I spent a portion of today, poking through my yarn stash and looking for a skein for the first pattern of Sock Madness. I thought I was hunting for a solid yarn, since between the twisted stitches and the smocking, there’s a lot going on. But then I came across a skein of purple, pink, grey, and white yarn (the one in the middle below) in a colorway called “Crossword” and there could be no other choice. Sometimes the universe speaks to you and it’s up to you to be listening.

I suppose it may turn out that the yarn is still wrong for the pattern, or, rather, that the pattern is wrong for the yarn. Because short of a yarn called “Muriel” suddenly appearing in my stash, this is what I’m meant to be knitting with today.

(If I need to find a new skein, I also kept out a couple skeins in pink/red that work for a pattern that means roughly “a thousand cherry trees” and that can be cast back on on Monday.)

Sunday would have marked my maternal grandmother’s 100th birthday, so I’m planning a celebratory weekend.

I have already put in a bunch of extra hours doing work, because she definitely valued hard work and meeting your obligations.

My fun activity for Friday night was watching Magnum while I was eating supper. The reboot is too recent for Gramma to have watched, but she enjoyed the original and I like to think she would have appreciated this version, as well. Rudi’s coaching this weekend, so since I can’t watch new things on tv tomorrow night, maybe I’ll pull up some old Britcoms. She did enjoy Hyacinth Bucket, Father Brown, and Jean and Lionel.

As I mentioned yesterday, my tea reinforcements have arrived. I’ll be refilling all the tins that have been depleted and drinking plenty of cuppas.

It’s the quarterly member sale at one of the local bookshops, so I’ll be heading up that way to indulge (and do some gift-shopping for other upcoming birthdays). I also have plenty of books to read, including some mysteries, which were Gramma’s favorite genre.

The first round of Sock Madness opened a couple hours ago, so I’ll be spending a good chunk of time knitting. Gramma was the one who taught me to knit, but I don’t think she understood why I wanted to bother with socks.

It’s been a while since I’ve done a crossword puzzle, so maybe I’ll fill out the ones from this weekend’s newspaper in her memory.

The butter is out, so maybe I’ll bake up a batch of something from Gramma’s cookbook she made me. Lemon squares would be fast, mint sticks chocolatey, or I could try something new.

In addition to baking sweets, Gramma enjoyed eating them. I have most of a container of ice cream in the freezer, whipped cream to top my cocoa, and Mum suggested I pick up a cannoli or something with Italian pastry cream in it to mark the occasion.

Okay, off to bed, because Gramma would not approve of still being up this late!

Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. A colleague mentioned a frame shop a couple neighborhoods north of me was having a sale, so I took the bus up there last Saturday. That part wasn’t super successful, but I stopped at my favorite Italian mom and pop shop for a slice, a ball of dough, and a bag of Jordan almonds, a fun stationery shop for some stickers, and one of the city’s mini-Targets, where I bought some lotion I can’t find elsewhere and some new shirts.

2. I made my annual tea purchase last week during the NYC shop’s sale, and earlier today 13 pounds of tea (and two pounds of coffee) arrived to refill my depleted canisters.

3. I ran out in flip flops, leggings, and a tshirt at mid-afternoon on Wednesday in between meetings and it was gloriously sunny and warm.

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world lately?

I’m not quite sure how I missed processing it was Wednesday until now. But it is. Or was. I’m glad the weekend is a day closer, but am not happy that I misplaced an evening in there, particularly one I usually enjoy.

As you can see, it’s been a productive week for knitting. I’ve been trying to knit during meetings in which I take more of a listening role than a presenting one, and that’s definitely helped. Also, the tail end of Recipe for Persuasion was great for knitting while reading, which really can’t be done when reading books with fraught conclusions. (It messes with my tension.) I’m into my last set of colors before I start the toe decreases, so there’s the possibility I’ll have a new pair of socks by the weekend.

Sock Madness begins sometime in the next two days, and I have several weekends with more me time than usual coming up because Rudi’s ski team has some end-of-season races that he needs to coach. I haven’t finished the timed round the past few years, but maybe the extra alone time will motivate me to knit faster. Or it won’t, and I’ll just move on to another project — like last year’s unfinished pair … or 2019’s.

I know I said last week that I was going to move on next to a novel set during spring training, but I wasn’t able to renew Undercover Bromance, so I decided to pick it back up and see if I liked it any more than I did the first grumpy night I tried to read it. The two main protagonists are now on each other’s radar, so I’ll give it two more chapters to get its act together, but I still may ditch it.

I’m also listening to The Midnight Library, which two local Twitter book pals loved and which Karen decidedly did not. It struggles to live up to its selling point — who amongst us wouldn’t like to try on the alternate stories of our lives if we’d made different choices? The author does too much telling and not enough showing, and the protagonist’s life spiral is rushed in an effort to get us to the most interesting part of the story quickly — and thus seems a little insulting to those of us who struggle with mental health issues. But as I wrote earlier this week, I’ve been doing a lot of self-rumination recently, so the concept is pulling me through so far.

Head over to As Kat Knits to see what others are reading and crafting.

While I was out and about on Saturday, I noticed the sure signs that spring is coming: flowers were popping up, in border beds, in the wild, and in the park:

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday from That Artsy Reader Girl asks us to share the top ten characters whose jobs I wish I had. It’s a fun topic, but I admit I had to go back to Goodreads to come up with enough answers to finish this week’s list.

If I didn’t develop educational materials, I might want to be:

1. Bandette, master thief and righter of wrongs (the Bandette series by Paul Tobin and Colleen Hoover)
2. Thursday Next, literary detective (the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde)
3. Phoebe, tv script writer (Red Letter Days by Sarah-Jane Stratford
4. Dani Brown, women’s studies professor (Take a Hint, Dani Brown by Talia Hibbert)
5. Phryne Fisher, private investigator (the Phyrne Fisher series by Kerry Greenwood)
6. Nina Hill, bookseller (The Bookish Life of Nina Hill by Alli Waxman)
7. Tuesday Mooney, philanthropy leads researcher (Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts by Kate Rannicula)
8. Kate, local journalist (The Lido by Libby Page)
9. Lola Woodby, retrieval specialist (the Discreet Retrieval Agency series by Maia Chance)
10. Vianne Rocher, chocolatier (Chocolat by Joanne Harris)

How about you? Are there characters from your reading whose career paths you envy for one reason or another?