threadwalker

On my coffeeshop/writing bike ride (trust me, it makes sense) this morning I passed a whole flock of meadowlarks right by the Concord airport. They must be migratory because I don't think I've seen one in town before. Also an acorn woodpecker darted out to grab an acorn from the path right in front of me then dodge out of the way of the wheels. (I would have stopped, really I would.) I sometimes fantasize about the birds and critters layout acorns out on the path so that passing humans will step-on/run-over them and crack them, but the truth is that there are just a lot of oak trees along the rec paths.

I'd been avoiding the trail that goes past the airport for a while because they were doing various bits of road work. I spend a lot more time on surface streets for that route than the others, but drivers are incredibly courteous about waiting to pass until they can swing wide. I think it always amazes me because drivers were never that courteous in the east bay.

Another reason for sticking to the canal trail recently is that too many things have gotten in the way of a daily ride, so when I do ride I want to do the Walnut Creek loop (Canal Trail + Iron Horse). If I'm going that far, I'd rather avoid excess surface streets.

I seem to have solved the "tire slowly going soft" issue by means of getting another puncture that clearly required repair. The new tube is holding pressure solidly, so my worry that there was a hidden thorn or wire that I hadn't discovered yet seems to have not panned out. Or if there was one, then maybe it worked itself out. The other option is that that particular tube had a manufacturer's defect and I should have just replaced it immediately. Thus do we second-guess ourselves.

This morning the airtag hidden in the bike seat cheeped sadly at me that it needed a new battery, so I've taken care of that. As far as I can tell, placing airtags is simply a magic charm against things getting stolen because over the decades I've had bikes, cars, and bags stolen but never since I've started using airtags. Or maybe I've just gotten generally more paranoid. (Although I'll note that the one time I used Find My to locate a stolen iPad, the police literally said, "So what do you expect us to do about it?" I think I'll stick to the magic charm theory.)

One of my retirement to-do items is "learn to knit socks; knit socks." Now "learn to knit" might seem an odd part of that equation, given that I've been knitting since I was 10 years old. (I.e., for well over 50 years.) The thing is, I never learned to follow patterns. I'm like a musician who can learn tunes by listening, improvise music, and put on a great performance, but who never learned to read notation. I have, in fact, knitted a pair of socks before by sort of reverse-engineering how to make yarn look like that. But I figured it was time to actually learn "by the book" as it were.

My first step was to learn to read patterns via a book on blanket squares, making a (cotton) baby blanket for my grand-niece, where each of the 16 squares has a different pattern. That way I could learn cabling, lace knitting, and all sorts of other variants. I won't say that I can remember all the individual stitch instructions by heart, but I can do them and know how to look them up. (And I can remember them during the course of a particular project--they just don't necessarily stick permanently.)

As part of the sock goal, I've been picking up some lovely hand-dyed, fancy fiber sock yarns. But I don't want to do my beginner learning on those! So I went to my local yarn store...oops, the last LYS I went to (in Piedmont) has closed OH NOES! Search...search...search...ok there's another LYS in the Elmwood district. (These are both over on the bay side of the hills.) Explain my goals "a nice boring plain-color sock yarn that I might not mind frogging a lot." Turns out the Piedmont store closed because the proprietor wanted to retire...but she's now part-timing at the Elmwood store. So that feels like a happy story.

Now I'm swatching. Swatching! Me! Seat-of-the-pants me! I had picked up a lovely (expensive) interchangeable needle+cable set. Should be good for all my knitting needs, right? Uh...the smallest needles in the set are size 3, which is definitely too large for socks. And doing online research, not only does that brand not do smaller needle tips for the interchangeable set-up, nobody does smaller needles for interchangeable cable sets. This probably has to do with the problem of the minimum size of the little screw-in thingy connecting the cable and needle.

OK, back to the store, and not knowing what size is going to turn out to be optimal, I went ahead and got circular needles in sizes 2, 1, 0, and 00. (I have some even smaller double-points from back when I was doing some medieval silk knitting.) I wanted the circulars because I want to do the thing where you knit both socks at the same time on the same circular needle. This may possibly be over-ambitious at this point in my learning curve, but when have I not been over-ambitious?

Back to swatching. At this point I've done size 2 and size 1 and we're approaching the target stitch gauge, so I have hopes that I'll hit it before I run out of needle sizes.

ETA: The sock book I'm working from is "Vogue Knitting: The Ultimate Sock Book." It has vast amounts of theory alongside the specific patterns, which warms my scientist's heart, but makes for boring reading when I'm still figuring out how all the theory fits in with the practice.