Man, three nights in a row away from home. I hope to actually knit some and sew some this weekend, for a change.

Classes start Monday, so I'm re-reading first chapters (fortunately the one class for which we have a "new edition" book, the first chapter didn't change much - especially, they left in an excellent example that I had been using in my discussion of the topic. It irks me when books take a good example and "have" to replace it with a newer example or a different example just to be "different." I know every college student has an opinion on the frequency-of-change of editions of textbooks, and frankly, a lot of the time I agree with them - with a few exceptions, it seems like a racket to kill the used-book market.

Actually, I tend to feel the way about any situation where the manufacturer dinks with something that works well, just to make it NEW and IMPROVED. One of the reasons why I'm kind of a technophobe - at least as far as "toys" like MP3 players and such are concerned - is that I expect the useful life of such things [before they get superseded by the newest and latest] to be so short that I can't justify the cost of buying one. Yeah, yeah, I know - they're practically giving iPods away in cereal boxes now, but still.)

Cast on a new pair of knit-and-read socks so I could work and knit at the same time. This pair is out of the (in)famous Trekking XXL 126, a/k/a "Neapolitan." This is one of those yarns - like the original Opal Tiger - that I saw somewhere in its first run and thought, "Oh, I like that" and bought some. And then bunged it in the stash because other things grabbed my attention. And then, suddenly, the yarn is discontinued and a feeding frenzy results - I think I read on KR that for a while this yarn was going for $40 on eBay.

I will admit I thought of selling it. Then I changed my mind, mainly because of inertia.

And now - Trekking's reintroduced it. So - speaking of markets being killed.

But anyway. It's a cute yarn. So I'm going to make a pair of socks out of it. I also have another yarn bought on the same yarn-pilgrimage from the same line - but it's got green and pink, so I guess it's Spumoni.

(I always liked Spumoni better than Neapolitan. But it's very very hard to find Spumoni, especially outside of areas where a lot of people of Italian heritage live. I did find an excellent - and extremely authentic - Spumoni at the Meijer's up where my parents live. But I have never seen even an INauthentic spumoni around here, and that makes me kind of sad. I guess Blue Bell doesn't do Spumoni.)

Last night was youth movie night, a/k/a A Supposedly Fun Thing I Don't Think I'll Do Again. In retrospect, I probably chose the wrong movie - picked "Apollo 13," which I guess I had only ever seen the 'sanitized' network versions of. (There is a rather large occurrence of the s-word. Now, I'd argue - most of the guys in the space program were military, and so that word and others probably flew with impunity. But the movie was rated PG...and I have certain expectations of PG. And there was also the "Honey, just let it ring" scene with the "bachelor astronaut" and his girl in the shower. Whatever. I hope no parents are upset - though I do suppose their kids see worse on television.)

Also, I think the movie perhaps moved a bit slowly for the 11 to 15 crowd that I had - and I'm not sure how much of the emotional depth was felt. I mean, I was kind of choking up watching Jim Lovell's family on the screen, and really felt the tension when the one guy (the astronaut who tested positive for measles) was trying to figure out a way to make things work in the simulator, and the kids were mostly talking and giggling amongst themselves.

I will say for a couple it was maybe a learning experience about pre-Shuttle space exploration. I had to explain how in the "old days," astronauts in the command modules were supposed to splash down in the ocean - that was the only way they had of doing things.

I was a tiny baby (5 months old) when the moon walk happened; when Apollo 13 took place I was just over a year old. But we were still taught about these things in Science class when I went through grade school. It was still kind of how things were done, spacewise. (Also - Voyager was launched when I was a kid. And I remember worrying intensely when Skylab was supposed to fall out of the sky, that it wasn't going to come down in the ocean like they predicted, but that it would land in a populated area and hurt someone.) The shuttle program began, I think, when I was about 10 or so. (The Challenger explosion - I was a junior in high school).

It's funny to remember that I'm a generation removed from these kids and that there are things that are sort of familiar to me that are as "ancient" to them as the Korean War was to me. It's still hard for me to grasp, as an adult - I tend to assume that people who are basically "adults" (and really, a lot of these kids are, seeing the level of responsibility some of them have at home) have the same experiential base as I do. (It's even worse with my college students - I have to consciously remind myself, for example, that most of them were not born yet when the 1980 Mt. St. Helens eruption - an example I used in Ecology class - occured.)

Maybe that happens to everybody. I once had someone at church ask me if I remembered where I was when JFK was assassinated. I didn't want to be cheeky and say, "Yeah, I was an egg cell in my mom," but it's true - I wouldn't have been born for 6 years yet.