But I have been pushed around lately by the fact that a) I’ve got the falcon cam on the big monitor attached to the husband’s Mac, because b) that site crashes my Firefox Ubuntu absolutely every time. Completely. Gone to lunch, ‘bye. (Which is why this year I haven’t posted the link. Don’t worry, that’s the link to the link.)
So tonight Richard was teaching me basic stuff on his machine, like how to open a new window and why it wasn’t working when I tried to. How to change the size of the window (so help me, that was designed by someone with sharper eyes than mine.)
It’s like knitting lace: it used to be, I didn’t know how, I didn’t (I told myself) particularly want to know how, but it bugged me that it was something I couldn’t do–but it was knitting! I eventually tried to teach myself, but at the time there was just really nothing out there and certainly nothing that told exactly how one was supposed to, say, purl, much less knit, into a yarnover of the previous row and which way one was to wrap the yarn, much less that it changed depending on what came before and what after.
Now, of course, it’s all as automatic to me as breathing, you just sit down with the needles and go:Â the Barbara Walker books from the last big knitting craze of the 70’s were finally reprinted, and I made myself slog through row after row with one eye on her first Treasury of Knitting Patterns directions and the other on the work in my hands.
A swatch. Then an afghan in a simple pattern, trying to drill it into my brain while learning to read my stitches, trying to learn not to panic and what to do if I dropped a stitch, how to put it all back together when it’s not simple knit and purl but with direction and–well, you know. One dropped stitch can unravel two or three below it and then that many more again each from there, and, yeah.
And then a second afghan. Trying to practice at it enough for long enough to make it worth the time spent learning how.
And how!, now.
So eventually I put my own book out there that prefaced with the laceknitting directions, verbal but also pictorial, that were exactly what I’d gone looking for and could not find all those years ago.
I think it’s a pretty good book. (They’re almost gone.)
But I don’t think that means I’ll ever, ever write one on my new-found expertise on using a Mac. Trust me on this one. Truly.