Since Mother Eve in the Garden long ago

Finished the heel! This sock is at least half done! The overall size is determined by the yarn itself and it seems like the photos of women's socks show the length of the foot and leg/ankle part of the sock as equal, so since these are for a man's foot I expect I used up more of it and the leg will be shorter. I hope. Because I am a bit sick of sockage after all that messing around with the heel (which came out with too many stitches on one side for some reason, I think I must have misunderstood some of the instructions).

I knitted a gauge swatch, and it came out right with the assigned needle and everything! Unfortunately, the ribbing at the bottom of the cardigan is supposed to be done in a needle I don't have somehow (I have so many needles!), so I'm using a slightly smaller one ... (I typed this several days ago, the back is 4" long now.)

Got in an argument with people on Twitter in the replies to a NYT post about Bridgerton/historical costuming. The original person I responded to said that the word "corset" is inappropriate in a Regency context because it inherently refers to tightlace-able Victorian undergarments, and then someone started arguing with me that "corset" wasn't in common usage until "well into the Victorian era" and that fashion historians never use "corset" for the early soft corsets. You can call anything whatever you want for your own purposes, but don't badly miscorrect me when I'm correcting someone else, okay.

This week went by very fast. What's been going on in it?

- At work, I finished cleaning up the PastPerfect entries that had the whole object number in the accession group field and nothing in the object number field; about 20% of them had no numbers at all, which is unfortunate, and I didn't actually do anything with them. Eventually I want us to have a blog like the one Kjirsten does for Clermont, so I've started working on a post about a local woman whose niece(?) donated a bunch of her photos and papers, including a scrapbook from her years at St. Lawrence U in the 1920s. There's still a bit of a mystery that I can't solve through nyshistoricnewspapers.org - she was originally on track to graduate in 1926, but she ended up graduating in 1927. It seems like something might have happened around 1925, maybe she was ill and missed a semester? I hate to post anything incomplete ... But anyway, there are some great photos from her sorority and I think people will like it. The web guy says he thinks he can integrate it into the site.

- I haven't been doing any sewing at all and I feel really bad about it, but at the same time not bad enough to actually do it. The honesty meme going around the blogs is great (I'm not doing it for obvious reasons), but it makes me even more hard on myself - other people's great pictures have never been the issue for me, it's the way other people get work done despite not being in Inspired Sewing Mode that does it. I'm always impressed by the way you all manage to finish things, especially when you're feeling bad in general. So ... yeah. But I have been knitting a lot, as the evenings are fairly cool. My cardigan is about five inches long from the back of the neck now. Twelve more rows of increases before I can put the arm stitches on scrap yarn, at which point it should speed way up.

- I read A Song for Arbonne by Guy Gavriel Kay a little while ago, and it was good. Pseudo-history! But it did have the problem that's common to pseudo-history - the countries that are stand-ins for real European countries are based on broad stereotypes in an unrealistic way. Not!Italy has banks and cool, not!Normandy is uber-warlike and oppressive, not!Occitania is all troubadors and egalitarian. But overall the story was paced very well - it's a long book, but I never felt like I was stuck or it needed to speed up -and even if the villains were OTT villainous, I'm always good with some OTT villains. The only thing that left me disappointed was ( spoilers )

Plus, I don't think you should fictionalize the crusade against the Cathars in such a starkly regressive/progressive dichotomy. The Cathar heresy was pretty radical and politicized - their persecution was horrible, but it wasn't due to the kings and nobility thinking they were too feminist or just being warmongers. I don't hold with the idea that whenever you analogize something you're saying they're exactly the same, but yeah.

Now I've started the first Harry Dresden book and a non-fiction on the rise and fall of the de' Medici family.

- I need to take everything out of my cupboards and move them around because all the food is above the fridge and it's getting too warm. And I need to vacuum, and I'm considering having the landlord take out the A/C unit because I'd rather have a fan. (I can set it to "fan" but then it's incredibly loud and awful and it's right next to the couch.)

Nearly done with the hat I'm making for Owen for Christmas - the Amstel hat. I just have to finish the ribbing along the bottom. For some reason it seems smaller than it does in the pictures from Interweave. Maybe the model just has a tiny head?

I have so much yarn stored up that I'm going to try to do something with it. Everything acrylic, I'm just going to give to Mom - she does knitting with her Crafts class, and she doesn't mind using acrylic herself. Then I'm going to do stuff with the rest. I've got a big stack of Interweaves and several books (one is Knitting Little Luxuries or something like that, small projects), and I'll just make things and give them away, and hopefully make a dent before next summer and its re-enacting season.

I've read more fanfiction in the past two weeks than the past six months. It's a bit strange.