yesterday: come home. want to watch a little tv, knit a little on a sock, not too ambitious. finally decide to take a picture of the sock and post it to flickr; cat does something cute and hey, now i get a cat photo and a sock photo! go to laptop, load up photo off camera, … and think to myself, “hey, why is the ‘DSL Sync’ light on my router blinking off and on like that?”

DENIED! both my DSL and voice were out, so i used the mobile to call in a trouble ticket to ATT. (who, it must be noted, has just had their request to buy out BellSouth approved by the DoJ — who have apparently never actually had to deal with a telephone company in their own lives, and therefore have no clue about how this will “benefit” consumers — so we move ever closer to not ever having broken Bell up at all in the first place. i love this game!) Ameritech SBC ATT called me around 10 this morning, saying they moved me to a new pair in the alley. when it rained, apparently my phone wires got wet. i am thus ever reassured about the quality of wiring in my neighborhood. at least the tech, who phoned me from the site, did make sure to check and make sure he could sync up my DSL before calling it a day, so hopefully i shall be able to catknitblog as soon as i get home. speaking of catknitblogging: for those who may have cared, my moblogging is now pretty much all on my flickr page; chiefly this is because i chose terribly, horribly, awfully when i switched web hosts, and i cannot cope with trying to get moblogging work on their system (because there are not enough hours in my life to deal with them any more than i have to — i still have an outstanding ticket from may, which really should have taken someone about 60 seconds to respond to with “No. Sorry.”), therefore i am copping out and emailing directly to flickr. so if you want to see random photos of nonsense, hie thee hence. and speaking of catblogging. er, knitblogging: i got my SP9 assignment!! am very excited. my spoilee is obviously very talented and has posted a bunch of cool creations to her blog, the address of which naturally i am not going to share with you and so i shall just taunt you by relating tales of her awesomeness. i’m very excited to start gifting! and, dude, i was just over at Loopy Yarns the other day ogling the pretty, pretty yarnses. and now i can go back again! hooray! (aside: niqui in a yarn store: “oooooooooo, lookit the sock yarn… i shall buy some of this even though i have yet to ever finish a sock… perhaps THIS will be the yarn for the sock that i shall finish!” actually, i did buy some new DPNs — as i remarked the other day, Kim has some awesome short (4.5″? 5″?) wooden DPNs that i thought looked perfect for socking, much easier than 8″ ones, and so when i found them at Loopy Yarns i picked up a set in each of sizes 2 and 1. (i’d post the brand name, except i can’t recall it at the moment. and, hey, they were only $5! you can’t beat that with a stick.) so i’m currently socking — man, i love using “sock” as a verb — on the 2s, and it’s going okay. i have slight ladder issues at one join (not the other three, for some reason; it is a mystery!) but otherwise it looks pretty okay. i’m going to take the sock-in-progress with me this weekend when i travel to baltimore to visit with some folks, and i’m just going to hope that nobody in airport security gives me any grief over my toothpick-sized knitting needles. i guess i’d rather replace the $5 wooden DPNs than two $6 inox needles if they get taken away from me, so … where was i? i do still like the circs. i’m noticeably slower on the DPNs, which makes me a little sad. i don’t know why i can’t seem to get up to any speed on DPNs. it’s not really all that much harder. maybe it’s just that i’m only going 15 stitches at a shot rather than 30. still, i’ve only got a few inches of this top-down sock done and if i was using circs i bet i’d have probably double. oh well. the wooden DPNs are still very nice to work with. i suppose i shouldn’t complain much about the speed until i can actually, you know, complete a sock. which i’m totally going to do, Real Soon Now. even my bartender, the other day when i was knitting over at The Butcher’s Dog, was encouraging me. (actually, she was really interested in my sock. she kept asking me questions. she said she could knit but had never seen anyone using multiple double-pointeds, so she couldn’t figure out what i was doing. and since i was starting out from the cast on, having come more or less straight from the LYS, i couldn’t really show her very easily, at least at first. hey, at least i was entertainment for the bar staff, y’know.) i’m going to finish a sock one of these days, yes, yes, i am. also, wow: this parenthetical “aside” is now longer than the entire rest of the blog post. hooray for stream of consciousness!) oh: everyone at work loves the fingerless typing gloves. not least of all, me! they’re fuzzy and cosy and my hands are so warm and they are the BEST $5 CLEARANCE YARN PROJECT EVER.