4:00am

I've been up since 4:00am.  I hate it when that happens.  You know when you wake up in the middle of the night, and you see the time and think, "Man, that's early.", and then you put your head back down to go back to sleep and then this one little thought gets in your head and forget it - you're whole brain starts going and the next thing you know your wide awake thinking, "Stop thinking! Go back to sleep.", and that only makes it worse, so then you are up?  You think about reading but the book you want to start is 860-ish pages in paperback and putting the book light on a book that size just wasn't going to happen.  And then you think, "Well, I may as well be productive with these thoughts since I'm just laying here doing nothing."  And then you get up, go downstairs, say hello to the cat, take some blog pictures even though it's still dark and you wanted to have good daylight for your next round of pictures but it just can't seem to wait until it's daylight.  Then you turn the computer on to start the blog and get sidetracked by a Knitpicks email that says they are having a sale on sock yarn and you have to stop yourself from making a middle-of-the-night-but-not-really impulse buy since you have sock yarn coming out your ears.  I'm sure you can relate.

In unrelated news, my little doodlebugs turned 19 months old yesterday.  They love to have The Cat in the Hat   read to them, and think it's hilarious to shake hands when we get to the part, "How do you do?  Would you like to shake hands with Thing One and Thing Two?".  They shake hands with me, then they shake hands with each other.  When my brother-in-law came home yesterday, we were just reading that part and they shook hands with him too.  So funny.

In Knitting News:
Some progress on the back of my Meadowlark-that-I-keep-wanting-to-call-Watershed, which is also a pattern I want to knit someday:

I also started another Great American Afghan square.  I couldn't seem to help myself.  It's #14.

Got almost half the square done during naptime yesterday.  I couldn't believe how fast it went.  It was much easier than I first thought it would be based on the chart:

Doesn't that look intimidating?  It's really very easy.  Just knits, purls and slipped stitches, and each line is has a fairly easy pattern to memorize so it just speeds along.

In Book News:
Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple: Loved. It.  So much.  I heard about this book from the Books on the Nightstand podcast.  I'm including the picture link for Amazon because I love the cover of the book.
I couldn't figure out how to describe the book, so I'm putting in the Amazon description:

"Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she's a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she's a disgrace; to design mavens, she's a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom.

Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette's intensifying allergy to Seattle--and people in general--has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands. A trip to the end of the earth is problematic.

To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, secret correspondence--creating a compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter's role in an absurd world."


I couldn't put this book down. Finished it in 2 days. Written in mostly an epistolary format, using the above mentioned emails, documents etc., it just pulls you along and draws you into this intriguing family. It is very witty, heartbreaking, and also heartwarming.
Done with blog.  Still dark out.  Starting 860-ish page book in the living room with regular light, not a book light.