thankful

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving. We had a quiet one, with one of my friends from my graduate program coming over for a vegetarian thanksgiving with my husband and me. The food was all lovely, except for my somewhat-failed attempt at a lentil loaf. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good, either. Just bland. Oh well. But given the holiday, I thought I’d start out this post with a little list of things I’m thankful for:

• my husband
• my family
• our kitties
• being in a fantastic graduate program
• having a superstar duo of advisors
• good food
• yarn
• pretty things (yeah, that’s general, but I like pretty!)
• beautiful music, especially when I’m participating in making it
• language
• science
• Keith Olberman
• Richard Dawkins
• having health insurance (but I wish everyone could)
• having a great support system here
• all of the great people I’ve met this year, online and off

And of course, plenty of other things that I surely forgot. But now, on to the knitting content. I’ve made more progress on my mom’s Rogue, and have finished the pocket and made it through chart A on the body:

It’s looking really good. I’m really enjoying knitting with this yarn, it’s nice and soft and glides through my fingers like butter. It doesn’t seem to be pilling, either, so hopefully that won’t ruin the lovely softness of the sweater. The color is a gorgeous dark hunter green, which will look really lovely on my mom. We have very different coloring (she has dark hair and more olive-toned skin, while I’m a ridiculously pale blonde), but this is one of the colors that suits both of us very well.

I also started another sock, with the STR lightweight that just did not work for Pomatomus. I tried a few stitch patterns, but found that only straight stockinette really looked good. So, stockinette socks it is! The picture below doesn’t reflect all of the progress I’ve made…I’m actually almost done with the heel-flap, but don’t really want to go get the camera just to take and upload a single picture:

I like the way the colors are coming out in stockinette. Sort of stripy, but nicely variegated, too. The colors remind me of the maple trees outside our apartment when they were first changing colors this fall…they all turned gold, but along the way there were stages where they were a blend of bright green, yellow, and gold, just like these socks. But I’m calling these socks “Lemongrass Socks”, since that’s what the colorway of the yarn is called. I don’t actually know what Lemongrass looks like, so I have no idea whether that’s a good name for the color or not.