Happily working away. I've got a lot done on the Morehouse Farms KnitPurl scarf. I really love the Morehouse yarn; I don't know how they do it but they make merino resilient and springy and so much fun to knit with. I really think it's my favorite yarn ever, in terms of how it feels while you knit.

I'm also up to the lace panel on the back of the Zelda pullover, thanks to some journal-article reading. I'll post pictures of both tomorrow or Monday.

Incidentally, Lydia, the essay I referred to in my comment on your blog is in Knit Lit (Too) - it's in Molly Wolf's essay called "The Sock Heel."

I still have the essay bookmarked in my copy. (I have compunctions against writing in "reading" books - as opposed to compunctions against writing in technical books I own, which I do not have - the compunctions I mean. I don't like writing marginalia in books that I read read, because on re-reading they slow me down and feel clunky. But in technical books, I write things like "error in formula?" or "here is the thing on that thing" or "support for using DCA scores in regression" because I read technical books very differently from books to read read. If that makes sense. [I usually also read read while in bed, and I don't have a pen or pencil handy]).

Anyway. I was reading my new American Scientist (not to be confused with another magazine, Scientific American) and it had the most beautiful article in it on Hawaiian spider evolution, dispersal, and community assembly. Just great. The kind of article that makes me want to get up and jump around the living room for the joy of reading it. Good science writing, where several different threads of something you've been thinking about are woven together, CAN be exciting and beautiful and a joy. There's a brief precis of the article here, but unfortunately, to access the whole thing, you must either buy the article, subscribe to the magazine, or find it in a library. What I'd really love to do (and may try to do if I can) is see if I can get permission to reproduce it for my ecology class to read; it touches on something like five or six different topics that we've discussed in class in the past month - dispersal, and adaptive radiation, and the isolation of islands, and Island Biogeography, and speciation vs. adaptation to conditions, and community assembly, and ecological time vs. evolutionary time - and it's just great, it makes me so happy, it was just what I needed because I was wondering after class yesterday if the stuff I was teaching them was in any way relevant and meaningful and if it hung together at all, and then here comes this wonderful article that tells me yes.