I know.  It was a shameful lapse.  It came without warning.  It lasted too long.  It’s just been that kind of week around here.  There hasn’t been any one dramatic upheaval, just lots of little unexpected changes.  It’s just been…busy.  Alas, not that satisfying kind of busy where at least you feel like you’re getting lots of things accomplished.  Nope.  Instead it’s been that really infuriating kind of busy where you feel like you’re working crazy hard just to keep up.  And, perhaps worst of all from your perspective, it’s the kind of busy that doesn’t lend itself to knitting.  Somehow I doubt you come here to hear that the oven is on the fritz, or to revel in the tale of my (unsuccessful) attempt to summit Mount Laundry.

There is a wee bit of progress on the knitting front, but it’s also a bit scattered.  I’m working on the second of the blue lacy socks.  They’ll likely be called Gramercy and they’re coming out some time in mid September (assuming of course I can get the second one done and take it out for photos between now and then).  I’ve cast on a was-supposed-to-be-mindless-but-then-I-went-and-shot-that-all-to-hell sock that I’ll be able to show you soon.  I’ve got Heather’s What Would Madame Defarge Knit socks well underway.  They’re damn cool, but the very antitheses of mindless.

And then, somewhere in the middle of all that, I fell pray to the knitting equivalent of crack.  I lost all track of my good sense and spent a lot of time knitting tentacles.  Yes I mean that in the most literal sense.  Stand-alone, three-dimensional tentacles…those grabby squirmy things hanging out on your favorite sea critter.  As an aside (and a deeply pedantic aside at that), the things on an octopus, and most of the things on a squid or cuttlefish, are technically arms.  Squid and cuttlefish have both arms and tentacles, while some beasties have only tentacles.  Arms (well, cephalopod arms, likely not your arms) generally have suckers all down one side, while tentacles usually have suckers only at the tip.  Got all that? Excellent.  So with that background I can clarify and say that I’ve been knitting cephalopod arms and blithely calling them tentacles.  I have every intention of continuing to call them tentacles too, as ‘cephalopod arms’ just doesn’t sound as cuddly.