knitting and books

 * I've mostly been working on the striped socks with a couple narrow lace bands inserted in them:

 I looked through one of my sock books and found a fountain-lace pattern I might want for the "vaporwave" colored yarn. I mean, malls had fountains, right? and malls played vaporwave music, right? and I associate malls with the 1980s when I was a tween/teen, and the colors in this are 80s-ish colors.

But I didn't have the energy to start them tonight, and I also want to at least get farther on one of the current pairs first. 

I've also been working on a pair of fingerless mitts but I'm up to the bind off, and I don't love binding off, so I put them aside. And tonight I knit on the enormous blanket I've been working on since 2022. It does look like it's getting close to finished - there are still many more rows (you only decrease one stitch per row) but at least it's not so long on a side it falls off the circular needle easily.

* Spent most of the day fighting with one (1!) slide deck - the one on the Clean Air Act. I couldn't get the contrast to be "enough" to please the build in checker in Canvas so I just dumped the pretty (very unobtrusive) background graphic and went with plain pale blue with black lettering.  As I've said: I get that this is important but it is FRUSTRATING and it's possible for someone to print out the slides in black and white and eliminate any contrast challenges that way, but it's got to be done.

I DID also spend time inserting links (now that I know how to do it so it's not obtrusive, but you can click that link and get the information) for all the court cases I reference. So HOPEFULLY some students will take the initiative to read those ahead, and if I happen to forget the exact facts of a case as I'm talking about it, I can click and get them.

Also, yesterday I pulled this off the shelf to glance at again. This is, I guess, evidence that my thinking about the environment/ecology goes way back - this is a book my mom bought me from a book club she belonged to when I was about five or six:

 Very, very 1970s. I tried to find a bit more about Margaret Gabel, the author, but came up pretty empty (this may be the only thing she wrote? there are other Margaret Gabels referenced but they seem not to have been her. The illustrator, Susan Perl, is more familiar - I know she used to do illustrations for magazines and she has a very distinctive style:

 There are a number of issues discussed in the book - "reduce, reuse, recycle" is in there if not in that particular mantra, but there is talk of "refuse extra packaging or bags or boxes at the store if you can" or the suggestion that thrift shopping can be a way to use fewer resources than always buying new. ANd there's talk of trying to talk to local officials about things (probably for older kids or parents). And there's a very strong anti-litter stance, which - yeah, that works in a book for kids, you have to teach them young, I think (as I was) and also cleaning up litter/asking people not to litter is something kids could do.

But again, I guess, nothing you learn is ever wasted, and this book I remember carrying with me to school for SSR in like first grade is now something I at least use as an example in class (talking about the history of the conservation movement, given that I remember some of the 1970s part, and all of my students these days are kids of the 21st century)

I started reading a new (well, new to me) book the other night. I had never read any Thomas Hardy before, and the last time I was at Books A Million, they had nice hardcover versions of "classic" novels (FSVO "classic," I don't know how much Hardy is taught in high schools or outside of a dedicated Brit-Lit curriculum)

"Far from the Madding Crowd" - one of his rural novels. It's funny, it's been a long time since I read a Victorian/Romantic era novel, and the first few pages (there is one where he takes like seven paragraphs to describe some mundane thing) made me go "okay, is Hardy doing a "bit" where he is using extremely flowery language to describe the life of this fairly humble sheep farmer, or is he Just This Way?"

I think given that he is a Victorian and is roughly contemporaneous with George Eliot, he is Just That Way.

Like I said, in the past few years I think I got a bit lazy in my reading and it was an adjustment back to a slower book with longer, more complex sentences, but once I got back into the groove, I liked it and I remember how I used to read, for example, lots of Trollope. 

I'm not very far yet - Bathsheba Everdene has just revealed her name to him after he returned her hat. Right now it's pretty peaceful and pastoral but I'm expecting sad parts based on the little I've read about Hardy's writing. 

I guess some of his later writing was controversial - I read something about some people thinking Jude the Obscure was "obscene" and....okay, I don't know what that would have entailed back then, I wouldn't be surprised if it was an out of wedlock child or some such that did it....