Monkeys & Legos
Ah, hello Day 2 of the New Year! Or are you no longer new now that you are 2 days old? No matter. I am still feeling the brand new optimism that comes from the arrival of a new year.
Lists and plans are still a thing of the future today. I’ve got time and I will get down to business when I’m good and ready. Today I am working on my first project of the new year and cooking my Mom a batch of my Dad’s spaghetti sauce. It feels auspicious that I am doing both these things on the second day of the year.
The holidays always remind me of my Dad. We would wait for all our favorite Christmas specials to come on TV after dinner. Hurry! Charlie Brown Christmas is starting! Now it’s all on demand, but back then we had to make sure we were planted in front of the TV on the proper channel or we’d miss out. There was something special about not being able to pause or rewind our favorite specials. You had to be present both physically and emotionally. I kind of miss those days. But mostly, I miss my Dad. He passed away in 2009 and sometimes I almost forget he won’t answer the phone when I call or give me a whiskery kiss and tell me not to take any “wooden nickels.” But I keep him alive making his spaghetti sauce. He taught me his “recipe” many years ago and I almost never cook it, choosing the speedy cheater method I’ve developed over years of college and young professional life rather than the low and slow day long approach his recipe requires. A couple years ago I didn’t know what to give my Mom for Mother’s Day, so I decided to dig out my handwritten recipe from the cooking lesson Dad gave me so many years ago, and I made her a batch. My Mom, notoriously hard to please with gifts, practically shed a tear. You’d think I’d delivered the moon and stars. Today, I’m giving that gift again. But really, it’s a gift for both of us. We both get to start the year with my Dad.
As for the socks, they’re auspicious too. I knit a pair of Cookie A’s Monkey socks a couple years ago and really enjoyed both the process and the result. My plan (as yet fully unrevealed) for 2016 is to knit a lot of socks. That’s all I’m really committing to you see: a lot. No specific number, no limiting myself to only socks this year….. why stress? But more on that later. Anyway, back to the Monkey thing. The pattern I cast on for is a version of the Monkey socks, but toe-up and purl-less. It’s called Los Monos Locos and has been in my queue since April 2011 (!). Though I loved the Monkey pattern and really want a pair for myself, I thought it would be more fun to work on my queue at the same time I work on my sock problem er, goals. So I cast on and guess what I discovered while surreptitiously slurping photos for my Ravelry project page? The Chinese Astrology Year of the Monkey begins in February.
How’s that for auspicious?