Hi! A'member me?*



(*10 virtual bonus points to anyone who remembers what SNL skit that's from)

Yeah, I decided to pick up Cozy again. I got some done on it last night (it's a bit more than 1/4 finished in that shot, at least based on the amount of yarn I have - I had just attached in the third skein). I didn't get as much done as I wanted for two reasons:

1. Somewhere a few rows back (I think it was when I was knitting on it while waiting for my allergy shot) I made a horrific mistake and I had to un-knit and fix it.

Un-knitting Summer Tweed is not fun.

2. I yielded a bit to neighborhood peer pressure. I hadn't mowed my lawn in about 2 weeks (well, the front lawn - the back, it had been nearly a month). I didn't worry too much about it - it's been brutally hot (surely no one expects a person to mow when there's a heat index of 110?) and besides, my next-door neighbor's lawn was even longer.

But last evening, while I was doing the necessary un-knitting (and watching a documentary on Typhoid Mary - a Nova repeat), I heard a lawnmower. "I should probably go out and do the lawn this evening, " I thought (calculating that it would be Friday before I'd have time again). Then I thought, no, I've had my allergy shot today, not wise to expose myself to all that mold and pollen.

But then I looked out the window and saw that the lawnmower was my next-door neighbor's teen-aged son mowing their yard. So, oh crud, I might as well do mine.

So I did. It's not great (the backyard, in particular, was almost too long for the old-fashioned reel-type mower I use), but it's done.

****

Some books I had ordered came yesterday. In particular the long-delayed Oxford Press order (There was a warehouse mixup but I won't go into more detail). In it was a book I've been eagerly awaiting, and am contemplating throwing over my other current reads (Gulliver's Travels, that book on the Crimean War, and a Guido Brunetti mystery) to read first - it's called "Jacquard's Web" (Essinger) and it's about, well, the Jacquard loom. But it's also about Babbage's Difference Engine (which is something I've been intrigued by for years), and silk, and a lot of other topics. It's one of those kinds of books I love - where the author ties together all these disparate strands and shows connections between things.

And also, there's the fiber angle: Jacquard's Loom (which, apparently, the author argues is the world's first computer. Heh. The first computer was made to make patterned silk. Take that, you rocket-scientist types.)

So it looks like an interesting read.