I'm back. Tired. The train was extremely delayed thanks to freights. (I know, I know - the freight companies own the tracks. But it irks me that HUMAN passengers are secondary to cars full of sweatsocks or coal or scrap metal or something).

I did get all of "Cold Comfort Farm" read on the trip back, and read most of a biography of Gregor Mendel on the way up (somehow for me, the train trip seems more conducive to reading than to knitting).

I finished a few things over my break; pictures will come later. I made a couple of toys and I finished a pair of "simple" socks. I also finished the first of the Miranda socks.

I also took advantage of the really good public library in my parents' town to vet a few books that I thought I might want to buy - and I'm kind of glad I did:

"Knitting loves Crochet" is nice, but all of the sweaters stop at like a 38" finished size, and the other projects didn't impress me that much

"Get your crochet on: hip hats and cool caps" is nice in its way, but the styles were not the kind of styles I wear. They are, and I'm trying not to make it sound too "code-y" here, more "urban" than what I typically wear.

"the Gift Knitter - knitting chunky for babies with four legs or two" is mainly patterns for babies (and I've seen baby patterns that appealed to me more) and also has dog coats in it. And you know? My friends who have dogs, their taste in dog breeds tends to run more to Australian shepherds and blue-tick hounds. Not exactly the kind of dogs who either need or would willingly wear a little knitted coat. (I did make the one thing - a small toy dog wearing an ultramini version of the basic dog coat - that I would be likely to make out of the book).

I will say I found a book I really DID like, and wound up buying a copy of - "The Bread Book," by Sara Lewis. As you might guess, it's a cookbook of bread recipes. Some lend themselves well to the bread machine but many of them require special shaping steps and such, so would probably more easily be done completely by hand (I've been dissatisfied by the "dough" mode on my bread machine). There's a soft-pretzel recipe (with rye flour as part of the flour) that I really want to try, and a "fougasse" that looks really good, and some garlic and basil pull-apart breadsticks. And there are a bunch of interesting wholegrain breads. It's a British book, so some of the terminology is a little different ("Strong white flour" for example, instead of "bread flour") but there is a glossary in the front.

I plan to make more bread this summer; I'm going to be at-home more I think. Both because of gas prices and also because the place I teach has decided that they will save money by shutting down the a/c the middle of the day on Thursdays (there are no Friday classes in summer). So I'm going to just plan on doing what I have to do up on campus Monday through Thursday, and do whatever take-home work I can do on the weekends, because I've learned through experience (and power outages on campus) that even a short period of time with no ventilation makes the building most unpleasant. So I'll be home for the risings and kneadings and such.

I'm really glad to be home. And I'm glad I cleaned house before I left - the ants have, finally, gone, it looks like.

Now I need to get some dinner.