One of my retirement to-do items is "learn to knit socks; knit socks." Now "learn to knit" might seem an odd part of that equation, given that I've been knitting since I was 10 years old. (I.e., for well over 50 years.) The thing is, I never learned to follow patterns. I'm like a musician who can learn tunes by listening, improvise music, and put on a great performance, but who never learned to read notation. I have, in fact, knitted a pair of socks before by sort of reverse-engineering how to make yarn look like that. But I figured it was time to actually learn "by the book" as it were.

My first step was to learn to read patterns via a book on blanket squares, making a (cotton) baby blanket for my grand-niece, where each of the 16 squares has a different pattern. That way I could learn cabling, lace knitting, and all sorts of other variants. I won't say that I can remember all the individual stitch instructions by heart, but I can do them and know how to look them up. (And I can remember them during the course of a particular project--they just don't necessarily stick permanently.)

As part of the sock goal, I've been picking up some lovely hand-dyed, fancy fiber sock yarns. But I don't want to do my beginner learning on those! So I went to my local yarn store...oops, the last LYS I went to (in Piedmont) has closed OH NOES! Search...search...search...ok there's another LYS in the Elmwood district. (These are both over on the bay side of the hills.) Explain my goals "a nice boring plain-color sock yarn that I might not mind frogging a lot." Turns out the Piedmont store closed because the proprietor wanted to retire...but she's now part-timing at the Elmwood store. So that feels like a happy story.

Now I'm swatching. Swatching! Me! Seat-of-the-pants me! I had picked up a lovely (expensive) interchangeable needle+cable set. Should be good for all my knitting needs, right? Uh...the smallest needles in the set are size 3, which is definitely too large for socks. And doing online research, not only does that brand not do smaller needle tips for the interchangeable set-up, nobody does smaller needles for interchangeable cable sets. This probably has to do with the problem of the minimum size of the little screw-in thingy connecting the cable and needle.

OK, back to the store, and not knowing what size is going to turn out to be optimal, I went ahead and got circular needles in sizes 2, 1, 0, and 00. (I have some even smaller double-points from back when I was doing some medieval silk knitting.) I wanted the circulars because I want to do the thing where you knit both socks at the same time on the same circular needle. This may possibly be over-ambitious at this point in my learning curve, but when have I not been over-ambitious?

Back to swatching. At this point I've done size 2 and size 1 and we're approaching the target stitch gauge, so I have hopes that I'll hit it before I run out of needle sizes.

ETA: The sock book I'm working from is "Vogue Knitting: The Ultimate Sock Book." It has vast amounts of theory alongside the specific patterns, which warms my scientist's heart, but makes for boring reading when I'm still figuring out how all the theory fits in with the practice.

Periodically I have enough to-do items at the U.C. Berkeley library that I organize a trip through the tunnel around that task. I alternate between driving or BART+bicycle, depending, but since I had some widely-spread add-ons yesterday, I drove.

Yesterday was a Cal home game. I should have biked.

All it meant was that I had to park in the downtown Berkeley parking garage and hike a bit more--no big deal--but circling the campus in the process of discovering this fact was annoying.

I also was able to have a chat with the Permissions Desk person to confirm what types of things my alumna library card does not get for me. Also to confirm that *everyone* hits a cut-off point past downloading a certain number of files from a library computer. I can get full JSTOR access in the library, including downloading articles to a thumb drive, but at some point (which seems to be variable) it declines to keep downloading. Changing terminals makes no difference. I should experiment with changing thumb drive *and* terminal to see if it's reading the drive ID in some way. (Permission granted for someone knowledgeable to explain the possibilities to me.)

This limit also exists when downloading files for Haithi Trust documents. Now the complicating factor for Haithi Trust is that *how* you are able to download the file depends entirely on the specific file and its permissions. Yesterday I wanted to download a copy of "A new picture of Paris, or, The stranger's guide to the French metropolis" a 1827 guidebook for the English traveler. I'd been pulling some screenshots for key information on my home computer, but don't have any download permissions on my own.

Problem is: A New Picture of Paris has slightly restricted permissions where you can only download one page at a time. And the download limit evidently is around 130 downloads. After which, not only could I not continue downloading A New Picture of Paris pages, but I couldn't download anything else. Fortunately, one of the other articles I wanted to get was available through a different online portal which allowed emailing the content as one of the options. (And without needing any extra log-on layer.)

I joked to the help desk guy that maybe I should go for a second PhD just to get the full library access. He pointed out that simply signing up for a University Extension class might do it. But I'm not sure I want to go that far. Mostly patience and workarounds will do it.

The only item on my shopping list that I hit a brick wall on was Neo-Victorian Lesbians on Screen (2025, by Sarah E. Maier & Rachel M. Friars). Only way to get it through UCB is inter-library loan, and that's not part of the alumni privileges. I was able to see a list of chapters with summaries and it looks like a fascinating book. But because it's criticism of modern media (about historic lesbians), it's somewhat tangential to my topic. Too tangential to shell out a hundred bucks for a hard copy. Even too tangential to shell out $35 for an ebook. (I fantasize about having both the standing and the nerve to request review copies of academic books, but I don't feel like I'm operating at that level currently.)

And now I'm deciding whether to hop on my fold-up bike and BART down to Walnut Creek for the No Kings rally (like I did last time), or park+BART then see how crowded the BART-downtown shuttle is. (Though it's a semi-reasonable walk, and I probably won't be doing other exercise today.) Last time I did the bike+BART thing and had the bad luck to get a flat. Which was awkward because I didn't take the bike bag with the tools and spare tubes (because I didn't want to lug it to the rally), so getting home involved a lot of walking the bike. No reason to expect it to happen again, but...salience effect, you know?