Still Life with Classics

At Christmas, my mother asked me if I wanted all those Greek books...in her ongoing purge-the-house-of- children's-crap campaign (also known as the "Your Dad and I Aren't Running a Museum" initiative), her narrow gaze fell on ten or twelve Penguins that I bought in '89 for Classics 101 -- a team-taught survey course that introduced punk undergrads to the Greeks and Romans. Great course, especially Anthony Barrett's lectures on The Aeneid. I haven't had a lot of use for my copies of Plutarch, Herodotus, and the gang in the intervening years, but they're classics for pete's sake, and I liked knowing they were back at the homestead. Made me feel smart when I visited. Well, there's no flies on my mother, and my strategy to avoid taking the books (leaving them on the shelf downstairs) didn't work -- she paid the $16 to send them across the country and have them live at my house. Hmmph. Chagrined, I was. Though she softened me up a little by sending some xmas cake in the package...I'm almost mollified. And I've started watching "I, Claudius" on DVD this week, so maybe I'll look through the books and find out if Livia really was so evil.

The whole "I, Claudius" series is something like 800 minutes long, and I've made it through episodes 1-3 while racing to finish the cardigan for Amy. It's now officially a garment, as you can see from this brown blob:Today while on an interminable conference call I finished up second sleeve (the upside to working at home) and now I'm down to hems and button bands and possibly ruffles -- I'm going to wait on those and let Amy decide whether she wants them. I think they're quite cute, but she might not. Tomorrow I need to find the Perfect Buttons. And block the thing. Might be weaving in ends on the bus down to London.

After this, I'm going to finish a Malabrigo hat I have on the go (colour: Lime Blue...Bonne Marie would adore it) and then make the fabulous scarf that's on the front of Nicky Epstein's Knitting on the Edge...in Malabrigo (black, to go with my weird collection of pink, red, green coats). Looooove the Malabrigo. Can't wait to go off the yarn diet and snap up some more. Might bully my sister into buying some when she comes to visit next week...she's pregnant and therefore can't run away from my yarn evangelism.