Really, what I probably need to do is not pay attention to news at all...not on television, not on Internet, maybe not on radio (but somehow, news on the radio seems more tolerable to me; maybe it's because it's aural rather than visual and I tend to forget stuff I hear better than stuff I see).

I wonder if some of the anti-swine-flu stuff is overblown. We have those hand sanitizer things in every lab classroom, but studies have shown that washing your hands with soap and water (which we have in every room that has the hand sanitizer thingies - because they're LABS) is just as good. And if you get chemicals on your hands (which frankly, most of the time, concern me more than getting microbes on my hands does - seeing as I work with soil all the time and am breathing in and getting soil microbes all over me), soap and water are a much better bet for removing them.

And I was at the grocery last night and there was a little kid coughing. All over the place. In the produce section. And her mom wasn't bothering to tell her to cover her mouth or anything. It made me twitch, but I'm always reticent about saying something about stuff like that to parents, lest I awaken the Mama Bear response.

My students are actually pretty good; we have boxes of tissues in all the classrooms and if someone is going to cough or sneeze, they usually manage to run up to the front and grab some tissues to cough or sneeze into. Though I think for the vast majority of them, it's allergies, as they don't seem sick otherwise and the coughing/sneezing has persisted for several weeks.

***
I finished the first of what I'm thinking of as the "Roller Derby Socks" (because of the colors and the wide striping) last night:



It fits really well. I remain somewhat amazed at how well a "just simple" 64 stitch sock done on size 1 needles fits me. (The colors are brighter in real life).

I've also been plugging along on Clapotis; I am on the last repeat of the "increases" before I start the midpoint. (And yes, Ellen, I'll photograph the stitches dropping and laddering when I get to them. It's not as scary as it sounds).



It looks kind of triangular there but it's bunched up on the needle; it will eventually be a mostly-rectangular shape (it is just slightly biased into a slight parallelogram but not enough to recognize it as such when it's being worn).

And now I've kind of got onto a fingerless-mitts kick. No, I haven't started any but there are SO many patterns on Ravelry and in some of the books I have that I'm now looking at yarns I bought for other things and wondering how it would look worked up into mitts. (At this rate, I may have to start wearing them all winter long even during class. Which yeah, maybe even that's a bit too eccentric for me).

But I saw this:



And thought of mitts. It's a Damselfly Yarn, from a yarn-of-the-month club I belonged to last spring. I never knit it up because (a) I already have a pair of black-with-bright socks, (b) I was thinking of doing a lace scarf (but now meh, I've got too many going on) and (c) I just never really found something that appealed pattern-wise. But I'm thinking it might make fun mitts - and depending on the pattern, I would be left with enough for either a SECOND pair (gift or swap item) or for an accent yarn on socks. So I might wind it off and consider which of the nifty sockweight-yarn fingerless mitt patterns would work best with it.