A busy weekend

I had quite a fun and busy weekend, made all the better because the weather finally realized it's supposed to be spring! We had temperatures in the 60s-70s Saturday and Sunday, and not a cloud in the sky. Same today, but, being Monday, I'm not out enjoying it.
The weekend started out like this: Here I am trying to reskein some of the yarn I dyed last Sunday. Now you might be asking, Emily, why are you reskeining that? You're just going to have to make it into a ball to knit with it anyway. To you who would ask such a question, I reply, because I had too much time on my hands wanted to see what it would look like when the color splotches were broken up. I might add that what you see here is the 3rd (yes) attempt at this, the first two having resulted in much tangling and hostility between Dave and I (poor boy was roped in to help). The photo above rapidly descended into this:

You can see that I'm laughing, but I'm also holding a big mess. Let me tell you this was a frustrating project. I'm going to find some schematics and hope that my dad will construct me a niddy-noddy, which might make such a task easier (or at least I'd get the right size skein, and thus only have to go through this hell once - what you see here, wrapping elegantly around the National Parks of the United States, is a skein that is really too small and will have to be dealt with again).

There was also a bit of this:

That's Dave, in the midst of the SeaTac Shuffle mountain bike race. He's moving quickly. I'm moving slowly, sitting in the grass with this:
This is the "mountain bike race survival kit," containing Great Books, by David Denby, my iPod (note April Project Spectrum (yellow/orange) colored iPod sock), and the clapotis. I realize you can't see from this photo, but I've gotten to the first dropped stitch (Saturday night, and boy were my hands cramped up from so much knitting, but I got there!). That was excited, that stitch dropping. I've never been one to drop stitches, even accidentally, so it was a bit of a thrill. Of course now this scarf has so many stitches that each row takes an eternity, so it'll be awhile before I get to drop another one, but I'll keep you all posted...I didn't actually do any knitting at all yesterday (see above note on hand cramping), but I read a lot. This book is great - David Denby is a film critic, living in Manhattan, who decided to revisit the Columbia University core curriculum literature and contemporary civilizations courses (the "great books" courses). I was drawn to this book because I took two almost identical classes at the University of Chicago (which is mentioned in the intro as one of the only other schools to have such a requirement), so I've read most of the books he's talking about, and it's a great refresher (since, to be honest, and this is probably sad, I've tried pretty hard to push all that philosophy out of my head). I'll probably write more about this book when I'm done with it, but it's surprising good, and I'd recommend it to anyone trying to up their level of pretentiousness...