Houston, We Have Sleeves!

Sometimes my brain works in strange and idiosyncratic ways.  I tend to have trouble with homonyms when I’m typing  — not when I’m writing by hand, mind you, just when I’m typing.  I invariably make the wrong choice first, like typing ‘right’ when I mean ‘write’ or ‘by’ when I mean ‘buy.’  I know perfectly well which one is which, and I’ll be looking right at what I’m typing as I’m typing it, — and still type “meat me after work.”  Like this morning.  I can’t recall now which ones they were, but it was a set of three homonyms, and I swear I typed and backspaced twice before I finally got the right one.  It’s like my eyes know which is which, but my fingers can’t keep them straight.

As I mentioned, I’ve been in the throes of a story for weeks now, and here’s today’s winning brain fart: What I meant to type was “got off on the wrong foot.”  As I was reading back through the paragraph, I saw I had typed, “got off on the round foot.”   I mean, it’s like I’ve just washed my hands and I can’t do a thing with them!

I think part of it is that I was a medical transcriptionist and typed for eight hours a day, five to six days a week for years and years, and I had this brain circuit really solidly wired in where the dictation went in my ears, through the part of my brain that interprets spoken words and the part where it got transliterated from spoken words to written words, turned left at my cerebellum and went out my fingers, while my eyes rode herd on the whole process, making sure that I was not only accurately typing what I heard, but that what was being typed was also spelled and punctuated correctly, and that it made sense.   I did it so much for so long that to this day, the first thing I do when I sit down at the computer is to put my earbuds in, and I can’t write at the computer without some kind of sound coming through them.  I’ve got an old copy of Winamp and a whole list of internet radio station URLs set up to play through it, and you wouldn’t believe the number of playlists I have on Napster.

Typically, the first thing I do when I’m in storyland is read what I typed the day before, which is wear where the knitting comes in. (See what I mean?) My brain is convinced that when I’m sitting at the computer, my hands have to be doing something, so while I’m reading yesterday’s work, I’m doing some form of “TV” knitting.   I guess I’m going to have to name my reader’s shrug “Mirabilo” because that’s the title of the story I was working on when I started it, and have been wrestling with like Laocoön  all the time I’ve been knitting on it.

Yesterday, I finally got the back of the shrug to the right dimensions and put everything on the 60-inch needle to do the sleeves.  The back has a 9-stitch wide garter stitch border top and bottom, and the first thing I did was join the top border to the bottom border on each side by putting wrong sides together and then taking a stitch from the top border and knitting it together (k2tog) with a stitch from the bottom border, and binding the stitches off as I went.

The basic shrug idea is to take a long rectangle, fold it in half, and seam the part at each end together to make the sleeves.  I’ve just started the sleeves here but instead of seaming them, I’m knitting them in the round.

But you can see the garter stitch border along the bottom which I joined at each end to make it into a loop.  This is the part of the shrug that goes behind your neck, over each shoulder, under both arms and across your back.  You can get the idea here.  A lot of patterns have you go back and pick up all the edge stitches and knit this part on last. Too many steps to suit me.   I like to do it all in one pass.

In this picture you can see I’m knitting the sleeves in the round, using the two-at-a-time method.   It’s knitted left sleeve starting at the center  bottom, going around to the top, then changing balls of yarn to do the right sleeve starting at the center top and knitting around to the bottom.  It’s coming along nicely.

I’ll be glad to get it finished.  The weather has already turned cool enough that I’ve switched over to hot tea and long sleeves.  I’ve had that little single microfleece blanket on my side of the bed for three nights now. (I’ll have to look at the 10-day weather forecast to decide if it’s time to put a blanket on the bed next time I change my sheets.)   I haven’t been reading anything lately because I don’t want the writing style or subject matter of what I’m reading to bleed over into my story.