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.