Beggars' Pancakes

Sometime last week I sat down to tell you about Beggars' Pancakes, the pancakes you make without eggs,  without milk, or sometimes without a recipe. But it was too nice out last week. One day I took my work outside, sat in the sun and the wind, and took photos of the grass. Pretty Photos. Photos I can't share with you because my camera has gone on strike. It has yet to make it's demands clear, but I know an engineer who will hopefully be able to work out a compromise. 

                    Because of the good weather, and my papers and exams, I haven't knit much besides fish, which aren't interesting to talk about. But today there was ice covering every tree branch, and frozen dewdrops on each blade of grass. There is a team of people who help set up the campus' stage for church, and as I am one them, I get to wake up early Sunday mornings and brave the outside world. Today, as I walked back to my room, I could hear the groaning of the small saplings as they tried to support their icy burden. The larger, more mature trees shivered and yawned in the slight wind. Once or twice I heard the bright chirp of the early bird. By the time church was over everything had thawed out. 

And then it started to snow. 

                    It has been falling steadily for over an hour now, but we've got less than an inch to show for it. The incredible dampness of the ground  deterred the snow from feeling welcome, I'm afraid, but it's all right now. I'm listening to Christmas music on Pandora, trying to cross off my weekend to-do list, and dreaming of starting Cookie A.'s Hedera while curled up near a glowing fire. Dreaming is right. I have no access to a fireplace, but I do have Sundara sock yarn and a, practically, free evening. 

What do you do to enjoy a winter's day?

   A different kind of snow

Hodgepodge of Studies

  Last week my philosophy teacher went over the rationalist and empiricist (I'm forever wanting to spell that last word with an 'I,' it just seems so imperial). This morning we started on Immanuel Kant. He's more of an rational-empiricist I guess, so he gets two whole days devoted just to him. It's strange, to hear all these theories of how the world works, or what the world actually is. By the time you've gone through the arguments and counter-arguments your head is in quite a tizzy. We realize how much we don't really think of these things. But I think we also realize how much we don't need to.  When it comes right down to it, as my teacher pointed out, the past two thousand years of philosophy haven't exactly cleared up any issues.  

I was reading Hobbes's Leviathan for one of my English classes today (I love how pretentious that sounds. I'll never be a real bluestocking, but with homework like this I can pretend I am). Pretty deep stuff. It's this kind of literature that makes me glad language is in motion. But it was interesting, and there are some elements of his style that I do miss in today's books. It's deeper because of it's content, but it's also deeper because of it's wordy richness. Like a thick bed of moss, it's nice to sink into it. You can't really sink into the more modern books, you kind of have to jump in to avoid being run over. 

It's Hobbes's ideas, though , that we are supposed to be noticing, and they were disturbing enough. His main tenet is that all men are at war with each other, and thus personal safety is our biggest concern. From this he derives all his laws – those of liberty, preservation, and honesty – ultimately ending with the idea that the most reasonable thing we can do is swear our  allegiance to the government and never look back. 

I guess his views are scary because I agree with so many of them. I agree, for one, that if you leave men to themselves they will dissolve into chaos and conflict. This is called anarchy, and there is no wonder it has it's own special little word, for it's a pretty loaded opinion. It assumes that people aren't naturally kind and peaceful, and that laws are  necessary if we are to be civilized. I don't think anyone likes the idea of looking up to someone, but if your leader has honor and integrity it can be nice to have someone to follow. It gets tiring, trying to find your own way all the time. 

But don't worry, I'm not buying into the mechanization of the human mind. And you won't be hearing me define injustice as "the not performance of a covenant." I think that powers which have shown themselves to be unworthy, or unable, to govern should be kindly dismissed; and there is a right or wrong beyond "what is good for me," and even beyond "what is good for us." 

In the end, despite all these mind opening classes, I'm more of an opposer than a thinker. 

Progress

I think that, if technology can be said to have affected any area of our lives over that of another, the greatest impact has come to our perception of time. In times past, if you wanted to make the world intimate with your every thought and feeling, you'd have to spend a life time keeping a journal, and then hope that your family was enterprising enough to try to publish it. But now you can not only publish autobiographies before you reach the tender age of forty, you can also blog your everyday, and twitter your every thought. We no longer have the patience to wait for our deaths to share our cognitive gems, we want the world to have them now. 

Likewise with pictures. Centuries ago, if you had knit a pair of Nutkin socks and wanted to let an acquaintance see them, you would be forced to wait hours while the picture was painted. Then, in all likelihood, your acquaintance wouldn't receive it until a week later. But now you can spend less than twenty minutes taking photos of your sock-clad feet, take two hours googling "trouble importing," spend ten minutes taking the silliest pictures imaginable with Photo Booth, and, in short, expect her to see them before dinner. 

Nutkin Photo-shoot 2
Originally uploaded by smaykull

Pattern: Nutkin

Yarn: Lorna Laces Shepherd Sock (a gift from Theo) 

Modifications: I believe I stuck mainly to the pattern; though, I did change the heel on the second sock, and by the time I got to the toes I was done being experimental and fancy, and so opted to do a row of purling and a boring, evenly decreased, toe instead of the prescribed turned toe, with its three-needle-bind-off. But other than that, yes. I followed the pattern. 

Further apologies for these photos. I don't foresee my camera magically complying to my every whim anytime soon, so I can't promise you anything better. I guess I'm going to have to start digging onto my Japan files in order to illustrate these post. What a shame.

Setting Up house

It is wonderful to be setting up house again; to sort through the templates, fonts, and colors. But it is also a little scary. I want everything to be just right before I get started.....