Lately I've been attending a few knitting gatherings in town. There's a Thursday night group that meets at Rae's Yarn Boutique, and also, as a result of Ravelry, a bunch of us have started gathering on Sunday evenings at Gone Wired Cafe. I've never gone to this type of group before, and I must say, I am having a blast. It's the perfect sort of gathering for an academic; no prep is required beforehand (which is what killed my book group participation; while I worked at Pharmacy, keeping up was no problem, but once I started to teach, well . . . ). All I have to do is be able to carve out a an hour and a half a couple times a week - and if I miss a week, no problem.

One of the best aspects of these groups, from my pov, is that they meet somewhere outside our houses. I have great insecurities about having people over; between the dog hair and - well, the dog . . . and the size of our house (which accommodates two quite nicely, but too many more and it's a sqeeze) and our "eclectic" furniture and my housekeeping (perpetually inferior to my mother's), having people over (particularly people I don't know very well) kinda makes me panic. I wish it weren't so - but in the winter months, at least, it is.

Roy Oldenburg coined the term "third place" to refer to places that aren't our homes and aren't our workplaces, but are places where people gather. He says they're essential for civic engagement and for feelings of community. For a time, there, back in the 90s (I can't even believe I said that), lots of us were trying to figure out whether "third places" could be virtual, or whether they had to be brick-and-mortar establishments. For a very long time, my third places have been online environments - the Megabyte University discussion list, the Tuesday Netoric Cafe, and so on. I'm not a churchgoer and my other attempts to find groups to hang with - my hockey team, groups related to the kids' schools, bicycle riders - have really not gone very far. (I have lots of ideas about why, but I'll spare you . . . ) So it's a real pleasure to have found a few communities here where I can drop in and hang out with people in a venue other than home. And the pleasure is multiplied because the groups are multigenerational, too (and one is even coed - rare among knitters!).

And here are a few knitting pics. My friend Amanda has joined me in a Ravelry-based dishcloth knit-along (a dishcloth a week - guess what you all are getting next Christmas??) Here's my effort for this week, a feather-and-fan cloth from the pattern on the Bernat site:

(That yarn is from the dishcloth I told you I was frogging . . . I did, and I knit it up in this pattern instead.)

My Christmas, '07 knitting has hit a snag. I started the second of a pair of socks, and realized that I have misplaced the first sock. How weird is that?? So I can't really continue with the second, since I don't have the first to compare it to. Of course, I wasn't real happy with the first sock . . . so maybe I'll start a totally different pair instead. (I'm sure that when the socks arrive, the recipient will be astonished and have forgotten Christmas entirely . . . )

While I puzzle that one over, I've been working on the Entrelac Shawl-Thingey I've been making for myself:

I'm running out of yarn for this one; I started experimenting with other yarns in my stash (see the top three rows) late last night, and in the light of day I have decided that I don't like the results. We hit the yarn shops in town today, looking for more of the yarn I'd started with, to no avail. So I came home and found it online. Hurrah for near-instant gratification! I can rip back the part I don't like, and proceed to knit with the rest of the yarn on hand. By the time I get back from LA, the new yarn should have arrived.

In other news, we got six inches of snow yesterday . . . which makes me and Wally very happy!

(I'll try to get a picture of Otto when he comes in from the snow . . . with his undercarriage full of snow dingleberries . . . )