A Curious Statistical Anomaly

For a while, I was knitting a row or two of a sock and then putting it aside. Lots of starts and very few finished — well none of them finished actually — got the finishing of about 12 socks on my ToDo list now and trying not to get overwhelmed by the length of that list .

Then I got in the mood last year and did a seat-of-the-pants sort of proof of concept sweater just to wear around the house. Paul — who hates sweaters by the way — put it on one cold morning and loved it. Seems he really hates sweaters that are tight in the neck. He wore it to work and around the house and actually had it on 4-5 days a week. It was hard to get it back to wash. The problem was it wasn’t even a really good sweater — just navy blue left over yarn knit top down with no pattern and not really following the rules for increases and the sleeves were short.

So, I decided to make him a nice sweater. He picked out some really nice grey yarn (Red Heart’s Grey Heather). By nice I mean it will go into the washer and dryer and be tough since I’m expecting it to be worn as much as the navy blue one from last year.

Got the yarn home and tried to find the Cobblestone Sweater pattern by Jared Flood. I’d made this sweater a couple of years ago for my son. Couldn’t find the pattern which was in a past issue of Interweave Knits but couldn’t find the magazine. So, went to Flood’s website and bought a copy, downloaded the pattern, and started knitting.

In a week, I’d knit the entire lower body and then needed to start the sleeves. Several month’s later I was still on the first sleeve with 6 more pattern repeats to get to the part where you join for the top of the sweater. So, I started knitting when I watched streaming video of class lectures, news shows, etc. and finished the first sleeve in 1 1/2 weeks. I took this picture of the body, pattern, and sleeves two days ago — sorry for the blurriness. The second sleeve is now just 11 patter repeats from being done. Once this sleeve is finished I expect to be able to zoom through the top and finish it. I’ll report next week on how far I get from this point.

I should also note that I’ve made a change from the pattern. I continued a strip of garter stitch up the outside of the sleeves (10 stitches wide).
Next Thursday, I’ll post another photo of the Cobblestone Sweater status. It feels good to be back into knitting again.

The Bad Miss Bennet: A Pride and Prejudice Novel by Jean Burnett. Pegasus (October 19, 2012). ISBN: 978-1605983721. Pages 272. Hardcover. List price $25.95. (Amazon: $20.10 / Kindle: $12.99).

I wasn’t sure what to expect from The Bad Miss Bennet. I’ve read books where Lydia is redeemed to one degree or another but none where the author just doubled down on her behavior and attitudes.

In The Bad Miss Bennet by Jean Burnett, Lydia is a recent widow. Wickham was killed at Waterloo. She doesn’t really miss him as her love for him burned out years ago — but she hates wearing mourning colors, especially black. She resentful of having to live with Elizabeth and Darcy in the boring countryside. So, she makes arrangements to live in London with friends.

In London, her friends are deep in debt and help arrange card games in order to cheat and gain money to support their lifestyle. Lydia is very good at cheating at cards, having learned the fine art from Wickham. Eventually, there are repercussions and they need to find a new venue. Lydia eventually gets drawn in by a confidence trickster, finds a dead body in her quarters, and has many other other adventures — some quite upsetting (to the reader not necessarily to Lydia). Her life is one misfortune after another all blamed on others and nothing to do with her actions.

I had a difficult time reading this because I disliked the character of this instance of Lydia Bennet. She had no redeeming qualities. Even when she did something nice for someone it was in order to further her own plans. She’s given opportunities and chances to change her life but whether she couldn’t recognize the possibilities or chose to misinterpret them, she ignored them and continually reached for the new best thing. Mostly it all boiled down to being able to thumb her nose at her relatives (especially Darcy and his sister, boring Elizabth) and prove she’s better than they are — so there .

I would have liked a Lydia with more depth — one who learns from her mistakes or at least has an inkling that she made mistakes. Time after time she makes the same ones hoping for a different outcome. While time has past for her, she’s basically the same as the Lydia we met in Pride and Prejudice. Her character fixed as Austen wrote her.

Burnett has managed to set Lydia into an interesting time period and because of her character flaws examined some of the politics and social changes at that time in history. She also left the ending open for a sequel. The Bad Miss Bennet is true to the original character of Lydia, extrapolating to a what she would be like after years of Wickham’s influence. The writing will draw the reader in but you may not enjoy the characters or care that much about what happens to them. Lydia is the viewpoint character and all impressions of other people are colored by Lydia’s thoughts and beliefs.

From Notting Hill with Love…Actually by Ali McNamara. Sourcebooks Landmark (October 1, 2012) ISBN: 978-1402269486. Trade Paperback ($14.99 / Amazon $10.19) Kindle eBook ($10.94).

With a title that mentioned two of my favorite movies, I could hardly resist the chance to read this book.

Scarlett O’Brien loves movies which happens to work well with her job. She and her father own a company that makes and repairs popcorn machines mostly used by movie theaters. Her fiance, David, and his family own a string of movie theaters. You’d think it was a match made in heaven except that neither her father or David like movies all that much. They were constantly at Scarlett to grow up and pay attention to her life because movies were pure fantasy. After a particularly stressful dinner with some of David’s clients, Scarlett wasn’t sure what she wanted to do about her upcoming wedding and even about David and her fathers attitude toward her movie addiction, as they called it.

Scarlett daydreamed about movies when life got boring and living with David it often got boring. She’d pretend she was in a movie: acting out scenes that now starred her, getting an award for best actress, writing a great screenplay, or meeting one of her favorite actors. Even her best friend, Maddie, thought she spent far too much time at the movies or dreaming about them. Maddie did feel that Scarlett needed a break from David so she called a friend who needed a house-sitter and set it up for Scarlett to live at their house on Notting Hill for a month. Scarlett thought she’d use the month to see just how many movie moments she could have and prove to David, Maddie, and her father that life could be like a movie.

That’s the set up and it’s actually fun as Scarlett meets some interesting and quirky characters as she moves into the house at Notting Hill beginning with Oscar who came around a corner and spilled orange juice on her when neither one was paying attention to where they were going. Through Oscar she met a number of other shop owners and residents of the area. Her next door neighbor, Sean, first met in the travel bookstore from the movie and didn’t make a very good first impression.

The book is filled with movie references — old and new. Life becomes anything but boring while house sitting as her new friends band together to help her gather movie moments. When they find out that her mother left her and her father when she was very, very young and she wants to find her everyone kicks into high gear to help her out — including Sean.

From Notting Hill with Love Actually is pure fun. Scarlett is a professional woman with a romantic bent trying to do the right thing for everyone around her often to her own detriment. She’s no more a dreamer than many people but her life has so much more opportunity for boredom that personally, I can’t blame her to escaping to her daydreams — who hasn’t in the midst of a boring staff meeting. She does have a tendency, as most romantic comedy heroines do, to jump to conclusions before getting the facts and this drives a lot of the plot.

There’s no lesson here; however, it is interesting to note that just as in life trying to force an event to happen the way you want often blows up in your face while the spontaneous events that are inline with your desires and hopes often go unnoticed or unappreciated. If every reader thought about their daily life and the spontaneous events and acts that give them joy — maybe just maybe they’d find that life is often like a movie — hopefully a romance not a drama.

As always, I look forward to comments and impression from those who have also read the book.