Reaction

My life has gone all boy-centric lately. All the mad activity of late May and early June has culminated in the family's second graduation. (I actually have a post that I'll finish up and publish about all that. Someday.) It's just that I forgot to think beyond. Now, John is out of school and Marco is on half-days and they're rather lost. They might be, dare I say it, bored. This is a bit of a strain. While I don't feel it is my job to provide them with endless entertainment -- I have even been heard to say that boredom is good for them -- I can't deny that watching them fluctuate between constant videos and aimless wandering about the place is not conducive to peace of mind.

I think all the looming boy-ness is having an effect on my knitting. Once I knew I would fail to finish the bubbly curtain as part of the Graduation Frenzy, I expected I would discard it until the next Family Event loomed. That would be Marco's Graduation. In two years. Plenty of time to pull it out and knit to another artificial deadline. Imagine my surprise, then, when I found I had so much curtain in my lap that the project had become unwieldy. No longer portable. People, this is lace, complete with all the baggage attendant thereupon: yarn overs, k2tog's, and lifelines. I like lace only slightly more than I like stranded knitting, which I despise only slightly more than I despise socks.

Yet it grows. If you look closely, down there on the bottom of the photo, toward the left, you'll see an orange stitch/row marker. B.G. (Before Graduation) ( that would be June 1 through June 5) I knit from there to a couple inches beyond the lifeline. Now we're Post Graduation and instead of stopping and turning to some other, more overtly congenial project, I'm here tracking a chart, counting stitch repeats. It's been marvelous, actually. I'm so occupied counting and muttering that I forget to entertain the resident males. Heck, I forget they need to be entertained.

Things had gotten to the point where standing on the toilet seat and holding the knitting up to the window no longer gave any useful information. The time had come to do a serious measurement, hence my takeover of the kitchen table.

It's pinned out to 30 inches wide, although I could probably yank another inch or so out of it. At that width, I've passed 44 inches. As of yesterday, when I conducted this investigation, I had less than 10 inches to go. Pinned out, my actual row count it 7.2 rows per inch, not the 5 I was guess-timating. Even still, the end is in sight, completion looms, there's a light at the end of the tunnel and it may not be a train.

Not only that, John has started perusing summer program brochures.