Hay is for horses

Hey there folks – where is the time going these days? How is it possible that in a mere two days, October will be upon us? I’m all conflicted about that. On the one hand, I love fall and I love cool weather that allows me to wear my knitted things, and I love that October will bring some travels to NYC and the Rhinebeck wool festival…but on the other hand, time always does tend to pass by faster than you think it should. This whole last year I think the only month that appeared to go by “slowly” was July, and now I have very little recollection of what I actually did in that month.

As far as what I’ve done this past month, well, I have indeed made some good progress on the Cabled Swing Cardi. The chocolatey Berrocco Ultra Alpaca is lovely and soft and heathery…

…however it is possible the alpaca content is not the best idea ever for my hands. Yesterday afternoon suddenly my right hand started to cramp up while in the clasping position, and then this morning the same thing happened when I was turning the shower knobs. Not a huge setback yet, there are still 3 weeks left to go until the Rhinebeck deadline of course….But still, one never does want to be plagued by injury. Here’s hoping a few days of ibuprofen and stretching and 100% wool knits only will do the trick.

In other news, in between agonizing over how best to convince my students that ideas are actually important and do in fact matter a great deal in our every day lives, I’ve started to fall a bit behind and have a couple of book reviews to catch up on. I also have some catching up to do on blogging and passing on good will. Marie at Sel & Poivre and Froggie girl at The Crafty Frog have ever so kindly nominated me for blogger awards, and I was extremely touched.

In the rules of this game, one generally does the “pass it on” thing and nominates more bloggers…I always have such a hard time with that because I feel guilty for excluding people at the expense of others. Y’all know I have my fantabulous sister who also knits and whose blog I think is awesome, and I regularly try to keep my Blogroll (down there at the bottom right) updated with the bloggers I read on a regular basis, and I often link to my knitting friends around these parts who I think are the bee’s knees. Please visit them and know that if I was passing out blog awards, these folks would be the first I would turn to.

When it comes right down to it I think anybody who writes a blog, a knitting blog or cooking blog or whatever-you-are-most-passionate-about blog, is doing something that is not without significance. It takes time, energy, and thought to write a blog, any blog, whether you’re posting every day or every month. I have a lot of respect for anyone who does it, and having this blog right here has been an important experience for me. I could write blog posts while I was working on my thesis and remind myself that writing things down and thinking thoughts was not always going to be an agonizing experience, just as one example, and yanno, that’s not nothing. Reading others’ blogs always reminds me that we are not just our knitting, we are people who find knitting very important, and our blogs are always some very small window on what that means in our lives.

Ever since Ravelry came on the scene a year and a half ago or so, there has been a lot of speculation in the Knitblog world about whether Ravelry would take the place of blogging. And I think there’s some truth to that only if you value Knitblogging for pictures and Finished Object specs and yarn information. But for me Knitblogging is more than just an archive of information; it is a different medium for sharing ideas and expressing ourselves and figuring out who we are as people who identify so strongly as Knitters. I mean, we haven’t abandoned newspapers, magazines, or novels, merely because Google has become such a big part of our lives, you know?

Anyway, if you’re a blogger, cheers to you. Me and my yarn stash salute you.

With that, i’d better get some lunch and continue sorting out my day and the rest of my week…Onwards to October! I sense great things in October, don’t you think? What’s on your knitting plans for October?