Finished up the first of the Cherry Tree Hill Supersock merino socks. The color is "fall foliage". I really like the yarn but I understand that Cherry Tree Hill has changed it - it now has a "softer" twist. Hrm. I like the "springier" quality that this yarn had (and doesn't "softer twist" = "wears out faster"?)

I also began the second sock. That's one of my little knitting superstitions - I will not finish the toe of a sock off (even if all that's left is grafting) unless I know I will have time to cast on and do a bit of the ribbing on the second sock. (It's my way of fighting the dreaded "Second Sock Syndrome").

Am fighting a lack of motivation for grading. Have a big stack of article critiques to grade, also a quiz to write and a recommendation letter to write. Would rather surf the blogs. Sigh. Must keep reminding myself that in less than two weeks, I will be able to relax totally, bake cookies, knit, sew, eat out in restaurants that are NOT fast-food places, etc., etc.

Also, this weekend, the "ABC Family Channel" (a channel I usually avoid because it seems to mostly re-run "America's funniest videos of small children falling off of slides, men being hit in the groin with golf balls, and cats getting soaked by hoses" or rather dismal "romantic comedies") is re-running many of the Rankin-Bass animagic Christmas specials. I have a particular soft spot for these, even though I am not strictly contemporaneous with them (most of them were in re-runs by the time I was a child - just like Charlie Brown Christmas, which was produced four years before my birth). And they are going to be showing some of the ones I vaguely remember from my childhood - like Nestor the Long-Eared Donkey - but have not seen for years and years.

That's the trick, I think, to recapturing the Christmas memories of old - experience something you did as a child, but have not experienced since then. The more familiar specials - like "A Charlie Brown Christmas" - are now for me totally overlaid with later memories of later Christmases (like watching it in the "media room" of my dormitory when I was in college, or the worries the year I almost wasn't able to go home...).

Also, I have to admit, watching "A Charlie Brown Christmas" this year, I was struck by something I hadn't really noticed before - how mean, how really rather nasty, the other children are to Charlie (except for Linus, bless his heart. He always was my favorite human character in the strip). I know Schulz meant a certain level of allegory there, but it still surprised me.