Reasons Why I Like School (Because I Really Need to Be Reminded Right Now...)

1. I enjoy learning; I really do.  Reading a book for a class is fun to me because it means that we're going to take it apart and discuss it.  The problem lies when I don't get anything out of the discussion as a result of a variety of reasons.
2. I like being with a group of people who also want to learn.  When you actually have a good group (like I have with my Early American Literature class at the moment), I feel useful and we actually get something done.  In the end, I think we all come out of it understanding the topic more thoroughly.
3. The professor has a certain amount of expertise in the subject you're learning.  As a result, being in a class taught by that person means that you get to hear an expert talk about their field of study.  The issues only begin when that person cannot effectively communicate that expertise in an understandable manner, which is disappointing because, and I said in #1, I enjoy learning.
4. I've had the opportunity to meet a variety of different people from all different backgrounds.  When we all come together to work in a group, that means everyone has something to contribute, even if it's simply a different perspective on the assignment.
5. I have some awesome people to call friends.  Between the groups that are or were in my classes--such as my Art Ed peeps--or the people who live in my building or from Getaway Weekend, I have some fun people to talk to and hang out with outside of class.
6. I have fun stuff to do outside of class.  No more hanging around at home for me.  If I tried, somebody would probably drag me out to do something fun.

Unfortunately, I must cut this short as I need to finish some things for the aforementioned Early American Literature class.   Don't stay up too late tonight, peeps.  There's places to go and people to see tomorrow.

Hat-ness

Alright, I'm not going to lie... I've become a little bit obsessed with hats over the course of this school year... Not only have a made a few of them, but my cousin gave me one she made for me for Christmas, and I rediscovered one that another friend of mine made for me for Christmas last year.  Let's recap my year in hats, shall we? 

 Hat #1: Imagination Beret

I started this back in August, about two weeks before coming to college for the first time.  This hat was one of my safety-net projects.  For at least the first month of my first semester, I had a knitting project in my backpack.  I made it with KnitPicks Imagination yarn in "Unicorn."  It took one skein and US 6 circulars.  This is the first hat I've ever made and opened up the doors for the other hats that I made over the course of this school year, as well as the hats that I want to make.

 Hat #2: Winter Hat

This hat was inspired by the cold weather that we had this year.  It suddenly dawned on me that it was cold . . . and I need to walk from one building to another in order to get anywhere on campus.  As a result, I need something to keep my head warm during the commute from one building to the next.  It's not a difficult hat to make . . . it's really just a whole bunch of ribbing . . . and fuzzy stuff along the hem.  I made it during the time before Christmas Break.  When it was done, it was just missing something, so when I got home, I found this fuzzy eyelash-type yarn that was perfect.

Hat #3: Slouchy Hat

This is my most recent hat.  I felt the need to make another hat towards the end of Christmas Break.  The only challenge about this hat was what colors to make it in.  It called for worsted-weight yarn, but I only had one wool yarn that I wanted to use, everything else was the wrong weight or wrong material or something to that effect.  However, I realized that, when I hold two lace-weight yarns together, it forms a thickness that was pretty similar to the worsted weight.  The colors were kind of a shot in the dark; I wasn't sure whether the blue-purple combination would work.  Fortunately, it did and it's one of my favorite things to wear.

So those are the hats that I've made.  I also want to make a few other hats . . . at the moment, though, I'm embarking on another sweater.  It's going to be really nice.  I'm using Paton's Classic Wool Merino in the colorway "Dark Grey Mix."  The sleeve-length of my sweaters seem to be gradually getting longer.  My first sweater (the blue "Diamond Mesh" sweater) was short-sleeved.  This one is three-quarters length.  I'll upload pictures soon, hopefully.  I'm almost done with the first sleeve.

10 Things I've Learned at College

College isn't just about what you learn in class . . .

1. The world does not revolve around you.  Period. Some people just haven't learned this yet.
2. Life would be miserable without good friends there to pull you up when you're down.
3. Courage and perseverance are necessary if you want to get anywhere in this world.
4. Being drunk is overrated.  Being able to go up the stairs without stumbling is such a good feeling.
5. Overthinking only makes things worse.
6. Crying doesn't solve any problems, but it definitely makes you feel better.
7. If you want something to happen, you need to make it happen.
8. Life's tough; get over it.
9. There are some people you can be friends with, and there are some people you can life with.  These two groups don't always overlap.
10. Enjoy where you are in life; you never know what may happen tomorrow.

Word of the Day

Banshee (noun) [BAN-shee]


1. (as in Irish folklore) a female spirit whose mournful wailing warns of an impending death in the family: "What sounds like the shrieking of a banshee is just Gloria singing in the shower."
(courtesy of The Quotations Page)

On another, completely different note, I got bored of the old colors and banner so I thought "hey, a new year deserves a new color scheme."  I stayed up much later than I should have and took time away from the homework I should've been doing to put together the current banner.  I'm happy with it, though.  The paintings on the ends are things I did for my 2D Design class last semester and, of course, I have yarn in the middle . . .

Books, books, books...

So, I was reading my friend Krysti's blog (krystiatcollege.blogspot.com) and she posted this list of books that, according to the BBC, most people have only read six of the one hundred books on this list.  I'm putting the books I've read in red. I'll put the ones that I started but didn't finish in blue and the ones that I want to read in green.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen


2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma - Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaube

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

So...that's 20 books that I've read, 8 that I've started but never finished for whatever reason, and 8 books that I want to read.  I think I need to get cracking... I really need to find a public library in this area... the reading selection at the school library stinks... it's all reference. I think we may be making a city excursion over the weekend, so we'll see how my reading goes from there.  At the moment, I'm working through The Hobbit again.  I've been wanting to re-read all of Tolkien's books... at least Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.  I would like to read the Histories of Middle-Earth, too, if I ever have time.  Yay reading!

Fiber for the Soul

I've heard it said that there are two types of knitters--the ones who knit for the act of knitting and the ones who knit for the end result.  Now, when I think about myself in this light, I think I tend to be a little bit of both.  To be honest, the majority of the things I knit are for myself, and they're (obviously) things that I would like to have.  I knit them for the final product.  But, I truly enjoy the proces if I like what it is that I'm knitting and the material itself that I'm knitting.  Even when I have to tear out rows upon rows of knitting--hours of my life being undone, hours that I can never get back.  I think I've found this ability to, when I'm on the verge of a very immature temper tantrum, I just put it down and walk away or I turn the video game off (I very rarely play video games, and when I do, I don't last very long.  As soon as I reach a level that is hard, I get annoyed and turn it off).  It's how I've maintained my relative outer equilibrium.

Another thing is my knitting.  You can tell that I'm stressed in some way because I've spent large amounts of time knitting, and it's usually something relatively simplistic, that I can knit fast and I have room to think.  And, to be honest, it's something that I won't mind tearing out later.  I knit the things that I don't necessarily want or need, but the simplest thing that I could possibly have any sort of interest in knitting.  Something that's enough to keep me interested, but something that I don't need to pay complete attention to.

Earlier today, I frogged a scarf I starte in the beginning of December.  I started it with the intention of making it a Christmas present.  It became my stress-reliever.  The thing I picked up when I needed a break from studying.  It was the thing I picked up when the drama of dorm life got to me.  It was the thing I picked up in the week before Christmas as I still struggled to handle the stress left over from my first semester of college.  It was the thing I picked up when my new pendant (a pretty Miraculous Medal) fell off its chain and got lost Christmas afternoon.  It kept me going for most of December as I tried to work out issues that I'd been dealing with.  And then today, I tore it all out.  I let it all go.  I got through exams; I made it through the drama of a first semester in a freshman dorm.  I made it through Christmas, and I found my Miraculous medal.  I think the knitting and the frogging of that scarf represented a psychological therapy of letting it build up and then letting it all go that's hard to replace.  Now, I'm not saying that these issues are resolved, because most if them are still very real, but I have the peace of mind that, great or small, they're just part of the fabric of life.  A perfect life is no life at all, is it?  How can you say that you've truly lived until you experience the stresses of everyday life?

Something to try

http://www.diynetwork.com/videos/make-your-own-knitting-needles/6204.html

This is something that I absolutely must try sometime.  It looks like a lot of fun, to be honest . . . I just need to find access to the materials and I'll have an almost infinite supply of needles.  At least, the opportunity to have them . . .