Dumbledore does like his knitting patterns, afterall.

As predicted, I finished reading the six Harry Potter books long before May, having completed Book 6 last night. (Although I will admit that having read, over the course of about a week, slightly more than 3400 pages - even if it is only children’s lit - has left me doing little else this past week.) There’s something about this series that doesn’t make it terribly tedious to continue to re-read. I first read Books 1-4 the summer of 2000, shortly after Book 4 had been published. I had resisted jumping on the bandwagon until then - everyone and their grandmother was reading these books, and I just couldn’t see what the hullabaloo was all about. But then Mom and Dad read the first one, said it was quite good, and since I had never known them to give me bad advice when it came to books (or anything, for that matter), I decided to give it a go. We were on vacation up in Wisconsin, for my uncle’s wedding, when Mom bought the first four books in hardcover. I read each one in a day (including the massive fourth book, which I read on the drive back to Alabama), and was instantly hooked.

Harry Potter fanart from minstrelbook.net

Book 5 came out the first summer I lived in North Carolina, and it was quite a hassle to get my hands on a copy of the book. I’d had it pre-ordered from Amazon for ages - about 3 years, actually. But I forgot all about it until the week it was to be released, and at that point, it was too late to change my shipping address on the order. The book was shipped to my parents’ house, and I had to manage to track down a copy at a local bookstore (which took some patience, since, of course, all copies had been claimed in the first shipment). But it eventually arrived, and I read it happily.

Book 6 came out two summers later, and by that time, I had plenty of friends living in the area. Instead of pre-ordering it from Amazon, we reserved copies from a local Barnes & Noble. My friends Hans and Laura and I arrived at the store quite early, when they started handing out ticket numbers for the queue, and then went out to dinner while we waited for midnight to approach. After dinner and some bar-hopping with even more friends, it was time to head back to B&N to join the HP festivities (they had a live owl showing and everything) and wait in line to buy our books. Because we got there so early when they first started handing out tickets, we were able to walk away with our new books very shortly after midnight, and of course, we all went home and read. By lunchtime the following day, I was finished with the first read-through.

Of course, having read the 672-page book in one sitting in the middle of the night after a long day of excitement, I missed a lot, and I knew I’d have to re-read it to start figuring out any of the mysteries the book presented. After a few more read-throughs, I had developed some theories, which I wrote about over at my LiveJournal blog. Reading back over that entry this morning, I’ve realized that my views haven’t changed any, and re-reading the series from the beginning has only strengthened those theories. (It’s amazing all the little hints that Rowling threw in, even really early on, that back up what I believe is coming.)

Though no formal plans have been made, I’m fairly certain that our group will gather, once again, at a local book store for their midnight Harry Potter sale come July 21st. (And we’ll all likely give in to temptation and go home and read again, despite the fact that we’re all getting older, and it’s getting harder and harder to stay up and be functional so late into the night.)

But enough about Harry Potter.

Between spurts of reading, I’ve been working diligently on Boris. Yes, yes, despite my best attempts, I cannot call this sweater anything else anymore. Once the name “Boris” was uttered, it stuck, and the V-Neck Sweater will forevermore be called Boris. (It’s disgusting, isn’t it? Oh well.) I’ve done quite a few revamps on the neck shaping, but I think I’ve finally figured out the best design, and I’ve just started the armhole shaping on the front. The stockinette is getting tedious again, though, and I’m afraid that as soon as the front is finished, I’ll be setting it aside again for a while to work on something a bit more… engaging.

So, forgetting for a moment that I’ve got half a gazillion WIPs going, I’ve decided to start another pair of the Aurelia socks. I’d really like to get the pattern up and available for download soon (I haven’t heard back much from my test knitters - I ought to email them to see how it’s coming along), and since my last pair didn’t exactly follow the final version of the pattern, I want to knit a pair that does. The difficulty in this lies in the choosing of the yarn. I’ve narrowed it down to four different choices - 3 Koigus and 1 Fleece Artist.

Which yarn to pick?

KPPPM #516

KPPPM #404L

KPPPM #818

Fleece Artist Nova Sock

It’s hard to say how busy any of them will be. I tried to chose colors that were not too busy, since that would detract from the lace pattern. The light blue or the light green Koigus are probably the best bets, as far as limited business goes, but the dark blue Koigu is so lovely, too. And I haven’t yet worked with the Fleece Artist yarn, and it looks sooo lovely, I’m really itching to try it out. Of course, I keep telling myself that whatever yarns I don’t chose for this project will still be around for future projects, and will one day be made into beautiful socks, but that doesn’t seem to help much. Every time I start thumbing through my stash, I find myself wanting to knit it all up RIGHT NOW. ALL OF IT. Silly, isn’t it?

I did finish the last pair of Aurelia Socks a while back, and armed with fresh batteries for my camera, I finally got around to taking some photos of the completed pair this morning. They’re beautiful, they fit perfectly, and I love love love them. I really can’t wait to knit up the next pair. So much for second-sock-syndrome, eh?

Aurelia Socks - aren’t the flowers outside my apartment so pretty?

And in other news….

That’d be a Sticky Note I’ve got posted on my desktop, reminding me that I’ve got a set of job interviews coming up on Tuesday. The one in the morning is with someone from Aquent, a job-placement firm, and the one in the afternoon is for a position that Aquent is sending me to. It’s a web editor contract position for SAS. The contract, if I get it, would be for six months, but I’ve been told that Aquent has already placed many people there, and most of those contracts continue to be renewed. And even if it’s not, that at least would give me six months to find something more permanent.

One of the most difficult things about being unemployed has been fighting the urge to buy yarn. It certainly hasn’t helped that I’ve joined several Flickr groups, and I have somewhere around 50 or so images sent daily to my Google syndication reader - images of socks and hand-dyed yarn. There are so many pretty pictures and so many sources of inspiration… So many links to yarns I had never heard of before. The front-runner in the must-resist-temptation pile is Wollmeise. (Other desirables include Sundara Yarns (whose logo is almost as lovely as the yarn itself), Scouts Swag, and Trekking Pro Natura (I’m hoping to jump on the bamboo bandwagon soon).) A simple Google search yields results like this and this, and you find yourself daydreaming about this stuff when you really ought to be focusing on more important things (such as trying to figure out which side Snape is really on, or who R.A.B. is…).

A lovely shipment of Wollmeise, ganked from sweatpea16.wordpress.com

So, I’ve decided that once I’ve gotten a new job, I will reward myself with a skein or two of Wollmeise sock yarn (or three or four - gotta justify overseas shipping, right?). Everything I’ve read so far seems to indicate that dealing with Claudia, the dyer, is quite a pleasant affair, and that leaves me with only one dilemma - what color(s) to select?!