Central Kings, you effing rock

1. Saturday. Or Caturday, if you prefer. It's Harvest Jazz and Blues weekend here in Fredericton - downtown is dotted with large circus tents in every parking lot and park available, all of them booked solid with music acts. It's terribly popular with almost every stratum of Fredericton, and even replaces the weather as the default topic of conversation (instead of "wow, it's wet today" we get "so do you have tickets to Harvest?"). Being fairly poor and not really motivated to go out, Sean and I aren't attending this year, but if we start to feel left out all we have to do is open the window and we can hear two or three shows on any given night.

2. This week was flat out tiring. I formally switched out of Anth of Literacy and into Media Culture, which was a good move for my sanity and my pitiful physique, though a slight blow to the ego (what, self, you can't handle it?). Even so, four classes in a row is an awful lot, and work is pretty busy, too. I spent a lot of time cleaning up the computer situation, and now the main storage (which was horribly disorganized) is only a little disorganized, and mine and Shasta's laptops have been cleaned out and transferred over to Kate and Amy. Unfortunately that leaves me stuck with the absolute slowest computer we have to do my "IT" work, but that's life I suppose.
I'm feeling sort of overwhelmed right now. I don't have any escape route, really, which makes me nervous - I have no choice about how many courses I'm taking, or putting off one of my languages, or quitting my job. I'm really hoping that this will get easier next week, as I get more used to my new rhythm and settle back into my languages.
At least the Greek isn't nearly as bad as I thought. My vocabulary is literally flooding back - I only have to look something up once and it's solid again. I can't say the same for the tables and tables of verbs, but I suppose that's what flash cards are for.

3. Some links!

• the new fall Knitty is out hooray!
• I think that Patrick Stewart has a moral duty to bid on the lionfish.
• Sean and I have adopted his parents' ancient ice cream maker just to try this out.
• In news about tolerance - this is pretty cool, but this is cooler because it's about a high school, and I didn't even realize until I went to post the link that it is actually Central Kings, you know, the school next to West Kings. Good job, guys. You make me proud.
  
• Dear Vinyl Gods: I want this and also this.

4. Interesting anecdote of the day courtesy of Cat Bordhi, a knitting guru, in an interview in the new Knitty:

Q: What's the one thing most people don't know about you that you're willing to share with Knitty readers?
A: When I was young we lived in a huge old house that had been built just before the San Francisco earthquake by the obsessed and eccentric Sarah Winchester, who built the 160-room Winchester Mystery House, now a tourist attraction in San Jose, California. Our house was much smaller of course (Mrs. Winchester had built it as a wedding gift for her niece), but still, everyone who came to the front door asked how we found our way around. We weren’t allowed to go on the roof, so of course we did (there was a door that opened onto the roof and how were we supposed to resist that?), and I remember thinking that I really didn’t know my way around on the roof, and it was actually a bit scary. It had so many ups and downs and ins and outs that it made me feel like I was lost on Mt. Everest. We also had some of the same fireplaces and details as Mrs. Winchester’s house, but fortunately none of the most bizarre features, like staircases that ended in ceilings or windows installed in the floor. We never stopped looking for hidden passageways, but never found any.

One year my father spotted an ad in the paper offering carpeting at $39.99 per room, installation included, no matter the size. Our carpets were threadbare, so he figured he should take full advantage of such a fine opportunity. The carpet guys nearly choked when they saw our house with its enormous rooms, and this was probably when they decided to balance things out by giving my colorblind father only one choice of carpeting, which he agreed to. I don’t think he consulted my mother. The rather thin carpet had been woven out of the factory’s age-old stash of leftover yarns. It was the equivalent of knitting a blanket out of random scrap yarns. There were single-line stripes of one color after the other – no sequence, just hundreds of different colors, very bright and a little crazy. We kids (there were 6 of us) thought it was great for broad-jumping, because you could start at the door and try to land on a particular color. And it wasn’t too long before that carpet was threadbare too. But we sure had fun. Next time my father bought better carpet, in the only color he could see: red. I still don’t know if he consulted my mother.

5. This weekend: my second blue Monkey met with a fatal error two days ago when I realized, two repeats in, that I had botched the cuff badly, so I'm casting on again. I have both Greek and Latin (of course), and also Sean has been suddenly felled by a nasty flu of the sinus and sensitive skin variety, so I'll be feeding him tea and soup and making him sleep. A quiet rainy weekend.