Procrastiknitting

 

I want to try to return to blogging. I haven’t done it since I retired, but I find sometimes I have more to say than I can say in a Bluesky post. So we’ll see how this goes. 

Since I am a retired bleeding heart liberal knitter living with inflammatory arthritis, whatever I come up with will be skewed heavily in that direction, whether it’s my current WIP, my view on the state of the disunion, or how I cope with chronic illness. If it’s not your cup of tea, you don’t need to read it. I tend to be both opinionated and acerbic, which also tends to piss people off. 

I retired from my day job as an instructional designer at a community college in 2019, the day before I turned 60. I like being able to say I retired while I was still in my 50s. My retirement timing was fortuitous, since it was the year before the pandemic, and if I had still been working in 2020, I would’ve been the one responsible for getting all the college’s courses online almost instantaneously when the college shut down overnight and went to pure online classes. I still try to teach one online section each semester, either physical science or descriptive astronomy, so that keeps me occupied.

 I knit English, because that’s how my mother taught me to knit almost 60 years ago. If it was good enough for her, it’s good enough for me. If you prefer knitting continental that’s great, but boy do I get annoyed when people insist that knitting continental is either faster, more efficient, or somehow better than knitting English, because after 60 years of knitting English, knitting continental is none of those things for me. If it works for you great. I can do it when I’m knitting two colors to more easily hide the floats, but that doesn’t mean I like it.

I also tend to knit more with plant fibers than animal fibers (e.g., linen, cotton, hemp, bamboo, etc.) It’s just a preference, not an ideology. For example, one of my favorite but unfortunately discontinued yarns is a blend of cotton and cashmere, which is a surprisingly good yarn for a summer knit. I just don’t like the feel of most wools, But I will use them in a nice blend.

I’ve been a registered Democrat since I could vote, even though my parents were registered Republicans. My mother did change her registration to Democrat when she was almost 80 in order to vote for Barack Obama in the Pennsylvania primary. I guess I raised her right. 

That said, I’m almost as pissed at the Democrats as I am the Republicans! The Republicans gave us a fucking playbook in Project 2025. That told us what they planned to do if they gained control of all three branches of the government. But the Democrats have no counterplan in place to prevent that! Trump’s puppet masters are dismantling the federal government, dismantling science, dismantling education, dismantling protections for the disadvantaged, and all the Democrats seem to be able to do in response is wave little auction placards at the State of the Union address. And I do mean Trump’s puppet masters. He’s not coming up with this shit on his own. But as someone on Bluesky pointed out, you don’t need a counter plan if you don’t plan to counter.

So if any of that sounds like your cup of tea, follow along. I don’t know how often I will post, but I will try to be somewhat regular about it. Maybe. For liberal definitions of the word regular. I also highly recommend Bluesky for people who miss the old Twitter, the pre-Musk, you can actually learn something, people share interesting stuff, Twitter. I am @kdroms-knitter.bsky.social over there. 

Now, off to explain why the Epstein files ARE the distraction…