New Year's Resolutions...or something like them.

The theme of my New Year's resolutions this year seems to be to get back to my roots.  While that could punningly refer to my hair color at the moment, it also refers to my educational background.  It means that henceforth I plan to write and, yes, even blog as if I were a former English major who once seriously considered burying myself in dusty tomes and stacks of papers for the rest of my poor but blissfully well-read existence.  This also from the person who would count her most influential book during her medical school years, while others raved over Gray's Anatomy and the memoirs of countless great physician-thinkers, to be a collection of Keats's poems and letters picked up completely on a whim from the undergraduate library.  Well, that in itself should be a bit of a warning sign, I suppose.

In any case, going back to my roots also involves revisiting a task I haven't really attempted, much less completed, since I first picked up Grandma's double-points (again) at the age of nineteen.  I've mentioned the fingerless mitts, of course, but this is--shall we say?--old-school: narrow 1x1 rib cuffs, stockinette body.  The yarn has some novelty to it, being some homespun-looking stuff that varies in thickness along its length and has a subtle metallic gold-colored thread running through it, and as one of my former college roommates once pointed out, somewhat to my surprise, the colorway is very...Monet?  Monet's water-lilies, in fact, if you wanted to narrow it down: this is Impressionist thread at its finest, but I digress.  The point is it's a pattern of very simple stitches and, hopefully, simple lines.  It's already teaching me a thing or two about the simple gifts of patience and foresight.  Someday, when they're finished, they'll complement my first truly independent "pattern," a 1x1 rib scarf with garter border (it actually ended up looking like a double-thickness stockinette that--miracle!--doesn't curl) made of the same yarn many years ago, like paintings in an exhibit.  And, after all, there are worse things in life than to have anything at all in common with an Impressionist.  Well, Van Gogh could be a bit problematic...