I have a little Ubuntu and a big afghan

Well, this Wednesday's post is even later than usual. I have early Wednesday mornings set aside for blogging (in a time slot that used to be a networking group but is now only a social get-together-for-breakfast-if-anybody-shows-up thing), and I take my little Dell 9" Inspiron to Central Market Cafe to do it. But in one of the endless, relentless stream of updates for Ubuntu (look it up), I think I wasn't paying attention and something got messed up. My Gnome menu bar was gone, and when I managed to get it back, selecting "Quit" to restart the machine made it disappear again. So I'm wrestling with it now. I'm sure I'll get it running again, but who knows how long it'll take. And what it'll do to my blood pressure in the meantime.

So anyway...I'm spending most of my knitting time lately on Holly's afghan. Holly is my sister's husband's brother's wife. My sister-in-law-in-law. A while back she decided to learn to knit by making an afghan. Note: Your very first knitting project should probably be something like, oh, a scarf. Not only flat and easy to handle, but small. Do-able in some reasonable amount of time. Unlike an afghan, which is acres and acres, and takes for freakin' ever to finish. Holly bought the yarn and got advice on a simple pattern from the fine people at the Yarn Barn in San Antonio. She worked stalwartly and finished about a foot (that's a lot on an afghan). Unfortunately, though, there were some problems and rather than being basically rectangular shaped it was, at best, a parallelogram. Bordering on "L" shaped. So she took it back to the Yarn Barn, they frogged it for her with their ball winder, and gave her a different simple pattern. She worked on that for a while, then realized she was sick of the whole thing.

Enter yours truly. We went to S.A. for a visit, and she said she had some yarn for me. She was giving up on the afghan, and asked if I wanted the yarn. Cool; sure. I went to pick it up and her husband (my brother-in-law-in-law) said, "You're just giving her the yarn? I thought you were going to get her to knit it for us." Ah-ha. I might have said no, but at that point Holly was starting the testing in preparation for a lung transplant. Seriously, how can you deny someone facing a lung transplant their own fuzzy warm afghan?

So I'm knitting an afghan. And knitting. And knitting. And knitting. It's a simple basketweave pattern, 20 stitches wide. It doesn't take much thought so it's easy to work on while I'm watching TV. It's very large, though, so progress is sloooow. I've set a quota of five rows a day, which will allow me to complete a row of squares in about five days, so the whole thing should only take...about two months.

A scarf. Seriously, start with a scarf.