Monsoon Season

Fascinating weather happening here in Eastern Pennsylvania...this past Saturday, we had torrential rain, winds with gusts up to 70 miles per hour and all the associated outages and roads blocked by downed trees.

Talking Weather
And if that weren't bad enough, it was followed up on Sunday with a lightning/thunder storm and tonight we're slated to get snow and tomorrow the temperature will climb to a high of 58 degrees (that's Fahrenheit...14 Celsius).

I have to say, that I've never been a fan of Winter or cold or snow or ice or sleet. I'd much rather have the rain.

Fortunately, I'm off work for the next two weeks, doing a kind of staycation where I'm getting my car serviced, and doing medical check-ups and such. Fortunately, the weather doesn't have to be cooperative.

Current Knitting
I'm kind of floundering about with knitting projects lately.

A guy on MenWhoKnit.com posted a scarf he had knit in a kind of tumbling blocks textured knit.

It's the Asherton Scarf by Smariek on Ravelry. Not only did I like the pattern stitch, but I also loved that it was reversible.

It's a bonus that it's rather a simple pattern stitch as well. The picture above is the Ravelry model...I'll post a picture of mine later.

Also, Asplund Knits started work on a Marianne Isager sweater which intrigued me. I searched through all my Isager books and found it in Knitting Out of Africa (or Afrika if you have the book in it's original language...I have both!).

I decided I needed to swatch on of the garter/mitered/entrelac/intarsia squares used in the sweater, and I really liked the result.

I mean really...if you can jam so many techniques into one design, it's got to be challenging enough to make me at least swatch it...right?

I've decided to go ahead and try knitting a full-size sweater in a modified version of Isager's design. We'll see how it goes.

Readers' Comments/Questions
Regarding the kid alpaca blanket picture on my last post, Sue writes, "I recognize that hotel room! Love a good Courtyard!"

You have a keen eye for hotel decor. This is the Wilmington downtown Courtyard in Delaware. The staff there are awesome and made me feel like family for about 3 years of my life.

Also on the blanket, aferdina writes, "...are you going king sized or some other smaller size. It looks cozy and beautiful..."

I'm thinking I'll make it about 6 feet long and about 5 feet wide once the border is on, but we'll see.

Finally, on the topic of discriminatory blood donations, MedTech writes, "50% of the new AIDS cases in the US appear in men who have sex with men. If you're going to pick a group to exclude because they have a higher rate of infection, gay men (unfortunately) seem to be a logical choice. The other group routinely excluded for life is/are prostitutes. Haven't heard a lot of protest over that one even though, as a group, they account for fewer new cases of HIV each year than MWHSWM."

Since all blood donations since 1985 are screened for HIV, it still seems to be an ignorant rule to disallow MWHSWM from donating blood. I might understand the rule if they excluded any man who has had sex with another man or with a prostitute since their last negative HIV test, but it still seems it's just easier for the FDA to be lazy and exclusionary.