The return of the swallows and other good signs

This week I saw the first swallows of the year, always a joyful moment. They're back! They flew all that way, and they're back. 

Where I live they have plenty of undisturbed places to return to and nest, including the condo development where the building design is perfect, sheltered spots, close to the marsh, open water, endless supply of insects for feeding young, very desirable. And we don't have any people trying to block entryways, which happens elsewhere.

On that note, the current book group selection is

As brilliantly written as H is for Hawk, about falconry, which even persuaded me to suspend my total dislike of harnessing the lives of wild birds to serve people.

This one is a series of essays, all separate, all, as far as I've got, illuminating and encouraging, even while she's squarely facing up to the extinction we have caused. 

There's still such a lot to love and defend.  She talks about one form of observation that any of us can try -- binoculars trained on the full moon. You'd be amazed at how many birds, bats and butterflies as well as other insects cross your small visual field. Best about now when a lot of spring migration is in progress, but you can do it any time there's a clear full moon. I did it years ago and couldn't believe the extent of bird activity when I had assumed they were sleeping.

I hugely recommend her, as a writer as well as a defender of nature. She understands that the planet isn't ours. We're newcomers flailing about, damaging what we don't understand. She helps us understand. 

Come to think of it, it would be good to read or revisit Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. That's another great, warm account of caring for our surroundings, by a native American who's a scholar, teacher and great writer.

I came upon Vespers when I was halfway through No One's Talking About This. It's a wild headlong dash, Twitter style through many fragmented ideas, jokes, some very funny and I'm not quoting them here, and is as mentally exhausting as following all the tangents on Twitter at once. 

I had not yet got to the second half where a real life tragedy strikes the narrator's family. And the book had so paled in the company of Vesper Flights, that I couldn't give it any more time and energy. 

This happens now and then when you read as much as I do. Some books just don't hold up once the bigs appear. But I'd still recommend it. Just not when you're reading something which leaves it in the dust.

And here's the first iris in my front yard. 

A bicolor bearded iris, it's a descendant of a friend's iris collection which were originally planted by her grandmother on her NJ farm about 80 years ago. I have quite a few out there, and have donated roots to neighbors and freecyclers. 

And, from west Yorkshire, yesterday's picture of daisies in full flight.

Meanwhile, speaking of mental health, which we were indirectly, I thought I'd like to learn a new to me knitting stitch. I've been doing all color work, stripes, blocks, on the Ministry Socks, and thought, since I'm getting down to quite a bit of  dull beigey yarn, maybe a stitch variety might be good. It's soft, a mix of wool and cotton, probably nice to wear but dull to knit.

So while this 

was in progress, I took a break to learn this

It's called brioche stitch and should come with a surgeon general's mental health warning. I went to YouTube and found numerous videos, mostly dogmatic, often contradicting one another, none using dpns, double pointed needles, my tools of choice. 

Mostly they worked the stitch flat, with a couple of exceptions, people using a circular needle to make much bigger items than socks. And none of them worked slowly enough with good enough focus to actually follow the movement. I even reduced playback speed to 50%, just blurred it more.

Soooo, many false starts and screams of annoyance later, I thought I'd start a sock flat, on straight needles, then once the stitch pattern was established, transfer it to dpns. That would leave a slit where the transfer happened,  but it could easily be closed when I did the finishing. 

And found that the pattern doesn't lend itself to moving needle to needle. This is partly because yarn overs are a constant feature. Knitters will instantly see the problem here.  Nonknitters can just take my word on it.

In fact, chaos quickly ensued, and I went back to starting again for the 19,574th time, and here's where I am

It's a lovely comfy stitch to snug around your legs, like a rib on steroids, so the current plan is to knit flat, transfer to dpns when I reach the heel, and resume plain knitting for the rest of the sock.

I can make an unobtrusive join up the back of the leg, when I'm doing the finishing. I'll do a shortrow heel and toe, but in the reverse order from the toe up approach. And if this sounds complicated, it's nothing to what I went through getting to here. Whoever said knitting was relaxing??

And then there's two-color brioche but I'm not going there.

We're expecting temps suddenly in the high 90s f this weekend, so I'm wondering how to protect my seedlings from heatstroke. Maybe a sheet thrown over for shade.  We'll see.

Meanwhile happy Friday. Stay cool, fight on!