1. Took the kids skating last Sunday. Yay! Somehow strained my lower back, probably through having to pull Elfling up on her feet again (while attempting to keep my own balance) every minute or so. Boo! No big deal until I had to carry a sleeping Dude upstairs on Monday and suddenly couldn’t really move much at all. Triple mega boo!
2. Spent the rest of the week mostly lying on the couch, wincing every time I had to move and contemplating everything that’s wrong with me. Lots of television happened. Being forced to spend a week lying around doing nothing but reading and cuddling your kids is the kind of thing that sounds awesome until it actually happens. Apart from anything else, I really, really, really missed knitting.
3. Plus side, I did catch up on my reading. I can heartily recommend The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace & Babbage, The Seed Collectors and Station Eleven.* But particularly that first one. It is quite exceptionally delightful. Quirky and contrary characters! Victoriana! Cogwheels! Footnotes! It even has an Alice in Wonderland bit, so basically is a perfect creation.
4. I did manage to do enough knitting to confirm that I am deeply in love with my current design. Sadly, I can’t show it to you before the autumn, but trust me. It’s a simple thing but the stitch/yarn combo is so irresistibly squooshy and textural and interesting – I can’t stop petting it. Which is the same “problem” I have with two-colour brioche. Which I’m also using for a design. Obviously this isn’t anything like a real problem, but it does slow progress down a little, having to constantly take fondling/ogling breaks.
5. I also finally finished watching True Blood. (ACHTUNG SPOILERS!) I have SUCH FEELINGS about the end of that show. Mostly rage and annoyance. Which is of course a total overreaction. It was always a ridiculous soap opera and only got more ridiculous with each season – that’s understood. Contrived flip-flopping of who’s good, who’s bad, and who’s shagging who goes with the trashy vampire show territory. (I have a deep and abiding love for trashy TV vampires.) So I could put up with that. But the lengths they went to, not just to ensure that everyone who didn’t actually die got partnered off AND HAD BABIES unless they had specifically mentioned they didn’t want babies (or were gay; poor Lafayette, nobody ever bothered to include him in the everybody-wants-babies assumption), but to rub it in with a completely unnecessary epilogue that literally did nothing at all except show everyone being happy and pregnant or parenting. And the incredibly heavyhanded sentimentality of certain scenes in the last episode. And the MEANNESS that came out at the end: Bill (supposedly back to being a nice guy at that point?) casually murdering someone for no reason except that she pissed him off was unpleasant, but worst of all, the hideously misogynistic treatment of Sarah Newman. Yes, we get it, she was mean and she hurt people. But for that, she has to be kept in chains forever, without any hope of rescue or release, losing her actual mind, and unceasingly pimped out to vampires? The sex trafficking analogy is even spelled out, not that it’s particularly subtle, and yet it seems like we’re supposed to take pleasure in this exceptionally nasty revenge. Even Steve, in ghostly figment form, shows up to smugly mock her. He gleefully participated in the Lilith worshipping destruction of the vampire/human social contract that prompted the crackdown on vampires, not to mention never missing an opportunity to sell anyone out, but his punishment is simply death – and then he gets to laugh at Sarah. Frankly, I expected better from this particular bunch of trashy vampires. It always felt like True Blood was on our side, or at least on the side of equal opportunity exploitation and objectification. Which was nice. And then… this. I am disappoint.
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* I got the first two on that list in a 2 hardbacks for £20 offer from the Guardian bookshop, and that offer is still running, so, well, you know what to do.
Woolly thoughts (and fuzzy logic) 