It’s one of life’s little practical jokes.

The Knitting Olympics begins, with a great yarn challenge, and incentive, and all of that fun stuff . . . and so, naturally, this is the day I strike gold at the bookstore. I would even have bypassed the bookstore today altogether, but Mom wanted to go out, and we did need to go to the grocery store, and so . . . well, it was right there AND I still had a $40 gift card from Christmas. What could I do?

I’ve mentioned that my bookstore experiences are either feast or famine–I either find between three and nine books I want within the first few minutes in the store, or . . . nothing at all. I can’t remember the last time I went to a bookstore for just one book, unless you count our last vacation . . . and even then, I ended up buying two.

Well, today was a good browsing day, as you can see!

Not only, that, but my copy of Interweave Knits came today.

Naturally. Because it’s fun to try to distract Debbie from her knitting!

Speaking of knitting, I DID get some done this afternoon, but only about four rows. I had to get up to make supper–homemade pasta, for which I blame Wendy, for getting my tastebuds all excited. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it tasted great, but . . . it wasn’t knitting!

I’ll try to plan my visits to the kitchen better tomorrow–I’m going to make porridge for breakfast, and stew for supper–both of which you can put in a pot and just let simmer, with no more attention than the occasional stir.

Speaking of porridge, did you know there’s a contest for the best porridge? Or, how about this fellow in Scotland who opened up his own lunch cart that sells nothing but porridge? Frankly, that sounds great to me. I just love real, good porridge. I eat a bowl of Quaker Old-Fashioned 5-minutes oatmeal for breakfast at least 5 days a week (with a little milk, no sugar). I never, ever cook with 1-minute Quaker oats (though I will bake with them), and I will not eat instant oatmeal (not only is the texture terrible, but they’re always way, way too sweet), but my favorite is the steel-cut oatmeal (also known here in the U.S. as Irish oatmeal), and my favorite way of cooking it came from Cook’s Illustrated magazine (April 2000), but Alton Brown’s is darn close. (The only real difference is the buttermilk.) It’s just a shame it takes so long, or I’d eat this every single day before work . . . although, it reheats really well, so when I DO make the “real” stuff, I usually make extra, for the week ahead.

Oh, and while I try not to pay too much attention to this kind of thing (try, being the operative word), sometime between yesterday and today, my Bloglines subscriptions went into the triple digits. 100 subscribers. Woohoo!

Added: I was just checking out my feeds at Newsgator, and in their “Latest Buzz” section was the following:

The Latest Buzz

• Google Copies Your Hard Drive - Government Smiles in Anticipation (146 incoming links)
• True video iPod to sport 3.5-inch display, touch-screen click wheel (95 incoming links)
• Big mail on campus (74 incoming links)
• Yarn Harlot: The 2006 Knitting Olympics (71 incoming links)
• Ex-CIA Official Faults Use of Data on Iraq (63 incoming links)

Now THAT’s making the big time!!

And last

My Scrabble© Score is: 26. What is your score? Get it here.

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• Tags: Reading • Permalink:Reading Material //