ritual de lo scriptual; and a progress report

You may not have known this about me, since I am not in the deep throes of fevered obsession anymore and therefore do not talk about this incessantly, but I am a pen snob. More specifically, I am a fountain pen snob. I own, like, 60 of them (don't gasp, most of them cost about $4 a piece - I only have a few really pricey ones). I fell in love with the damn things in 9th and 10th grades, and I have been preaching the f-pen gospel ever since. One of the small pleasures I take in life is, at the beginning of a semester, choosing which fountain pens to use and filling them with ink. It's a semi-annual ritual I really missed when I wasn't in school anymore and had no reason to keep my pens inked up.

Anyway, I just filled up my pens for the coming semester tonight. So far, that's the only prep I've done, tho'. I'm still kind of in denial about the fact that school starts tomorrow.

Here are the pretties I am using to start this term:

From left to right, that's my green fine-point Waterman with violet Pelikan ink in it; my Waterman Hemisphere (I think that was the name) with dark pink Pelikan ink; my new Retro 51 Tornado (which I got for Christmas from Bean - yay!) with apricot Pelikan ink; my pink Tombo with green Waterman ink; a Sheaffer Reacktor (seriously, who names these things?? That is the lamest product name ever) with lilac Pelikan ink; my Sheaffer Jellies pen with some really old brown Sheaffer ink I am trying to use up; and my new orange Lamy Safari with turquoise Lamy ink.

Oh, what the heck, since I already have the camera hooked up - how about some knitting progress pics?

Here's how I'm doing on my first of the Brainylady cable socks:

I've started the toe - I should be done with this by tomorrow and casting on for sock #2, with any luck.

Here's Adler's Wallaby:

I need to freakin' hurry up with this, or he will have outgrown it before I can even give it to him. I'm almost to the armpits. I'm worried that I won't be able to figure out the pattern there, because I read ahead a bit and it didn't make a bit of sense to me on the first read-through... but often patterns don't make sense until I'm in the thick of them, so... I must forge ahead with great speed! I've only managed about 7 rows on this in like, 3 months. Ack!

Here's how the Linux illusion scarf is coming along:

From straight on, it just looks like stripes...

...but viewed from an angle, a picture is beginning to emerge! Neat, huh? I tell ya, tho', if I ever do one of these again, I'm choosing a much narrower pattern. This is taking forever, with 60 stitches per row. And I'm thinking, now that I am like, 100 rows into this, that I should be doing it on 5's instead of 6's. I figured with worsted weight yarn, 6's would be ideal. But now that I'm a ways into it, I can see how an even tighter gauge would be better. The thing wouldn't be quite so wide on 5's, either. If I actually make it past all 284 rows of the Tux chart, I'm thinking I will just forgo the Linux chart on the other side and just finish the scarf out in garter stitch, or else I will never finish it. At least garter stitch I can do while I'm doing something else, like reading or watching telly.

And here's Johnny's Dr. Who scarf:

I haven't touched this thing since before the end of last semester (and oy! I should be weaving those ends in as I go! I know I should, but I've been lazy). It was my take-along project for last semester, so I always had it with me in my bag - but since I've been home all the time, I haven't picked it up, probably because it was too far away from where I was sitting. I am so profoundly lazy. I'll definitely pick it back up once school starts again. Anything to procrastinate instead of doing homework.

And that's it. There are so many projects I totally want to dig into, because I've got the yarn and needles and pattern all lined up, and I've got a mission to bust all that stash (and also, apparently, a mission to link to the stash post in every subsequent post - I guess I've found a hall-of-fame entry, there). But. I need to get Adler's Wallaby off my needles, at least, before I start anything else.