Multi-tasking, of sorts

Why do so many useful abilities vanish just when we hit adulthood and need them the most? Like being able to easily pick up languages and being able to do more than one thing at a time --- I strongly suspect these aptitudes all permanently moved to the same place my memory keep taking vacations to. In terms of the latter capability, I distinctly remember being able to multi-task (though I didn’t know it yet by this modular, efficiency-evoking name) with ease when I was young and being puzzled when my parents would scold me and asked how I could possibly focus on more than one thing at a time. Now, when my life practically demands that I always juggle multiple tasks at the same time, I’m finding that, well, I can’t. While I can still safely chew gum and walk at the same time without doing myself damage, anything that involves trying to partition my brain into two separate thought paths ends in disaster. Sadly, this limitation seems to extend to knitting and crafting as well. Since I started knitting, my reading has seen a precipitous drop. I just don’t have enough free time to both read the piles of books I have out from the library and knit all the projects I want. So far, all my attempts to do both has resulted in split and dropped stitches. I am quite amazed when I hear about people who manage to knit without looking, even so much as to do it in a darkened theater. Does anyone have any tips on simultaneous reading and knitting (besides practice, practice, practice)? I can only renew my library books so many times…
The upside of no reading during knitting, though, has been the NPR and Podcast listening I do instead. Now, during the evening when I would normally read, I knit and listen to the radio or my iPod (yes, I am well on my way to skipping straight on to grannyhood). Last week, I was very excited to find one of my favorite shows, Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me (a sort of humorous news quiz show), was available as a podcast. Now if they would only do the same for All Things Considered, This American Life, and A Prairie Home Companion…
Today I found some wonderful fabrics for a Project Spectrum project. (My camera is terrible at capturing color...the white fabric is actually a light gray/flax color and the background of the crane fabric much more of a blue-gray)


Since sewing is less time consuming than knitting, this will replace the Noro scarf as a red project for this month so that I might possibly finish the vest in time for Mom’s birthday. Speaking of the vest, it is growing ever so slowly. I was entirely too optimistic when I thought I could finish any significant amount of the back by the end of this week. I am now at 2.5 repeats out of the 5 before shaping for the armholes occurs. So, there will be much purple knitting in the next few days and very, very little reading.