I have six minutes to sqeeze out a post. (That sounds vaguely dirty…) I promised Yannick I’d meet him in bed at 12:30. No you pervs, not for that. We still haven’t finished reading the last Harry Potter, and I have so far remained remarkably unspoiled in terms of who dies, etc. I did find out one little tidbit by accident (if “by accident” includes reading Stephen King’s column on the last page of my EW magazine where he blurted something out), and that tidbit, for those of you who have read it, implies that…oh how can I put this for the unspoiled? It implies that one of the characters had a lot in common with the original actor who portrays him/her in the movies. Is that vague enough?

I had to share this with you.
Isn’t that cool? A HABS holiday decoration! I kept meaning to blog about it, and when over at Maaike’s on Saturday I snuck a quick photo. If you go over to her blog to comment on it, send some love over to her hubby who made it!

I didn’t post my stripe tally over the weekend because I had none. Yannick’s parents came over Saturday morning and we spend the day putting up new window treatments in the bedrooms and preparing the heated floor for our (eventual) den, then they slept over that night. Sunday I didn’t get any knitting done either, as in the morning we had swimming lessons, then around lunch time Julie and Rich came over with adorable little Kayla, and then we had plans later that night.

Sunday afternoon Jakob was being really kvetchy and his toys weren’t holding his interest. Out of desperation I popped in a Baby Mozart dvd. Think he liked it? He didn’t move from that pose for the entire video, except to laugh out loud every so often and turn to look at me as if to say “did you see that?”. It was too cute. I know I’m going to have to stop keeping the tv on for me soon, as he constantly turns to see the moving shapes and colors, and I don’t want him watching once he’s old enough to understand what he sees. But I approve of the videos and I don’t mind him watching those. He was never able to sit through a whole half hour, so I only played each of the 3 videos we have once or twice each. Now that he pays attention and enjoys it, I think I’m going to sit with him maybe once a week and watch it together.

This is where I am as of this afternoon. I only work on this project during the day when Yannick isn’t around. Last week when Maaike and I started our Noro scarves, I mentioned to Yannick that I was working on a cool scarf. He asked “is that the one with the yarn I bought you?” I felt bad that his yarn was still sitting in the project bin, so I decided to work on it behind his back so I can surprise him one day soon by wearing the finished shawl and praising him on his taste.

This closeup shows off the subtle color variations and the stitch pattern. It isn’t actually supposed to have a wavy bottom, but I was feeling too lazy to weave another needle in the bottom edge to hold it straight, so this is the result of my quick pinning-for-the-photo job.

This closeup shows the texture of the yarn. Now do you see why I needed sharp needles? I was almost getting nauseous at the “stuttering” effect those yo, k2tog rows were having on me. I’m used to knitting in a rhythm, and those rows were throwing off my groove.

Finally, here’s my Noro Striped Scarf progress as of tonight. I’m laughing at myself because on Friday Maaike told me she had 74 stripes knit, and then she didn’t get a chance to knit at all over the weekend, and she let me know today that she didn’t knit today either. So she’s stalled at 74. I knit my fingers off from 8-11:30pm tonight while watching my tapes and when I finally called it quits I counted up my stripes- I have 73 done! Yet again I could force myself to sit there and do just a few more stripes to be in the lead, but I’m not. I’ll let her think she’s winning…for now. 🙂

p.s. as you can see by the time this post records it was posted at, I didn’t come close to being done by 12:30. We’re going to put the reading off ’til tomorrow. I’m aware that now my post title makes no sense, but I’m too tired to fix it.