I actually got a bunch of errands done before lunch. First, I had to take a package to the post office. And, therein hangs a tale.

I had heard rumors about paying the postage on-line and printing out a mailing label, so I decided to try that. I went to the USPS web site, registered for an account, input the particulars for the package, and prepared to print my label. So far, so good. The instructions specify that you should print a sample label before printing your actual mailing label. The sample didn't print. The instructions specified that you need to have Acrobat Reader installed, so I downloaded Acrobat Reader (and, once I installed it, discovered that I already had it). But, Reader didn't pop up when it was supposed to. I had some vague recollection that Reader plays more nicely with Safari than with Firefox, so I tried again in Safari. (The account information was saved, but I had to enter the credit card info yet again.) Still, no dice. And, when I looked in the list of Safari plugins, there was no sign of Acrobat Reader. So I started googling for info about how to make it appear on the list. After about an hour of reading useless stuff, I finally hit paydirt. I'm running OS 10.6.2 on a relatively new Macbook Pro. OS 10.6.2 and other Apple-provided software, like Safari, runs by default in 64-bit mode (normally, quite desirable). However, the Adobe PDF plug-in for Safari is 32-bit only, and the trick to having it available is to force Safari to run in 32-bit mode. So, I did that (in the Get Info panel), and, to my surprise, I was able to print my label. And next time I have to send a package, it will be a piece of cake to print the label (and save a few cents on postage, and get free delivery confirmation).

So the first errand was to drop the package off at the post office. Then, I decided to head for Milford, about 15 miles away. Normally, the Milford shopping run involves the LLBean Outlet and Trader Joes. (It used to include Costco, but I decided not to renew the membership this year. While there are products I really like, I just don't buy enough there for it to be worth the membership fee.) But today there was an addition. Whole Foods has come to south-central Connecticut. I've heard all the stories about high-quality organic food, not to mention all the complaints about prices. And, yeah, the quality did seem to be good, and I liked the way they highlighted local products throughout the store (even though their notion of "local" was a bit more expansive than mine would be). But, the prices... At some level, I suppose I really thought the complaints about the prices were based on a comparison with Walmart. I know that organic, grass-fed meat and wild-raised fish cost more than their factory-farmed counterparts. But, really, I can't justify blowing my entire weekly grocery budget on enough meat for 3 or 4 dinners. At least the wild salmon fillets were on special, and I could get a small one. And their base chicken (not the super-crunchy organic) pieces were OK. But I don't see putting Whole Foods on my regular shopping rounds. Except for one thing...they have a bin in the front of the store for recycling #5 plastics, which I can't put out for curb-side recycling. That's worth something to me.

In the LLBean outlet, I found a new pair of heavy winter mittens that will serve me well when I have to shovel snow on really cold days. And in TJs, I stocked up on frozen food for my parents.

Then on the way home, I stopped in at the farmstand for cabbage and a few other things. To my delight, they have kale, so I took some local sausage out of the freezer, and tomorrow will make sausage and kale soup. I picked up the sausage at a local farmers market—I'm not sure which one—and, while it was a little more expensive than supermarket sausage meat, even the local brand, it was still about half the price I would have paid at Whole Foods.

And, now, I should be doing laundry, but instead I'm puttering around online.

In a departure from off-day routine, I actually got something done before lunch! It's a dryish day out (at least the humidity is no longer at mid-summer levels) and there's a light breeze. So I finally pulled out the duvet cover that was lying in the spare room. It needed to be washed and put away until November, or whenever I decide that it's time to bring back the down comforter. So, the duvet cover (along with two pillowcases) is hanging on the line. While I was at it, I washed my old winter coat that I want to freecycle this winter (I feel guilty freecycling stuff that needs serious maintenance); that's heavy enough to rate dryer time. And while I was at it, I folded about half the laundry that I did last weekend.

Lunch today was a salad, sourced as follows:

Lettuce, from a local farmstand
Radish, from the farmstand
Sliced onion, from my garden
Cherry tomatoes, from my garden
Cucumber, from the farmstand
Hard boiled egg, from a local farm (may have been bought at the supermarket)
Havarti cheese, from a local cheese shop (I'm not sure whether they made it or not; they have both cheeses that they've made and cheeses that they get elsewhere)
Dressing, home-made, from my standard ingredients, all mass-produced
Half an apple, from the farmstand (new crop!)
Peanut butter, all-natural brand from the supermarket

It only seems like I haven't done anything all weekend. OK, I haven't done a lot, but I did get some things done.

Yesterday I did two loads of laundry. Since it was grim out, I hung them on the racks in the basement, and they're almost dry. There's a third load in the machine now, and I left enough space on the racks to hang everything in it. (If I'd been energetic enough first thing in the morning, I could have hung this load outside on the line, but now I'm not sure that things will dry before dark.)

I also went out briefly in the afternoon because of a chocolate emergency, the emergency being that I had none. While out, I filled the car (it was running on fumes, and filling it over the weekend will save time on Monday morning). The closest sensible place to buy chocolate is my local health food store. While much of what they have is natural and organic junk food, they do have some bulk items and natural ingredients. In their gluten-free section, I found something I've been looking for for a while: chick pea flour. It's lower carb (and higher fiber) than conventional wheat flour and is, I think, the breading for the fabulous cauliflower I had at an Indian restaurant a few months ago. And, they had free samples of locally-picked early-harvest apples. So, I came home with a Gingergold, which was every bit as good as I remember them being last year.

On the agenda for today, aside from the remaining laundry, is figuring out what to do with the cup or so of blackberries I have. I'm thinking some kind of syrup to put in yoghurt would be good.

And, of course, there will be knitting, and, if I get energetic, the bathrooms need cleaning.

I really try to minimize waste in my life. I (mostly) bring my own bags when I go shopping. I try to buy local as much as possible, from local (non-chain) merchants. This time of year, I shop at farmstands and farmers markets as much as possible. But sometimes it's very hard.

Years ago, I bought a cheap plastic glass for rinsing when I brush my teeth. I don't remember where I bought it, though it was probably the housewares department at a supermarket. Well, that little cup has reached the end of its useful life. It's gross looking even when it comes out of the dishwasher. So the time has come to replace it. Ideally, I wanted to buy a few 6 oz plastic tumblers, so I could rotate them through the dishwasher, and even have spares for overnight guests. Plastic is necessary, since there are too many hard surfaces in a bathroom and it's too easy to drop something on one of those hard surfaces.

Easier said than done. I tried two different supermarkets. While they have plenty of disposable plastic cups, they didn't have anything approximating a child's juice glass. Hell, they don't have glass juice glasses, just larger glasses. Bed, Bath, & Beyond was equally useless. They have very nice tumblers matching their other decorative bath pieces (soap dishes, etc.). But these are really decorative only. The average price was $10; they're large and breakable; and they're not dishwasher-safe. So, not so much. On to the bathroom decor sections of Lowe's and Home Depot. One of these didn't have household items at all; the other had a selection pretty much mirroring that from Bed, Bath, & Beyond.

So, one evening a few weeks ago, I started Googling. With some judicious massaging of search terms, I discovered that plastic cups like I wanted are, indeed, made, and I could even order them from a variety of on-line vendors for less than a dollar each, plus shipping. For any reasonable quantity of cups, I'd be paying more for shipping than for the cups. But I couldn't find them locally.

Until tonight. I had to stop in at JoAnn Fabrics to get some hemp twine to replace the brake band on my spinning wheel. In the same plaza, there's a Dollar Tree and a Walmart. The Dollar Tree had nothing useful. However, while I was wandering through the Walmart, trying to figure out where I would be if I were a plastic cup, I found 4 plastic cups that another customer had ditched with in the food container department. They definitely weren't in the right place; I couldn't find a shelf label of any sort matching the price. The cups are almost exactly what I wanted; they're 10 oz rather than 6 oz, but they cost less than 50¢ each. And, they're dishwasher safe.

Now all I have to do is remove the stickum from the labels, discard the grotty old cup, and come to grips with the fact that I found what I needed at Walmart.

God Bless America in the Kate Smith recording, in place of The Star Spangled Banner, before a Philadelphia Flyers playoff game, WIN

God Bless America in the Kate Smith recording, in place of Take Me Out to the Ballgame, during the 7th inning stretch at Yankee Stadium (old or new), EPIC FAIL

Right now I have parked in front of my house:

(1) Car wrapped around telephone pole, driven by local college students on the way home from hockey practice (fortunately non-fatal combination of college kids, icy roads, and an SUV that, as the grownups know, doesn't stop any better than a normal car)
(2) Their friend's car
(3) A cop car
(4) A sheared off sign warning of the curve
(5) A tow truck trying to figure out how to remove the hockey players' car
(6) A bunch of guys with flashlights inspecting—or trying to inspect—the telephone pole for possible damage

This street is the only entrance to a decent-sized neighborhood, so it's a very good thing that a snow-plow did manage to get past.

I'm no expert, but I've navigated that particular curve in much worse road conditions, so I suspect that they were going too fast for road conditions. This suspicion is heightened by the piece of bumper that ended up in my front yard, about 20 feet from the phone pole.

Yesterday, I was out all day. One of the groups/forums I participate in on Ravelry (account required) organized a jaunt to WEBS, an amazing yarn shop in Northhampton, MA. So, about 30 wild and crazy knitters from all over the Northeast (at least the area delimited by a geometric area with apexes of New Haven; Cape Cod; Portland, ME; Rutland, VT; and Albany, NY) converged. And shopped. WEBS had been alerted to this plan, and were prepared with an open classroom for us to leave stuff in, goodie bags, and extra staff to facilitate check-out.

Lunch was a little chaotic, though, as the one Northhampton native was suffering from a sinus infection and went home to sleep it off. The plan we finally arrived at was to go to an Irish pub downtown, which I was assured was not walking distance from WEBS. So, I got in the car, together with another equally confused participant, and headed for downtown. Within two blocks, we passed an Irish pub, but decided that that couldn't be where everyone else was headed for, because it was totally within walking distance. Instead, the two of us lucked into a parking space downtown, with time left on the meter, and had a nice lunch by ourselves, because, as it turned out, almost everyone else was at the Irish pub that was totally within walking distance. No matter. While we missed out on the bawdy bar jokes, we still had fun.

I came home with a large bag of yarn, and plans to photograph it all this morning for my Ravelry stash pages. One problem, though. It's been rainy and overcast all day, and so no photographs, not of the new yarn, not of the various projects I'm working on or have recently completed.

Most of what I bought was sock yarn. Most of it was expensive enough that most non-knitters would freak out ("$20 for a pair of socks! You know you can buy socks, don't you?"). But I was delighted to find a new stock of my absolute favorite summer sock yarn, a Plymouth Yarns wool/bamboo blend, which comes in at $10 for enough yarn for a pair of socks. I had picked up a ball of it last spring at WEBS. After knitting a pair of socks (Ravelry link) with it, I'd tried desperately to find more, and had had no success to speak of. The yarn, Rockin' Sox, didn't even appear on the Plymouth Yarns web site. In the meantime, I'd tried a wool/bamboo blend from another manufacturer, one with a reputation for higher-quality yarns, and been disappointed at the number of rough spots in the plying that I encountered. Well, yesterday at WEBS, I found more of the yarn I wanted. But somehow, this year, it's called Sockin' Sox, but it's definitely the same thing. So that was a total win.

In addition, I bought enough Lopi Lite for a sweater. Mind you, I have enough yarn stashed for three or four winter sweaters (I realize that, in some circles, this would show me to be a rank amateur). But, of all my winter sweaters, the one I like the best is a very simple pullover knit in a heathered dark charcoal Lopi Lite. I made this long enough ago that I have no picture of it anywhere that I can locate, and it's softened up wonderfully (it's very rough yarn when you're working with it). So, I bought enough yarn in a light olive green to make another pullover. (Actually, I bought more than enough, because one always does.)

And I bought something that I once swore I'd never buy, sock blockers. These are forms whose primary function is to make socks look pretty when you photograph them. I'm such a dork that I had a sock along with me so I could make sure I bought the same size. (Actually, it's the finished mate to the sock I'm currently working on for my sister.)

I had to re-login earlier today, and discovered a comment that had been waiting for moderation for three weeks. I'm supposed to get email notification of comments from people not on my friends' list, but somehow this one must have gotten eaten by a spam filter. Sorry, Norma!

So, I was driving home around 7 o'clock this evening, and spotted a car with no headlights on. I flashed my highbeams,

( and )

I stopped off at the grocery store after work for a little pre-snow panic buying.

My list was: Stoneyfield Farms yoghurt, Breakstone sour cream (I had a coupon), Joseph's low carb pita, Farmstand brand shelled walnut pieces.

What I came home with: yoghurt, sour cream (on sale, on top of the coupon), an avocado (needed), and a jigsaw puzzle of the front page of the Boston Globe from Nov 5, 2008. The puzzle will make a nice birthday gift for my mother.

I'm especially annoyed about the pita. I like the low carb pita, and my blood sugar responds well to it, which is to say, very little. But it's really hit or miss whether it's available when I shop. When I complain about its absence, the store manager will tell me that he's not responsible; the Josephs distributor decides when to restock. This is the case with other supermarket departments as well. The supermarket provides shelf space, but takes no responsibility for product selection. But they also insulate the people who are responsible for product selection from complaints about this selection. There are three different stores that I sometimes shop at that sometimes stock this particular product. I shouldn't have to go to all three of them in hopes that I might be able to stock my pantry.

Well, I had three items left on yesterday's to-do list.

(1) Vacuum as much floor as I can
(2) Clean the half-bath off my bedroom
(3) Put away all the knitting books

I am half-done and that will have to do. I did some vacuuming, in the bedroom and the hall. There's enough stuff on the floor in the living room that I can't really vacuum without dealing with it.

More to the point, I dusted down an empty book shelf downstairs in the spare room. It was empty, because I'd had other things in mind for it. But the wall shelf upstairs in my "crafts" room (which has become more of a junk room) was buckling under the weight of the knitting books. So, after 7 years in the house, I revised my plan, and put all of the knitting books and magazines downstairs. It's less convenient, but the shelf will hold the books with no problem. So it's all good.

And the bathroom? Well, we will not speak of that again.

Today's list, in no particular order (updated at 6:15 PM and again at 11:15PM):

(1) Vacuum as much floor as I can
(2) Clean the half-bath off my bedroom
(3) Put away all the knitting books

Tomorrow is another day...

(4) A little grocery shopping and maybe look for a new dish drainer at Target I didn't like the dish drainers, but I did look
(5) Grind meat for chili
(6) Make chili It's simmering away on the stove now It's quite good, for something made from a mix, albeit a gourmet yummy mix I bought at a festival. (Of course, I added chopped beef, shredded cheese, and cut up green onion and cilantro.)
(7) Knit or spin or both
(8) Watch and mock the NHL skills competition

Maybe I should get dressed and get started.

1) Ate breakfast.
2) Brought dry clothes upstairs. They were washed and hung to dry on Friday.
3) Shoveled walk and driveway. Yesterday, after 45 minutes work got me about 10% of the way done, I paid a neighbor's son-in-law who's starting a landscaping business to snow-blow the rest of the 6-8" deep heavy snow. Overnight, we had another 3-4" of lighter snow, so I could deal with all of that myself, in about 45 minutes.
4) Reheated some turkey-kale soup for lunch; I made the soup on Friday, from a carcass I stuck in the freezer last winter.
5) Photographed some finished knitting projects.
( Details and Pictures )
6) Watched most of the Patriots-Cardinals game. There was snow and it was a blowout.
7) Heard the plow come by again.
8) Spent another hour shoveling the inch or so of new snow since the first time I was out today, including the mass of crud that the plow threw up at the end of the driveway. Pondered the stupidity of the article on the ergonomics of snow-shoveling that I read in this morning's paper. It advocated pushing the snow in front of you rather than flinging it to the side. I already have snowbanks that are, in some places, two feet high. If I pushed the snow to the side instead of flinging it up, I would eventually squeeze my car out of my driveway.
9) Developed a craving for hot chocolate.
10) Came inside and made hot chocolate.
11) Turned on the Jets-Seahawks game. There is far more snow in Seattle than there was in Foxboro.

Today did not start out very well. I got to bed late last night (I decided fairly late that I needed to wind a ball of rather sticky yarn so I can start a scarf today, as it's cold enough for scarves now). And the college boys on the next street were being noisy enough at almost 3AM that I considered calling the police. (I should call during business hours on Monday to find out what the local noise code is.)

I woke up around 8, wondering why the radio wasn't playing. (Even though I don't have to get up early on weekends, I still set the alarm.) I tried to turn the radio on, but nothing happened. It finally occurred to me that that's precisely what should happen when there's a power failure. The clock-radio has a battery to store all of its settings, but you can't listen to the radio on battery. So, I turned over and went back to sleep, assuming that the power would, somehow, be fixed.

Around 9:45, I woke up again. The power still wasn't back. So I stumbled into the kitchen, and squinted at the phone book, looking for the trouble number for United Illuminating. But, I got an "all circuits are busy, try your call again later" recording. Twice. That's more than a little scary.

I do have a boom-box radio in the kitchen, that will run on batteries. However, it has digital tuning, and the LCD display is broken, so it's almost impossible to see what you're doing. I mostly use it with the AUX input to listen to my XM inside, but, fortunately, it was tuned to a known station, from New York, when I switched away from the AUX. The known station was on its normal programming (sports talk), but it's a New York station. I was able, very carefully, to tune in a local station, that was also on its normal, albeit non-local, programming. Even though it was some Fox news crap, it was still strangely reassuring. At that point, I looked up, and my microwave was blinking 12:00. I waited a few minutes for the cable modem to finish resetting itself, and went to the UI web site, trying to figure out what had happened. According to the site, about 25,000 customers in my town were experiencing an outage, but there was no indication what had happened. As of now (12:30), more than half the town is still out.

I have a bunch of errands to do, and a pot of soup to make, so I'd better get going. But I'm wondering whether my normal stores (grocery, liquor, etc.) will have power and whether traffic lights will be working. This could be interesting.

At least I have yarn ready to go so that I have something to knit during the hockey games tonight.

So I have some apples, from the farmstand. I can't eat a whole apple at once, because it would do a number on my blood sugar. So, what's the best way to store a half apple to avoid unappetizing browning?

I've had dental issues lately. I guess that comes with getting older. But, no matter. As a result of avoiding tooth-challenging food, I've just about used up my canned tuna and salmon. That means one thing in my world: a trip to Costco. Costco has the best additive-free canned tuna at a reasonable price. That makes it (almost) worth a special trip, especially as I can stock up on bacon (for when the dental issues are resolved). There are two other retail stops that get combined with the Costco trip (30 miles, round-trip): Trader Joes and the LLBean outlet.

Trader Joes is my source for paper goods made of recycled materials. And their store brand of yoghurt is the same as Stonyfield Farms, for $1 less per 32 oz container. So, I had a TJs list as well.

The thing with Beans is that you never know what you're going to find. But I always have to look. And today I had a specific quest. I've lost about 10 pounds since the 1st of the year. While the dental issues might have something to do with this, it's more likely that I changed the way I eat. Nothing dramatic, but about a year ago, I really committed myself to eating local as much as I can. Given the temperate zone growing season, this isn't fully feasible, but I view it as a target, not as an absolute. So, I didn't eat huge salads during the winter; instead, I had a lot of braised cabbage. I don't have any local sources of meat, but I started choosing packaging with smaller serving sizes. Thick-cut porkchops are typically cut to be close to half a pound. They're not quite large enough to provide two servings, so there's a real temptation to eat the entire thing rather than saving some. So, now I buy the package of thin-cut porkchops, which are typically under a quarter of a pound. As a result, I've been eating less meat, and, when I buy fish for dinner, I'm reducing serving sizes in the same way.

This loss is doing great things for my blood sugar control. But, it's not so nice for my wardrobe. Shorts and slacks that fit me properly last year are now too big. And garments that were just a little too big last year (that I kept in case my weight fluctuated upward) are unwearably big this year. Couple that with the fact that some of my stuff is so old that the elastic in the waistbands needs to be replaced (if I can work out how to do this).

So, LL Beans outlet. While they have some regular merchandise, most of the stock is sold at half the original price. But there are also racks going for 20% or 50% off of the outlet price. The flip side is that if you grab something that's too big, there's no guarantee you'll find the same thing in a smaller size. But today, today was so my day. I came away with 5 pairs of slacks and one pair of nice shorts, for under $60. That gives me something to wear now, and if my weight bounces back up, it won't be devastating.

The Good

So, I just had my main bathroom redone. Unlike pasketti, I paid people to do it for me. However, I still had to go out and buy fixtures myself. I have a whole stack of receipts to add to my "House" folder, so that if I ever have to figure out how much I put into home improvements over the years I can. Yesterday, I got the Visa bill including most of these purchases. Even without checking the receipts, I could identify most of the purchases (light fixture, toilet, cabinetry, tile, towel bars). But, the Lowes charge was a bit of a puzzlement. I couldn't locate the receipt, and the charge seemed to be too high. All I could remember getting at Lowes was the mirror and some CF bulbs for the new light fixture. There was around $100 unaccounted for. So I called customer service at the Lowes I shopped at, read off a few numbers from the statement and confirmed my name. The CS rep put me on hold for less than two minutes, and came back, telling me that the third item on the charge was a faucet set. Yep. The new faucets in the new sink came from Lowes.

The Bad

This morning I decided to take my shower (in my new bathroom!) after breakfast. That turned out to be a bad decision. As I was drinking my coffee, the power went out. I looked outside, and there was a crew from United Illuminating moving lines to a new pole. They clearly had cut the power to do so. So I threw on some clothes and went outside to find out how long the power would be out. The guy I spoke to told me that it would be at least an hour-and-a-half. He further said that they had knocked on doors to alert homeowners who would be affected of the power cut. I told him that nobody had knocked on my door, and that I had been up and dealing with breakfast for well over an hour. He told me that they had. So I went inside to finish my coffee (a shower was out of the question as there are no windows in my new bathroom). After a few minutes, I decided to call UI to register a complaint. The woman I spoke to was appropriately sympathetic. But it was only after I got off the phone that I realized that I should have asked for a few dollars credit. Oh well.

In one of the forums I participate in on Ravelry, some posters talk about "yarn accidents": "Gosh, officer, I don't know how that luscious sock yarn made its way from the shop to my car to my house, but I'll just have to gird my loins and knit something from it."

Today was the first day of the local Farmers' Market. As Farmers' Markets go, it's a small one. There are usually 3 or 4 farmers represented, as well as a local bakery and a soap-maker. Today there were two soap-makers and a funky salad maker with an odd business model. But the pickle maker from last year wasn't there. So I wandered around, and selected a quart of strawberries (on the list) and a bag of peas (on the list). I couldn't find radishes (also on the list). But, somehow, a ginormous bag of Swiss chard found its way into my car, and, thence, into my kitchen.

When I got home, I weighed the Swiss chard: over 3 pounds. That, my friends, is a lot of Swiss chard. I cleaned half of it, and discarded (and composted) the stems from the other half. I then put the cleaned half in a soup pot, with just the water sticking to it, and steamed it until it wilted. Following that, I spun the water off of it. For dinner tonight, I took about a third of the steamed chard and sauteed it in olive oil with chopped garlic and red pepper flakes. It was delicious. But I have enough steamed chard for two or three more meals, and as much more raw chard in the fridge. I'm thinking I'll freeze some and make a crustless quiche.

But, yeah, a chard accident, most definitely.

There are 1500+ people signed up for Summer of Socks 2008. That means that there are 1500+ people competing to knit socks between June 21 and some time around September 1. There are prizes galore. Last summer, somebody knit 42 pairs of socks over the summer. I can't imagine. Even during the Stanley Cup playoffs, when I watched a lot of TV over the course of two months, I only managed 6.3 pairs of socks. That's a little less than a pair of socks per week. And there's less knitting time over the summer. So, we shall see.

Of course, I've been getting work done on the house. Aside from the air conditioner, I've been getting one of the bathrooms totally redone. The original bathroom, that I've been living with for 7 years was awful. It seemed that every few months I had to replace toilet innards, the medicine chest smelled, the floor rolled, there was no storage space to speak of, the vanity light was gross, and the electrician who put in the overhead heat/fan/light unit did a piss-poor job on the switches. And there were very few towel bars. All that is gone. I have nice tile floor, a new vanity, a new toilet, a linen cabinet next to the vanity, and the switch situation has been fixed. Still to come is a new vanity light, a nice mirror over the sink, a cabinet over the toilet, and towel bars.

There's been a bit of adventure getting the work done, and it's taking longer than I'd anticipated. Between the contractor's girlfriend taking ill and the contractor being attacked by a vicious dog on another job, there have been setbacks. So, I've had to take more vacation days than I anticipated to "supervise". In this context, supervising involves giving workmen permission to use the downstairs bathroom, providing plastic bags and glasses of water, and changing the vacuum cleaner bag. But it's also given me unanticipated knitting time. As a result, there's an actual change that I'll finish my first pair of socks within a week. Right now, I'm about 1/3 done with the second sock.

Of course, I started off with a pair of worsted weight hiking socks. On the other hand, the yarn, a soy-polypropelene blend, is sticky in a way that wool-blend yarns aren't. But the sock, as knit, has a sproingy feel to it. I have enough of this yarn for two pairs of socks. But I want to finish the first pair and actually go for a hike in them before I start the second pair, as I might want to knit the other pair with a looser gauge. We shall see.