On progress, regress, and the passing of time

Stephanie's post today raises some interesting ideas about the way blogs have changed—and changed us—since the beginning of the Aughts. The first blog I ever read was way before we had the term "blog." In the beginning of 1997, my friend Teresa was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma and took a year away from school for treatment. She started a page to keep her friends updated about her health and her progress. (She's an engineer, and at that point most people weren't tech-savvy enough to build and maintain personal websites. This was 9 months before google.com.) A bunch of us on campus followed her progress, but somehow people from the rest of the world found her, too. Her site reached a lot of people who had Hodgkin's or knew someone who did. The internet seemed like a much smaller world back then, but that sense of connection with people far away through the series of tubes was pretty cool.

This blog is four and a half now, though if you counted up active time it would be a lot less. I've gone through the phases that a lot of bloggers have lately, falling away because of time spent on Ravelry and Facebook (and, of course, everything else). But it doesn't seem like the blog is over yet--some of us have come back. One of the reasons I'm not ready to give up the blog yet is because it's my main link with some pretty cool people whom I don't feel I know well enough yet.

And just today I helped someone start a new blog. Ann Budd, my friend and fellow Boulder knitter, decided that it's time to have a web presence, and one of her resolutions this year was to start a blog. She's just getting the hang of it, but you can find her here. (I teased her that her sock yarn stash is relatively pathetic in size—and she's acquired most of that recently—but the fact is, she's such a fast and productive knitter that had she started with a stash my size, she'd just have to get a new drawer for all her knitted socks. Plus, as a professional designer, she's used to getting what she needs for the project at hand.)

I've been plugging away at my socks since my last post. I put in some serious time knitting in front of the TV, and after about 3 hours I noticed I wasn't progressing as fast as I expected. I looked the socks over and saw the problem right away.

There's no gusset. The reason I was going so slow is that I was working about 20 extra stitches per round.

Sigh.

Comments

[Chris]

D'oh about the gusset!

I'm glad you're back. :) And I'm glad that Ravelry, Facebook, Goodreads, etc, haven't killed off blogs. There's something about the conversations that start, in the comments or in email, that's led me to some of my now dearest friends.

[naomi]

Um. At least you figured it out before you got to the toe?

[Amber]

Ooopsie doll. It's still a gorgeous sock =)

[mardi]

I did that once. Argh. Pretty sock though. Will look great with clogs. ;-)