In the time warp, otherwise known as May, I knit another little Baby Surprise Jacket for a friend’s daughter. I blocked it last weekend but with all of the rain we’ve been having lately it took forever to dry. Now it’s ready to send off to mom and baby. I was glad to finally have something to use with this Cotton 100 yarn. It’s been languishing in the stash for quite a while and is perfect for kids sweaters. I just needed the perfect sweater that fit the amount of yarn that I had.

pattern: Baby Surprise Jacket by Elizabeth Zimmermann from The Knitting Workshop
yarn: Berocco Cotton 100 in 9208 (Lavender) from stash
needles: size 7 bamboo
started: April 30, 2008
finished: May 9, 2008

This morning, I finally planted a few plants we bought at the farmer’s market last weekend. With the roofers around for several days, I wasn’t about to go out and try to pot anything for fear of being hurt by falling shingles. I fear we may have lost one of our cilantro plants but the gerbera daisies and peppers are still doing well. The lettuce came already potted so it was just a matter of hanging it up in the back. I was excited to see that the mint I planted last year is doing quite well. Ooh, mint tea!

Thank you all for your kind words about George. We’re all getting along okay and Chloe is figuring out what it means to be the only cat in the house. This is the first time she’s ever been without George. I swear George gave her some snarking tips before he passed away.

I’m finished with school for the semester! It felt like the semester that would never end a few weeks ago, but I turned in my final paper (exam) on Wednesday, a day early. I’ve been home sick for the last seven days with a nasty virus (cold-like symptoms) so I’ve have a lot of time to read, watch Ugly Betty on DVD and knit. Another Baby Surprise Jacket is three rows from being finished. (Photos soon)

This summer I’m taking an Adult Popular Literature class and figured I’d start doing some reading for the class before everything kicks into full gear in June. In four days, I plowed through Devil in the White City, an amazing book. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it. I seriously could have stayed up all night to read it but knew that I needed my sleep.

Of course, after I finished Devil in the White City I got a bit distracted. For one of my final papers this semester, I had to evaluate a medium that was geared to children or teens. I chose to evaluate the show Gossip Girl with no idea how addictive the show could be. It’s sort of an updated Beverly Hills, 90210 mixed in with Sex & the City. In all of my research, which included watching several episodes of the show and reading quite a few articles on the show, I totally got sucked in. Yesterday, I checked out a fair amount of books for my Adult Popular Lit class and a Gossip Girl book just happened to end up in my stack of books. How odd! I’ve since finished the book and am thinking I’ve found yet another guilty pleasure. They aren’t books I would recommend to younger teens and they’re books I would be hesitant to recommend to fifteen-year-olds but if they are fans of the show, then I probably would recommend them. I can definitely see why many parents are not happy about these books and the show - the amount of underage drinking is more than I think most adults want any kids engaging in, although I’m sure a lot of teens are drinking anyway.

(I learned this semester that when school gets a bit insane that washcloths are the perfect project - from February until this past Monday I knit a total of seven washcloths. Above are just three of them that I knit for my sister.)

These last two weeks have been all about reading and writing. I mentioned my papers in my last post and thankfully I have four papers under my belt and only one due next week. Getting in the groove is starting to happen but some days I think it will never happen. Lack of sleep does tend to put a strange angle on life at times. This week I planned out every day in a reasonable way and have managed to stick to it. At this rate, I’ll have all of my readings done by Friday evening. Of course, I’ll have reading responses that will need to be written this weekend for one class but the readings will be done.

Last Saturday, I had a wonderful day with S sewing. I got some work done on the quilt that I’m making. Over the last week, I’ve also knitted quite a bit on the Demin baby project during study breaks and knit night. With a little time in the car this weekend, I’ll probably be near completion on the Demin baby project. Sunday, I’m planning on sewing in the evening. Maybe this weekend, I’ll finally get to two of the skirts that I finished back in July but never hemmed. With autumn weather quickly approaching I only have a few more weeks to wear them. I’m really itching to get myself back into knitting the Martha sweater. It’s been so long I don’t even remember where I left off with Martha.

With October comes Socktoberfest and the desire to start a new pair of socks. I’m thinking I know what I want to knit and it’s a cute pair of anklets. My goal this year is to finish one sock since I’m not sure I’ll have the time to knit a pair in October. Last year I managed to finish a pair in 27 days but that was with a lot of time on my hands.

The baby quilt and the Moderne Baby Blanket have both arrived at their respective homes. The response to both has been overwhelmingly positive, as I figured it would be. At the home of the Moderne Baby blanket, the dad wrapped himself up in it and fell asleep. If that’s not a compliment, I don’t know what is.

Well, I’ve managed to survive two weeks of classes. There have been meltdowns and self doubts about getting through school but yesterday it all seemed to come together. I’m truly enjoying my classes, especially Children’s Lit. What isn’t fun about reading picture books for class? Today, we discussed the picture books we read for class and I had one of those “this is totally what library school is supposed to be about for me” moments. In my readings for today, I discovered a few picture books that have come on the scene since my childhood that I really liked, such as Good Night, Good Knight, The Princess and the Pea, which has my favorite artwork of all of them, and No, David!. And I’ve also rediscovered some books such as Where the Wild Things Are, My Friend Rabbit and a retelling of Rumpelstiltskin that I hadn’t read before. (I always remember the Rumpelstiltskin my parents read to me as a child that was illustrated by Edward Gorey, which is still how I envision the little man.)

There have also been the serious library school readings about information that had my head swimming a few weeks ago. It’s all about reawakening that intellectual mind of mine that’s been sleeping in the back of my head for over 10 years. (I didn’t need it when I was getting my computer science degree, that called for the practical mind.) My first paper is due in about twelve days and I’m nervous about it but know that I’m fully capable of writing 800 words easily.

My assistantship at the reference desk is going well and I’m starting to get a handle on how to answer some questions with confidence. It’s definitely challenging and I’ve learned so much in the last two weeks at the desk.

My knitting and sewing have suffered a bit from my busyness with school, as I completely expected they would. I did manage to finish the Moderne Baby Blanket two weeks ago and blocked it last week but just got around to taking photos today. I’m also making myself work on the Go With the Flow socks, which are almost finished. Last night as I was working on the socks at knit night, I realized I made a somewhat blaring mistake that I refuse to fix. On one sock there are four lace ribs on top of the foot and on the other sock there are five lace ribs. I’m so close to being finished with my third sock of the pair (I had to reknit one of the feet) that I’m leaving them as is and calling it a design element. (Photos of evidence coming soon.) Just before school started I started another quilt that’s a bit of a funky monkey quilt but that will have to be for another day.

My goals this weekend are to get all of my readings finished for my Monday classes, finish the Go With the Flow sock, hem two skirts, and possibly work on the panel skirt that I started and have neglected since mid-July. It’s a lot but if I put my mind to it I think I can do it.

Since I’m so immersed into the whole library thing now, I love finding random library-related things now, such as this song that I found out about on The Shifted Librarian blog.

My life has changed drastically in the last two weeks. I’ve gone from being a circulation clerk at a public library to a graduate assistant at the third largest academic library in the United States and the largest library at a public university in the world. These last five days have felt very surreal. I start classes on Wednesday and I’m sure it will all very even more surreal then. I’m taking Children’s Literature, Intellectual Freedom for Youth and the required class, Information Organization and Access. Of course, my excitement about classes started a few weeks ago when I was able to access some of the syllabic for classes online and found out the reading lists for two of my classes. I’m really excited about my two youth-based classes. When I was able to access the Children’s Lit list, I immediately checked out a few of the books for the first week of class and have already finished them. For my Intellectual Freedom class, one of the books for the first week of class is either the first Harry Potter book or any of the other ones if we’ve already read the first one, which is a perfect excuse to read the fifth book.

Knitting-wise, I’ve finished the Moderne Baby Blanket, have to give it a bath and then I’ll take some photos to show it off. It’s gorgeous and huge. I didn’t expect it to be 48 inches by 44 inches, but it will make the perfect lap blanket when the kid is older. Sewing-wise, I finished the baby quilt and just need to snap some photos and send it off. I started another baby quilt on Saturday that’s coming along nicely. As I learned with the last quilt, the top goes quickly, it’s the back and binding that takes a while.

Sorry for the photo-less entry. I hope to get the photos of the blankets up soon.

This past weekend, B and I had the pleasure of visiting Madison and La Crosse, Wisconsin. I’ll go back any day. Each time we’ve gone to Madison, I’ve enjoyed it even more. We were there just one day but made the most of that day just puttering around the State Street area, including spending a bit of time just wandering around a used bookstore. (The photo was taken in the children’s room of the bookstore.) And staying in a great bed & breakfast. I love b&b’s just because they are so cozy and welcoming. Then we headed up to La Crosse, Wisconsin to visit the former director of the library where Bryan used to work, who is now the director at the La Crosse Public Library. She gave us a great tour of La Crosse as part of the historic tour that she does as a side job. Then we talked libraries for several hours after the tour. La Crosse is beautiful, I can definitely see the attraction of living there. For a town that’s just over 50,000 it seemed like a much larger town. We were so impressed with their food co-op complete with a great restaurant on the second floor. I’d definitely go back to La Crosse for a longer weekend. On the road, I did manage to get quite a bit of knitting done. I worked on part of a secret project and knit one of the borders to the Moderne Baby Blanket. I’ve now completed three of the four borders and if I can stand the blanket next to the a/c window unit, I may have a finished blanket by the end of the week. I have a few tv shows from last week to thank for my progress.

Today we’ve been recovering from our travels and getting ready for the next week. This is my last week at the local public library and then next week I start training at the library on campus for my graduate assistantship. The transition that we’ve known was coming for several months is finally here and I’m so excited about it.

Several of you mentioned in the comments of my last post that you can’t imagine having a coffee shop in the library but it’s been great. The staff love it and it brings people in the library who want to read the paper and get a good cup of coffee. We have an area limiting where food can go, which seems to have worked well.

Since I’m starting library school, you’ll probably see more about library stuff here. Here’s an interesting article that I found regarding a library no longer using the Dewey system. It makes sense but at the same time there is a part of me that thinks, how will they ever keep track of all of the books but I guess it’s the same as separating fiction into genres, such as mystery, romance, etc.

It’s been a while since I last blogged and I’ve been busy. The summer isn’t the perfect time to blog, plus there are so many other things I’d rather be doing than sitting inf front of the computer.

The garden is growing well, I eventually lost the cherry tomato to a critter. I had to move the lavender into a pot and am sprinkling pepper flakes on the soil to keep the critters from eating more of the lavender. Two of the plants are finally coming back, two died, one of the surviving plants is a replacement for a dead lavender plant. The cilantro went nuts and we’ve enjoyed a lot of salsa made with our own cilantro. The flavor of our own cilantro is much more intense than store bought since it’s freshly picked. Since the cilantro grew so fast, I decided to buy some seeds and have managed to get little cilantro plants growing in the kitchen that I’ll transplant outside later on. We’re patiently waiting for our tomato plants to produce tomatoes and for our little green peppers to grow up to be big beautiful bell peppers. The basil has gone crazy too and is huge. Sort of makes me want to plant huge pots of herbs next year or a huge herb garden when we finally are able to buy a house.

I’ve been sewing a lot lately. Since my last post I’ve made two skirts and two canvas bags, similar to the one I made for my friend that was shown in the last post. Each bag seems to get more involved and I love the last one I made for S. She gave me the fabric and I made the bag for her this week. It’s so cute and I love the bicycles. She also gave me these beautiful Amy Butler fabrics that I might to make into a skirt similar to this one, but I haven’t decided quite yet.

About two weeks ago another friend had a baby, it’s the fourth of six babies born to our friends this year. I decided I couldn’t work on another baby blanket right now so I decided to make my first baby quilt. With all of the babies being born and all of the babies needing gifts, I decided this might be a quick route to go since the baby was born last week. S helped me pick out the fabrics and is going to hold my hand in the piecing together of this quilt. I just have to have faith in myself that I can do this. It’s not going to be difficult, I just keep finding ways to distract myself because I’m so afraid of messing up a very simple block quilt. Last night as I was piecing the strips together, I realized that I cut my middle block too small, so I’m going to remedy that tomorrow by just buying a new piece of fabric for the middle block and cutting it to fit what’s already pieced together.

As you’ve probably guessed my knitting has been a bit stagnant over the last three weeks. I’m 16 of 36 garter ridges into the last blocks along the edge of the Moderne Baby blanket and I’m trying to make myself knit about two ridges (four rows) a day. I haven’t thought of counting the stitches because four rows takes almost an hour to knit while watching tv, plus it’s been so warm and muggy that wool on the legs is not the most pleasant thing.

Last week, I decided it was time to get started on the another baby item. It’s currently a secret baby project since I know the mom reads my blog. She’s due in late August so I hope to get that project finished by then. Until she receives it, it will have to remain the secret baby project.

I’ve also been working on my summer reading. Last summer I read 16 books between Memorial Day and Labor Day. This year I started my summer reading earlier since my summer ends a few weeks before Labor Day with the start of school. So far I’ve already read six books. One of them I feel I completely need to spread the word about. The book is The Girls by Lori Lansens. It’s a wonderful book about a pair of conjoined twins who are about to turn 30. I’ve loved so many books I’ve read since the beginning of the year but this one sticks with me. Somehow I completely identified with these women and just loved their story. If you’re looking for a great book to read that you probably haven’t heard about, this is definitely one to check out.