Today looks like an excellent day...

to hole up and knit. The rain started last night, around midnight, and it's feeling blessedly cool for a change. I don't think that's going to last all day. We're under a flash flood watch, but I don't think it's going to stop me from making at least a short jaunt out to see what's going on in the world today.

Today's the first day I've ever heard one of my neighbors - it sounds like the person upstairs from me is doing aerobics. It's fairly quiet though. In some ways, it's a nice change to hear another human.

One of these days I suppose I need to get out and head to a knitting group around here, get to know some people. The weekday meetings are hard - I don't always leave work early enough, and by the time I walk home, I'm not really excited about going out again. I'll have to get over that hurdle. It's also a group that meets in a small space, and there's something intimidating about joining a group of strangers in a small room. The other group that meets on a weekend I feel less enthusiastic about. It's farther away, and I've picked up a strange vibe.

Anyhow. I am still knitting, just nothing too exciting. In the process of exploring the yarn shops around here, I picked up some more stuff - a ball of Trekking XXL, probably to remake the Primavera socks, except this time in my size. I also fell down hard in the other store - I don't like the location as well, but the shop is gorgeous - and I bought two more skeins of sock yarn. The yarn is gorgeous, and deserves photos as soon as I clean up my apartment. As a moving-in present I also bought two Morehouse Merino kits. Totally mindless patterns, but the laceweight is pretty fantastic on the hands. It's another rustic yarn with a fair amount of variation in thickness, a single ply that isn't incredibly strong but possibly a bit deceptive. I'm knitting a Verona shawl, which is a giant rectangle of stocking stitch, and a Partridge Scarf which is a self-fringing triangular scarf, and also totally mindless knitting. It's about all I can manage.

Last weekend I sat down to finish some of my albatross projects, the Cutaway Cardigan and Badia. I really don't like seaming. It's not difficult, I just prefer knitting to sewing. I'm very close to being done with Badia, but am slightly stumped. My next step is to seam the sides, and then I'll have to deal with the armholes. The pattern calls for knitting ribbing first, then seaming (which seems odd to me) but my concern is that the ribbing is going to make them too small and too tight. I think that leaves me with crochet to fix the problem. I suspect I'd be more excited about the project if I liked the yarn I used, but more on that later.

Time to finish my coffee, then get on with the day.