working on now

This is the start of the "Paddington's Garden" shawl (a Janina Kallio pattern - she has a lot of different ones for sale on Ravelry; most of them are fairly simple, some combination of garter, stockinette, and rows of yarn-overs with k2togs). I'm using a Wollmeise yarn (it's a slightly corally pink; the color-name translates to "sweet"....Suss (no I am not going searching for the eszett this morning to get the orthography perfectly right)

It's a simple pattern but is fairly enjoyable to knit on. Apparently the rows of yarn overs increases by one each segment as the shawl grows.

I also give an exam today, I decided to bring Augusta and work on that (the cabled cardigan; I'm on the second front now and then I have the sleeves to do).

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Also, I heard this story the other day: a young woman working at Waffle House to pay for her college tuition helps an elderly man (on oxygen, and who said his hands didn't work so well any more) by cutting up his ham for him. Another person - someone involved at Texas Southern University - saw the story and has now offered her a scholarship to go to college.

This is the fairy-tale world I want.

I know we should do good not because we expect or even hope to be rewarded, but gosh it's nice, once in a while, to see someone get paid back (with generosity beyond all bounds) for a kind thing they do.

There's a bad old phrase - "pour encourager les autres" - which I guess is from "Candide" (I had forgotten that) that essentially suggests that occasional executions of military officers (when they mess up) is necessary to, well, encourage the others not to do so. But I like much better the idea of good things happening - sometimes very large good things, out of all proportion - as a way of encouraging the rest of us to keep on trying to do good.

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Well, there may be a fix to the low teacher pay (for some values of "fix" - it's about a $6000 annual increase). It involves some tax increases; the one that will impact me is the gas tax. And I kind of gasped this morning when the newsreader first read it off - he said it was a "thirty-cent per gallon tax increase" and I was like, "yeah, give the money to the teachers but then take it right back out of their pockets with every commute" and I also mentally vowed to fill up every time I crossed over into Texas.

Turns out in fact it's a three-cent-per-gallon increase, which is much less likely to even be noticed (some people are still already complaining and yeah, there might be better places to get that money from, but you know? being in education in Oklahoma I can see what the "brain drain" of teachers to other states is doing). It sounds like schools are still going to be closed Monday (so a lot of people get a four-day weekend) but it also means that it's unlikely the Science Fair or children's play will be disrupted.

AND I don't expect higher-ed to see any increases, and I could totally see the Legislature taking cuts from us (robbing Peter to pay Paul).

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In happier news - I e-mailed my piano teacher yesterday about spring lessons. They start next Thursday. I have been keeping up with practicing though not as diligently as when I have "assignments" to work on. (I've been working on my own on "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" which is not that difficult a piece, I just have a few places where I'm still sticking, and on an arrangement of "Moonglow," which is kind of difficult because it has funny syncopated bits and I am not always so good at that. I will need some help figuring out the rhythm in parts of it...)

And I talked to my parents last night; my dad offered to pay for part of my hot-water heater replacement. Part of me is going "you are a grown-up adult and you should be taking care of your own appliances 100%" but part of me is really grateful I won't have to budget QUITE so tightly in the coming months. (And also: were I married, and both my husband and I working? We'd have more money coming in than I do alone, and we'd be able to afford something like this together).

(Still, I do need to be more careful about spending and get better about chucking a couple hundred dollars in savings on a regular basis, with the goal of building up a "car fund" against the eventuality of having to replace my current car. I'm guessing, barring anything BAD, I've got at least five years left in it, but I will need to replace it some time, and I would MUCH rather not do the financing route if I can avoid that.)