Progress Report

I managed to drag myself out and run for 461 minutes in February. I missed a couple of scheduled runs, but it's still progress. I haven't lost any more weight to speak of, but we've eaten out a few times and I don't do diets so this may take a while longer.

I've made some progress on the Spanish, but I am behind: on page 18 instead of 34 where I needed to get in order to finish working through the book this year. It's not like kiddy learning where the lady on the TV shows you pictures and tells you what to say; this book talks about past participles, gender of articles and nouns and the lack of a possessive form, not to mention ordering of words for elegance and we haven't got to the irregular verbs yet. Here I was thinking about memorising vocabulary words... I'm not giving up yet, though.

One of the other goals I set for myself this year was to knit some socks and perhaps a sweater. I'm not as fussed about the sweater as they are a lot of work for something I already have plenty of and if they go wrong, well you wasted a lot of time - though perhaps if you enjoy knitting it wouldn't necessarily be wasted. The socks were more about learning the technical skills and having the satisfaction of doing something a bit more difficult. Several of the ladies in the sewing group have tons of experience with this, though they don't tend to do socks anymore, preferring to do sweaters and baby items. Amongst the household items we acquired from several of Bill's mom's moves were a sizeable collection of British knitting needles (mostly very small, grey plastic; American needles are more likely to be different coloured aluminum) including quite a few double pointed ones. I hadn't realised that socks were knit on several needles; I'd no idea how you could do that. Well, now I know.



When I first started I couldn't get over how tiny the needles were -- brings more meaning to the term needles. I thought they were so cute I just about talked in baby talk whilst using them. I got over that however when I started over the 4th time after dropping stitches off the ends. Then I remembered these little rubber stopper things that came with a box of needles I bought last fall from Ebay.

These socks are for me -- the ribbing is full of mistakes I couldn't see until much further on and since I'm just learning to do this I thought it best to plod along and see how it works. I wouldn't give something full of errors as a gift. Since I'll be doing well to finish this and another sock (hopefully similar only better) by the end of the year, I don't think these are items are good candidates for mass producing Christmas gifts. Bill might get some, if he's really lucky...