Happy New Year!

Today marks the beginning not only of a new calendar year but also of another blog year: my sixth! Yes, the Brainylady blog turns five today. On New Year's Day in 2003 I sat in my bedroom in my first Taipei apartment and signed up on Blogger as a very new knitter. (My first real post came a couple of days later.) I had no idea then what I was really getting myself into! I didn't know that I was entering into such an incredible community -- dare I say a tight-knit community? -- where there would always (always!) be somebody cheering me on, answering my questions, and offering advice, reassurance, compliments, and/or inspiration at every turn. Nor did I know that I would meet some of them in person, be invited to stay at their houses, and be sent yarn and homemade cookies in the mail. I freaking love the knitbloggers. Whatever people say about online friends versus "real friends," I don't see such a clear line dividing the two.

And having said all that, I must now tell you that you'll be seeing less of me in the coming months. I need to make some changes in my day-to-day life, and the most important thing is to reestablish school as my top priority. Over the last six months I've let things become unbalanced, and let myself off the hook too easily. It's pretty obvious to me that I can't, at this point, split my time effectively between reading and knitting; my mind is so occupied with knitting patterns and my Ravelry queue that it won't let Foucault and Bourdieu in. Plus I've been letting the Internet suck too much precious time out of each day. So I have to make some big changes: I have to extract myself from the computer and I have to make my brain more available to what I'm reading. This means I'm not even going to open my laptop until the evening, so not much blogging. This also means very little knitting, both because of the time knitting takes and because of the time I spend thinking about what I'm going to knit next. It's time I put the brainy back in brainylady.

To conclude (I do feel a bit like I'm making a speech here), may I present the real last knits of 2007! I'd hoped to give Bill a new pair of socks for Christmas, but I just couldn't get them finished. So he got a surprise New Year's Eve present instead:


It's very tempting to make a joke here, like "these socks look like A.S.S. -- Arch-Shaped Socks, that is!" but that would be terribly immature. Ahem. So these are indeed Arch-Shaped Socks (PDF), knit on 2.50mm DPNs in Reynolds Soft Sea Wool. It's an interesting pattern: a plain stockinette sock without being just a plain sock. I don't know if I screwed up somewhere (twice), but I had to fudge the numbers when I got to the part in the foot where the gusset decreases met the arch decreases. (I had 70 sts. at that point instead of 66; I skipped one round of sole increases and worked the whole foot on 68 sts.) The colour is more true in this picture -- it's a really good blue, like a faded tattoo:


Here's what they look like flat -- weird, right?


And here's one more shot, in which cuteness trumps blurriness:


I wish you the very, very best for this new year. Watch your Bloglines -- I will be back. In the meantime, wish me luck with my reading. I've got to get it done! Good luck with everything you hope to accomplish in 2008, and I hope the year brings you plenty of happiness. Knit a few rows for me from time to time. xo