking it again, though. Dani, Tamar, and I went to a hookah bar that served it at New Year's, which made me remember how good it was, and then I had it again at a tea party I went to last weekend. Jon also went to said tea party, and it was like he'd died and gone to heaven.