Two socks do not a pair make

Well, after being a coward for many a month I have finally bit the bullet, so to speak. I have braved the knitting right of passage of turning the heel. I am now officially a SOCK KNITTER! I have in fact knitted two socks! And here they are... drumroll, please...

 

See? Socks! With lovely turned heels:

  

And I am loving knitting socks.  There is something almost poetic about how you are knitting in a tube, and then you knit a flat panel, and then you follow a few steps and TA-DA!  You suddenly have a turned heel!  And then you make the gusset and it suddenly looks like a SOCK!  (Well, missing the toe, but you get my point.)  It's like magic...

Now there is something that needs to be explained. You see there is only one of each sock.  Mmm hmmm.  And yet I have two feet.  (Last time I checked.  Hold on... Yup.  Still got two and only two.)  There is, in knitting, a phenomenon known as Second  Sock Syndrome. Socknitters.com defines this as "an affliction that prevents the victim from knitting the second sock of a pair." There are actually many funny articles and blog posts out there about SSS.  And it's not so much that there is something "preventing" me from knitting the second sock... it just hasn't happened yet...

But that is what has been happening on the knitting front since school has started there isn't much time to knit, so it's nice to have the socks which are small and travel well in my backpack.

I'm enjoying most my classes:

1. Geography is a yawner... ah, well.  It's easy.
2. The assigned reading in Border Studies has been really interesting thus far and it looks as though this will be the case throughout the semester.
3. TA-ing for Ling 300 is going well; I had my first opportunity to interact with the class as they worked on morpheme "shrubbery" today, and will probably start correcting homework next week.
4. Survey of Native American Languages should be very interesting: we got to decide what areas of American Indian languages interest us, and that is what the teacher is going to cover.  (I'm going to end up doing one if not more presentations in this class because of my fieldwork with the Q'anjob'al speakers.  She wants me to give the Q'anjob'al number presentation I gave last semester, and maybe other presentations.)
5. Along with that, I'm, as I said, finally getting credit for the Q'anjob'al dictionary that I've been working on for a year (including the semester that was just data-gathering).  And my professor has had me submit a proposal to WAIL (UC Santa Barbara's Workshop on American Indian Languages) about the dictionary project and things that we have learned as we have progressed through the dictionary.  If it is selected, I will be presenting my paper at the workshop at the end of April! (In front of ling grad students and real LINGUISTS.  !!!)
6. And then there is independent Cognative Linguistics, which is just fantastically fun.  The reading is awesome; One article that I read and discussed with my professor on Monday was about the development of colour names, and it was really interesting to see how my Q'anjob'al data fit in with the article. (In Q'anjob'al they have colour names for black, white, red, yellow, and green.) (As a side note, they also have a word that you put with a colour word that means that the shade of that colour is the wrong shade to paint a house.  Fantastic.  And it says so much about the culture.)  I may be seeking data later in the semester for other things we study... be forewarned!  Anything you say or type can and will be used as linguistic data!  :-D

 Well, I think that post is sufficiently long.  I can't think of much else to say, as this pretty much sums up my life right now.  I need to cast on for the mates of these socks and then knit while I do the reading for tomorrow morning's class.