Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Cuffs

So yesterday I knit two cuffs. One cuff was for a sock:


And one cuff was for a sleeve:


Cuffs are beginnings, right? So what about the stuff from last week? Oh, that! Finished some of that.

A sock:


And some close up:


Sock #1 of Pattern #1 of the first installment of Cookie A's sock club. The yarn is String Theory's Caper sock yarn, very soft and lovely. The pattern was perfect. There wasn't a moment of confusion or an error or anything amiss. The sock feels great on my foot.

The next installment of her club isn't until April, so I'm debating whether to take another skein of Caper from my stash to knit the other pattern to keep me busy until the next package arrives. We'll see. My sock queue is long.

And the cuff? Well, I finished the first sleeve for Slipped Hours and attached it to the body of the sweater:


For a fingering weight sweater, this is going very quickly! I'm sure I'll bog down a bit once I get the second sleeve finished and attached, because then each round will be really long. But it will get smaller as it goes up and the sleeve shaping progresses.

Green... so much green... I think I pull out the green every year at this time, looking for something to spur Spring's arrival. At our Westover Woolies meetup this morning, almost all of use were knitting with green in some form or another.

Watch for me to flip out and scream "NO MORE GREEN!!!" in a couple of weeks.

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Jr. Jr.'s basketball team cruised into the second round of the playoffs this weekend with a rousing first-round victory. Unfortunately, they couldn't keep the momentum going and lost in the second round. Tears all around. Nonetheless, they had a great season. They were so much better than they were last year, with excellent teamwork and admirable sportsmanship. And most of them will reassemble this weekend on the baseball diamond! Not even a weekend off.

I'm a little upset about some stuff that's happening with the local schools. Crowding has been a growing issue in our county for a number of years, but the School Board has for the most part punted on the issue every time it's come up. They've tinkered a bit, moved a planning unit or two from one school to another, rearranged some programs, but they haven't taken any steps to address the big picture. For years, many of us have been telling them that the increase in school population isn't a blip or an outlier, but a trend. We look around our neighborhoods, see all the young families moving in with preschoolers, see all the infill development and realize that we're nearly bursting at the seams with young kids.

Now the school board realizes that it has a problem. Almost every school in the county, elementary, middle, and high included, will be over capacity in a couple of years. Many of these schools were recently renovated as well. The county cannot afford to build new schools. I'm not even sure if they have the land to build new schools. I don't even think they have any buildings (like community centers, for example) that could effectively be re-purposed as schools.

Up until now this hasn't been too much of an issue. We get trailers, we turn the computer lab mobile with laptops, we double up on PE. Class sizes have increased slightly, but not too alarmingly.

However, I found out recently that the fifth graders at Jr. Jr.'s school no longer take weekly trips to the library to get new reading material. I think that there just isn't time to schedule weekly library time for all the classes at the school. So instead of coming up with a solution that allows all the kids to get library time -- for example, by having the fourth and fifth grades alternate weeks -- they've just eliminated it for the fifth grade. (We won't even go into how the school didn't tell the parents that this was happening...)

One of the primary missions of elementary schools is to get kids reading and foster in them a love of reading. Eliminating library time undermines this goal, to put it mildly, and makes me wonder what will be taken away from the kids next.

5 comments:

Tracey said...

Ah - another subject near and dear to my heart. The School Board (who I generally agree with, by theway) firmly believes that the ideal high school size is 1600 students. So they insist on building them all for 1600 students. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain who is telling you that numbers vary but that right now we have over 1800 at two of the three schools and they are GOING UP. Build the thrid school for 1600 too. Nuts. Meanwhile the cafeteria and the audtiorium and the library and the computer lab can't accommodate everyone who's there now.

By the wau - all this finer guage yarn stuff has inspired me to buy yarn for (and maybe start!) a sweater in sock yarn. Maybe I'll finish it by Summer 2012....

Loren T said...

Tracey - Sometimes I think APS just sticks its fingers in its ears and goes "Lalalalalala I can't hear you!" when these kinds of issues come up. I can't fault them for thinking that 1600 is a good size for a high school IF there are enough high schools to meet that goal. I think there were about 1000 kids in my high school. That was a nice size, but I think a slightly larger population allows the school to offer a wider variety of class choices.

Soooo, inquiring minds what to know: what sock yarn and what pattern?

kippi said...

Beautiful! So we're four days past this post date, are you sick of green yet?

Don't you just love the Caper sock yarn? It's delicious.

Loren T said...

The Caper is great, Kippi. I can see why so many people love it.

I'm okay with the green so far. I'm stretching it out and taking breaks. I started spinning the Sanguine Gryphon club fiber, which is light blues with some grey, so that switches things up for me. I spin a little, I knit a little. Well, not today. But when I can.

Tracey said...

I planned to knit Tempest (from Knitty) - fine yarn but on size 6 needles. But then the yarn came and the two colors don't go together at all so now I need to order some more yarn in a different color. And then in the interval between deciding that, and actually ordering, my mind wandered and now I don't know what to knit. If I'm going to put in all that work, I do want it to look good when I'm done. Fortunately I do have a few things I could be working on, so there's no rush to get going.