Melody: you're probably right, a certain amount of wishful thinking is there. Just like I have wishful thinking about living a life with enough free time to take off for some of the fiber-fairs, or to go to week-long "folk school" sessions, like some people do.

I think it's that I was in grad school too long, and dealt too much with people who had real ENVY (I remember a colleague snorting that the undergrads didn't "deserve" the nice cars they had. This particular chap drove a pickup that was about 20 years old, so I suppose there was some - considerable - envy there. And so, I tend to hear envy rather than wistfulness in the voices of some.)

That said, someone finally posted a fairly intelligent post about it: either you can afford it or you can't. Either it's worth that to you or it isn't. Now, was that so hard?

(And honestly, it WOULD have to be pretty wonderful yarn for me to pay $23 for it. It seems my cutoff point these days for a pair of socks is about $15 - which is what you pay for the readymade Birkenstock merino or "smartwool" socks at the hippie shoe store).

I'm trying hard not to be irritated this morning but there are two things that are poking at me a bit. First: I wish my friend D.'s husband was responsible for deciding whether to start classes on time today, as he had been for the postponement of the honors day Saturday. Because the roads are, if anything, WORSE today. And there's a thin freezing mist - the sort of weather that makes you think of (if you're gloomy) consumption, and cold attics and dark, Satanic mills, and insane first wives or (if you're a bracing, outdoorsy sort) going back to bed with a thermos of soup and an Eric Ambler novel. And the main artery up from Texas is shut down - or at least WAS, as of the time I left the house. (I have 9 people in my 8 am class. I think every single one of them commutes up from Texas. I may not have an 8 am class today. And I hope none of them tried and got in an accident if the roads are as bad in Texas as they sound. If only one or two show up, I'll give them the choice: we can discuss the material or you can take off.)

I'm also irritated at a movie ad I saw last night - apparently there's a new kids' movie coming out called Doogal (vague memory: wasn't that a British kid's show? I seem to remember seeing the little dog before, in a sort of PBS like setting and all the characters had accents). But the movie's rated G, and in the ad they make a bathroom joke.

they talk about the dog and his friends saving the world and going "beyond the call of duty." Then, several characters look shocked/surprised. And the narrator says, "Yes. We said 'duty.'"

Charming. This is aimed at 3's and 4's, I guess, and yeah, I suppose the duty/doody juxtaposition is considered sophisticated humor at that age. But. It irritates me - probably beyond the point where I should be irritated - that "duty" is now basically being used as part of a joke, the assumption being that when most people hear it, they hear a baby word for feces. (Ridiculing duty, just like ridiculing a sense of responsibility or maturity, seems to be a common theme in entertainment these days, or at least that's my perception. I expect some kind of horrible coprolite joke based on the phrase "sacred duty" one of these days).

And, even though I opened the campus webmail on Saturday and deleted all the spam that had accumulated since Friday afternoon, this morning there was so much spam - mostly pushing "meds" or software - that it crashed my email program. I've tried setting up filters but it's one of those evolutionary arms-race things - as soon as I get the filtering right, they come up with new keywords. And at one point I was losing "real" mail because it got swept up in my filters.

Ah, such a change from yesterday afternoon, which I spent curled up on my bed, under a warm blanket, knitting on the Art Mohair scarf and reading as my little humidifier ran next to me. (It's been like 15% humidity here, and I woke up in the middle of the night Saturday coughing and hacking and with a dry throat, so I figured time spent by the humidifier was needed.). Sometimes it's hard to hit the ground running first thing on Monday. I could do with a few more hours with a book and my knitting and the humidifier.