233 yards:



(Because I'm afraid I won't have time to knit up the last few, to show just how far one ball of Araucania goes. So I used the old "tailor's estimation" to measure off what remained - the distance from the fingertips of your outstretched arm to your nose (with your head turned slightly to the side) is about a yard. I use it to estimate amounts of quilt fabric when I can't remember if a piece is 2 1/2 or 3 yards in size.)

Here's a close up showing the neat little garter stitch detail:



I actually might have got the full 240 (well, + 240, if you want to strictly go by what the ball band says) yards if I hadn't messed up and knitted one of the rows I was supposed to purl.

But one thing I have learned about knitting, which is probably generally applicable to life, is that most problems have more than one fix - there is the long, involved, and immediately-obvious fix (ripping out the whole row back to the mistake and then fixing it), or, if you keep a cool head, a less-involved and more localized fix (knitting up to the mistake, then undoing each stitch in turn and remaking it as a purl stitch). So that's what I did.

I don't KNOW for sure that making an effort to fix mistakes in knitting by not ripping back whole rows (which I really hate and prefer to avoid if at all possible) has trained me to be more patient, to step back from a problem before charging in and doing the obvious thing, but I think maybe it has...I tend to be the person people in my department come to with computer/projector issues (well, before they call the computer guys) because perhaps 8 times out of 10, I can at least figure out a temporary fix. And it's really only because I stand back and listen to the symptoms and think before I push buttons - I really know very little about computers. But some of my colleagues are more impulsive than I, and they can thoroughly muck up a computer by trying five different things at once, while excoriating the machine for being a recalcitrant beast. (And of course, computers are thoroughly inanimate* and cursing does no good)

(*Well, not one of them has won the Turing test yet, that I've heard of).

So anyway. I'm just a bit nervous that maybe I should have been doing the alternate-balls-of-yarn thing because of the fact that a couple of the other balls of yarn are a lot darker (Araucania does not have dye lots). I think I'll try the alternate-every-couple-rows thing from here on out and hope it's not too noticeable.

****

I finished "The Artificial River" today. It's an interesting book but my impressions of it are somewhat diluted by the fact that I read it over the span of nearly a month, but in chunks separated by a long period of time.

One of the interesting things about the book is how it kind of chronicles the rise of the merchant-class along with the development of the canal. And how a lot of early businesspeople tried to argue that things that were good for their business were actually also good for the public weal, and that they weren't just trying to get ahead, but that they were also trying to benefit society.

Also, there was a lot of the same kind of jimmying and jockeying about tariffs (and the relief from same) that we saw last week in the "don't call it 'bailout,' call it 'rescue'" bill. La plus ça change...

Also, business owners were by and large a lot more paternalistic back then. Not sure if that's entirely a bad thing...it seems in some cases we've swung too far to the other extreme, where the business owners see people merely as cogs to be plugged into a machine, rather than as individuals.

(However, the canalboat owners, by and large, seemed to treat their drivers pretty badly - there were comparisons made between that laborer class in the North and slaves in the South, with the conclusion that with the exception of pay, and (technical) freedom of the Northern laborers, their lots were not all that different. And as a result - there are links between the Bethel Church movement - groups that were missionaries to the canal workers - and the abolitionist movement).

The book is well-written and it does talk about a chapter of American history I knew little about...we learned about the Canal Era but mainly in the aspect of it being doomed to fail because of the rise of the railroads, which were faster, didn't have to shut down in the winter, and were in some cases cheaper.

***

Well, I'm not sure how youth group is going to go tonight. I just got a call from my co-leader. One of her grandkids took a bad header on his scooter (like, had to go to the ER bad) and she's not even sure she'll be able to be there tonight (and she's transportation for most of the kids).

I don't know. I've not been having very many people. Part of this is that a couple of our "core group" moved away, a couple kids in the group are mixed up in a messy divorce where apparently neither parent feels "comfortable" taking their kids back to church (or maybe that's a euphemism for something else).

I remind myself that my behavior is the only person's behavior I have control over, but there's just a lot of sad crap going on in the lives of people around me - I know of two people going through rather ugly divorces (in one case, a "surprise! I don't want to be married any more!" divorce). And it does wear on a person.

I don't know; it seems like an awful lot of people around me seem to be being followed around by little black storm clouds.