(Parenthetically Speaking)

So, I'm sitting here at work repairing DVDs (oh, the joys of widely-used audiovisual materials!), getting way high from the fumes (all the scratch-repair products are petroleum-based and toxic! Hooray!), and reading the emails flying back and forth among my family members. My family now numbers seven (we were five, but now there are boys) and when we try to organize for family events like birthdays, it gets a little bit insane.

(I just noticed that there are three parenthetical comments in that two-sentence paragraph. I seem to have a lot to say but can't make it happen linearly. I defy the accepted forms of space, time and grammatical construction! I create my own ways! I cannot be bound! Mwahahahha!)

Yes. Anyway. My family. Was I saying anything important there? Oh yes: I am looking forward to seeing my weird and wonderful family this Saturday to celebrate my and Laura's birthdays. Yes. Plus, seeing my Dad and Nick crack jokes and be silly in emails warms my little heart.

I just realized that I have three nights of awesome birthday plans staring me in the face: tomorrow (my birthday) I have a date with Nick; Friday we have dinner plans with friends at my favorite Indian restaurant in Rockford; Saturday dinner with my family (and possible climbing at the gym during the day!) (see how I love the parentheses? See?)

(These are the subject-change parentheses!)

Heather and Anna have written about Monday's Sit-n-Stitch and how it was all kinds of fun. I was needing some non-work venting time after my amazingly shitty day and I got some, but I also got someone asking me questions about why the Library is inefficient in some areas. Great question to ask me that day, dude. Are we playing the "Raise Kathy's Blood Pressure to Soaring Heights!" game? How sweet of you to think to ask me and not, say, THE PEOPLE IN CHARGE. (And of course that night I had a horrible nightmare in which I was closing the Library building and trying to get the patrons out, but no one would leave! And people kept making faces at me and acting like I wasn't in charge. And my supervisor (a truly lovely woman) told me that this was the last thing I had to finish before I became a Librarian, and I couldn't do it!) I hate dreams like that!

Anyway, I did make some progress on the wrist-warmer/handwarmer/whatever the hell these things are called:



I bound off the thumb gusset stitches. Progress! I have since cast on to make the palm part of it, but I think I screwed up somehow (really, Keyes? How astonishingly unlike you!) (Shut up.). The pattern says to cast on 3 sts "using the backward loop method." Holy hell, people, I could not find a "backward loop method" of casting on anywhere. Not in Donna Kooler's, not in Reader's Digest Knitter's Handbook (which surprised the heck out of me--that book has twenty pages of cast on methods). Does anyone have any suggestions on alternate names for this elusive "backward loop method" cast-on?

I did cast on using the half-hitch (I think?) cast-on, but the stitches got a little stretchy. It's not a huge deal, because these mitts are mine and what the heck do I care about a loose cast-on? But I do want to learn what the heck a backward loop cast-on looks like. Any suggestions?