I decided to damn the torpedos and install IE5 on my Mac here at work. If someone from IT gets pissy about it someday, I'll just claim ignorance. At least now I can post to my blog. And that's what's really important, right?

Yesterday turned into a good day. I didn't really do all that much for most of the day - put a few things away, went back to the aquarium store with Ryan for some more rock for the fishtank. But around 5 pm I decided to start knitting, so I pulled out the Luna silk and the Artfibers pattern and started on Kristy's bridesmaid top. I was tremendously relieved that the knitting goes pretty quickly, even though it's a finer gauge yarn than usual. Actually, it's really not all that fine - 5.5 stitches per inch (that's 22 per four inches for those who don't feel like doing the math).

The first inch of the sweater is garter stitch, which I actually find goes more slowly than stockinette, since my odd method of purling seems to go faster than my knitting. For the 36" size, I cast on 99 stitches, and have already finished the waistline decreases and am about 12 rows into the bust increases. I'd say there's about 5" on the needles right now, though I am terrible at eyeballing measurements like that. The fabric is just beautiful - it feels wonderful, drapes nicely, and looks lovely. Now I am beginning to once again believe that I can pull this off.

I think the only reason I had any doubts was that phonecall I had with the girl at Artfibers. I don't know which person it was, but she made a big to-do about Luna being "very thin" and being surprised I was knitting it by hand. Whatever! She must be a chunky-gauge gal. (Yarnwise, I mean!)

Got a seat on the subway this morning, which figured since I left the knitting at home. I had to content myself with playing FreeCell on my Palm, as I had also neglected to bring a book. I'm really annoyed about leaving the knitting - now that I have started this sweater I just want to continue on it constantly. It feels so nice to actually want to knit again - like maybe some of the craziness in my life is calming down and I am getting back to "normal." I think I'll even go to Stitch-n-Bitch tomorrow night. I have a few errands to do in my old neighborhood (dry cleaning, prescriptions I didn't get a chance to transfer yet) so I will do those right after work, and then head over to Java-n-Jazz for a while.