Huh. So I post a post on giving up my need for others' approval and particularly for awards, and two people tell me they'd give me an award.

There's something unsettling about that, philosophically. (It's like the old line - which frankly annoys the daylights out of me - to the effect of, "When you stop looking for your soulmate, one will appear." Yeah, sure. And then maybe I'll blink and nod like I Dream of Jeannie and make a million dollars appear. Yeah, I'm bitter about it because I cannot count the number of happily-coupled people who've said that to me over the years. And it simply doesn't work that way.)

Anyway.

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TChem is back! She posted that meme that's been making the rounds, about grabbing the first book of 123 or more pages that you can lay your hands on, going down the first five sentences of that page, and then posting the next three.

I did this eons ago but I was in my office-office so all I had was a boring old GIS book to quote.

So this time, this is what I have, from a book from my "I want to read these someday" shelf in my home office:

"Later, he began to wish that he could put several other questions, such as "Do you like being a sexton?" or "Are you a slave?" or "Are you even happy?". The extraordinary thing was that he could not ask these questions. In order to ask them, he would have had to put them in ant language through his antennae - and he now discovered, with a helpless feeling, that there were no words for what he wanted to say."

T. H. White, The Once and Future King.


Maybe I should read that after I finish "Pickwick Papers."
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And despite my soulmate-snarliness above (and it's more irritation at the assumption that because one person has succeeded at some life goal, everyone can, and that it's really simple - I feel the same way about "I lost weight by doing x, so you can too!" advice), I decided that rather than feeling bereft and sad because I had no one to buy a Valentine's Day present for, I'd just buy one for myself.

It came today.



Two skeins of Shibui Sock yarn, in the color Chinese Red (1797). I have no idea yet what pattern I'll use with this one, but that's part of the fun of it. And since it's a just-barely-variegated, it should work with just about anything I want to use - cables, or lace, or a twisted-stitch pattern. I may skim through my Nancy Bush books to see if there's one in there that jumps out at me, or I may just use some kind of lacy pattern stitch from a stitch directory.

I don't really have any true red socks. A couple pairs that are burgundy, but no just-plain-red.