This is the real post-of-the-day.

Mostly what I did last night was quilt on the big quilt. As I said, I'm liking hand quilting more again - I listened to a CD of Celtic music (I have a few of those) and quilted. I also knit a bit on my mom's socks.

And I'm thinking about projects again. I really like "Bloom" from the new Knitty, but I'm going to wait and hold off and buy the yarn once I've gone off the stash-diet. (I'm projecting Oct. 16, simply because that's my mid-fall break, and I'm considering a yarn shop run).

I also love the pictures of Bloom; somehow they remind me of the various Metroparks my family used to go to when I was a child, or of the Blossom Music Center - that sort of freedom and running around over swoopy ground. (And being able to go barefoot and sit on the ground, in a land without fire ants. Seriously, one of the things I miss about my former habitation was the relative lack of insect life, or at least insect life that isn't aggressive and capable of inflicting pain).

I've been looking at my back issues of Interweave Knits again...and you know, I still like Salt Peanuts for the Llama-wool yarn, darn it. I think I like it better than the (probably simpler to do) Debbie Bliss design I talked about. My only concern is that the yarn proposed for the sweater (the Bergamo) is quite light and frothy by comparison with the llama-wool, and I'm afraid of making a sweater that will either feel like it's made out of boilerplate, or that will slowly stretch to minidress length. (I know, I know: swatch. I will anyway, but I usually only do a 4 x 4 swatch to check gauge. I don't like the though of knitting half a sweater and then ripping it out).

I'm ready for it to be fall again; I'm ready for cooler weather and rain. (it looks like it will be 2 more weeks minimum on each count). I remember all the fall hiking my folks did when I was a kid - this would have been when I was like five and six and seven. My brother was a baby in a Snugli and later a toddler that my dad carried. We used to go here (except it was still a National Recreation Area then). We'd go to places like Deep Lock Quarry and the Deep Lock. My early interest in history started, I think, from those trips - I remember feeling something strange (I think the proper word might be "numinous") looking at those artefacts of a hundred or so years earlier, and realizing that there were other people who walked these paths, and that there were people who had been here that I would never know, people who had been there that probably never conceived that a hundred or more years later, a little girl would stand and look up at the quarry and wonder how they cut the big stones, or look down in the lock and be a little afraid because the water seemed so deep and murky...And then realizing that even before the European settlers, there were Native people, who probably never even conceived that they'd eventually be pushed off the land their deep ancestors had used...

( the whole Towpath Trail virtual tour. It's really nicely done and is one of the places I "visit" when I get feeling homesick and nostalgic).

Or we'd go to Hale Farm (Or I'd go, with a school or Girl Scout field trip) and I'd wonder about how people lived, and be totally charmed and seduced by the thought of living off the land and weaving my own cloth and making my own stuff. (I think I wrote some months back about watching the weaver at Hale Farm and thinking about learning to weave myself. It's still a dream of mine, even though I have no time, and nowhere to put a floor loom, and don't know anyone in the area who could teach me).

There was ALL KINDS of history stuff like that, back when I was a kid, living in the Western Reserve. (heh...I went to Western Reserve Academy for high school, and when I used to wear my old WRA sweatshirt when I was in college, I had other kids ask me if I had gone to military school. I guess the "Reserve" part threw them off; "Western Reserve" was the nickname of the part of Ohio where I grew up because it has been lands in the "Western Reserve" (reserved lands) of Connecticut during post-Revolutionary War times. I guess not a lot of people outside the area knew that, but for me it was a fact as familiar as my own name).