Responsibility

First I want to say that the knitting done between yesterday's post and this one was so much like the knitting that was done the day before that, that I decided to spare everyone the tedium of looking at it yet again. I feel for you folks, I really do. Plus, I feel responsible. After all, if your boss (assuming you are looking at this at work...folks at home do not need to worry about this) comes across you, flat-out sleeping in your chair, head cocked back and snores issuing from your mouth and looks at your computer screen and sees my blog with it's incredibly dull (to him/her) pictures of knitting, who knows what your boss would think!? I wouldn't want to be responsible for a) your being fired for sleeping on the job or b) someone thinking that knitting (in general) was boring or c) someone thinking that *I* was boring. Let's not go there.

I could have just not posted, something I notice that other people, who are not, perhaps, as obsessed about talking about themselves as I am, actually do on their blogs. I admit it, there are days that go by where I haven't posted, but it's not because I can't think of something to say. It's because I've gotten busy doing something else.

Now, you ask, what the heck am I going to post about, since I'm not showing pictures of yesterday's knitting. Two things:

On fortune cookie fortunes

I got this yesterday in my fortune cookie. First, I want to say that I usually don't bother even eating the cookie, much less reading the fortune inside. But for some reason, I did yesterday.

Isn't this infuriating? What is this supposed to mean? That's why I don't bother to read these things.

What does this have to do with knitting, you ask? Well, reading this I could see all sorts of implications for people who knit. "The gift without the giver is bare." Does this make sense? It does not make sense to me. In the terms of giving knitted gifts, I think it should read "The giver without the gift is bare"!

Of course, I know that some of these fortunes are meant to be "deep" and convey some sort of philosophical meaning. We here in the West often assume that oriental people have a bigger handle on this sort of thing than we do. Why else are there umpteen million books called "The Zen of...."? This was covered extensively in an episode of Seinfeld when George's mother assumes that Jerry's girlfriend, whose last name was Chang, must know so much more about life than other people. Then she was mad when she found out that Ms. Chang wasn't oriental after all. ANYWAY....

Looking beyond the surface, I suppose that this fortune means that if we don't invest some of ourselves when choosing gifts for people, that the gift does not have a meaning. Yeah, well. As knitters, we automatically do quite a bit of that anyway. Plus, I've gotten lots of gifts from people who have invested themselves in the gift by picking out something THEY would like to have and giving it to me assuming I will like it too. Er...

So, if there are any fortune cookie manufacturers out there, pull this one from the repetoire, won't you? Go back to "You will soon meet a tall dark stranger." I'm hoping to do that today. The UPS man should be here with my stamps sometime.....

The other thing

Since I don't have anything interesting to show that I'm currently knitting, at least without boring you all into a state of sonomulence, I'll do some walking down memory lane:

Isn't she cute? This is Laurel at age 4 months. She's a little butterball in this picture, but she was born thin and caught up quick.

I knit this bunting for her out of Plymouth Encore. The LYSO suggested making it extra long to accomodate the car seat buckle. Laurel wore this quite a bit...it was perfect for cold days when it wasn't quite cold enough for her big thick bunting that her grandmother bought her.

You can also see how very beautiful she was...she's still beautiful, but when Laurel was a baby, she just had this glowing beauty that made total strangers come up and tell me how gorgeous she was. And while this is a nice bunting, Laurel could make any clothes look extra special, just by wearing them and looking so beautiful. Sigh....




See how happy she is in her bunting? These are the sorts of pictures you love to look at on days when your tweenager has tossed her head and stamped her foot and demanded that you do whatever it is she wants you to do at the moment. This is what I look at in my head when otherwise I would be wondering why I let her live as long as I have. God has reasons, my friends, for making babies as cute as they are. Babies know this too. They know that by being cute, their mothers are more likely to knit cuddly warm garments for them. Tweenagers and teenagers alike should remember this when they are campaigning for ponchos. I wonder why they forget this vital information and at what age it happens?

Now Emily, for instance, told me this morning that her new yarn wants to be a poncho and that it needn't have a hood. But she did it in such a cute way, with no sulks or petulance! When will the rot set in?