Thursday is the new Friday (for one more week at least).

Well.

Arrived home, switched on the news (mainly to see how DAMN HOT it's going to be this weekend) and heard about the second attack in London. Brr. Stay safe, folks, and I hope Scotland Yard or whoever's in charge of this catches the people doing it, and it doesn't happen again. Though this time it sounds like either some STUPID crazed lunatic copycat who didn't know what they were doing, or that the bombs were past their sell-by date so they didn't 'splode right and take out "enough" people to make terrorists happy. (From what I've heard, no deaths, one injury).

May all terrorist bombs in the future 'splode wrong and not do any damage.

Sitting at the computer now, sloooowwwwwly surfing knitblogs (I am a cheapskate who still has dialup at home) as I write out final-exam questions. I'm using the notecard system I used to use - one question per notecard, and just keep going until I totally run out of ideas, then sift through the cards and (if I'm lucky), I'll have more questions than I need so I can discard the crummy or confusing ones.

I tell myself I will thank myself for giving a machine-graded multiple choice final on the final day. But it's heck writing good multiple choice questions that actually challenge the students a bit. It's very easy to write a good essay test but essay tests are hard and time-consuming to grade. Multiple choice tests are difficult to write (unless you draw on a published test-bank, which I don't, mainly because the questions seem to never be quite right) but simple to grade.

In another week, I will essentially be done for the summer semester. August 1 I leave town for a while to go visit my family. I'm looking forward to it, even though it means going on Public Transport and I'm just a wee bit jittery about that these days.

And I'm thinking about projects again. Thinking about what I have ahead.

I think my next sweater is going to be the Bookworm Vest I talked about - in sort of a greyish blue and green Fable, it will look good with jeans.

After that, I don't know - I never started the Bistro Cables (or whatever it's called) sweater from last fall's Interweave (or was that 2 falls ago? Time does fly).

And I've got the Fibonacci sweater.
And another Bookworm's worth of yarn.

And I have some purple silk blend for Otis from Knitty
And I have some Araucania Nature Wool for a "Grandpa's Cardigan" (a simple, boxy, ribstitch cardigan - good knit-and-read project, I think).

And I have some Fisherman's wool somewhere, for a crocheted vest, but that might change and become a knitted vest instead. Except I already bought the buttons for the pattern...

And I have some alpaca somewhere for the Cul-de-Sac vest.

And I have bunches of the cheap inexpensive Highland wool and alpaca from Elann- one of the wools is going someday to become the X-O vest in Folk vests, and I still want to do Rafn (Raven) from Viking Knits out of the alpaca. (Hrm...maybe THAT will be my next "big" sweater after the Bookworm vest. Or maybe even my next "big" project, and I'll do that next instead of the vest. One benefit would be that the yarn for that is already skeined, so I wouldn't have to wind...) Rafn would be yet another burgundy sweater; that would make five - one purchased sweater, Zelda, the Grandpa Cardigan, the yet-unborn Wallaby, and then Rafn. (No, I never ordered the Rowan; I still like the idea of it but I'm leaning towards petitioning for it for Christmas).

And I've got the Mayfair for Sally's Summer Sweater, and the Pachuco cotton for the to-the-lake sweater.

And I last week I found where I had tucked away a bag of some kind of Phildar boucle that a friend of mine brought me back from Paris - she's not a knitter and she only bought five balls of it, thinking it was enough for a sweater to fit fat old me, but it isn't. But I realized that that asymmetrical vest in The Knit Stitch can be made with the amount I have. (But I will make the vest be symmetrical - VE HAFF VAYS UFF MAKINK YOOOOU ZYMMETRICAL! - because I am that 10% of the population [that Sally Melville says are excessively left-brained; I tend to disagree with that] to whom asymmetricality is like nails on a chalkboard or like eggshells in the egg salad.)

And I've got two SitCom Chics worth of yarn - some 1824 Cotton (which I guess no longer is made) and some Denim Style from Bernat that hopped into my cart one day at the Hobby Lobby when I was tooling around feeling depressed that I didn't have a "real" yarn store near me.

And I've got more stashed away - for sweaters that never became. A bunch of Microspun that was designated for a cabled sweater in a back issue of Vogue Knits; don't know if I'll ever make it considering what I've heard about the alleged unpleasantness of knitting Microspun. (I don't even know if I bought enough). And I've got a bunch of burgundy (burgundy again!) Muskoka that was bought, oh gosh, even before I moved down here, to make a Wonderful Wallaby. (Which also never got made). And I have some green Imagine for that big fat fluffy sweater that Lion Brand used to have (and they might still) on their website.

There are other things I'm doubtless forgetting - I think I still have a Mags Kandis kit-sweater packed away, and some superbulky olive colored yarn that seemed like a good idea at the time and probably still will when I pull it out to knit the coat-sweater I intended it for...

I'm stalling here. Not writing any questions for my exam. But that's a quick mental inventory of the sweater-stash. (Surely there's stuff I'm forgetting, accidentally or deliberately - like the Rowan Summer Tweed I bought on impulse for that shrug in Interweave, before thinking "gee, a shrug might make me look kind of like a battleship in wool, with the shoulders I have." I'm on the verge of repurposing the yarn into another eventual Clapotis instead.)

I better get knitting.

I wonder how much of those yarns will go to whatever heirs I will have. I don't have anyone in my life (younger than me at least) at this point who knits. I sure hope my brother and sister in law pop out a few babies, and that at least one of them becomes a knitter ('cos at this point, my own spawning looks increasingly unlikely). Or maybe I'll hit the jackpot and fall in love with a man with a couple of well-behaved 3 to 5 year old kids, so I can have the fun of reading bedtime stories and making cookies and playing tea party, without actually having to birth and diaper them myself....and then I can bring them over to The Knitting Side, so I have someone who will fight over wanting my needles sometime around 2060 when I'm long past being able to use them...