Weekend Reads + Epic Knitting Fail (after 15 years of knitting!)

Bonjour mes amis :)  I hope you all had a great week, and a relaxing weekend.  I had a very stressful week filled with lots of work.  And I officially hate my folklore class.  The teacher is impossible.  I have to reprint my paper (it's ungraded until I do) because I didn't put a word count on the title page.  WTF??  I've written tons of research papers and never have I ever been forced to put in a word count.  And seriously.  Couldn't she just take off a few points for that instead of making me waste more paper??  It's crazy.  She also handed back my preliminary bibliography (which is lame anyway, since it's just a list of sources we are going to look at for our next paper..) and said it didn't follow MLA format.  Um....seriously?  I've written enough bibliographies to know how to write one.  I even used her "how to write an MLA bibliography" sheet that she gave us.  I think she's just crazy.

On to something happier though.  And much less stressful.

I finished The Guernsey Literary and Potatoe Peel Pie Society last night!  I LOVED it!  It is seriously going down as one of my all-time favorite reads.  I'll have a raving review posted soon.  I also got a review book in the mail that I won from LibraryThing.com.  It's called The Lost Child.  I've heard mixed reviews of it and I'm looking forward to reading it and seeing how I feel about it. 

Oh and after knitting for....like 15 years.....I came to the conclusion yesterday while waiting for my Gramma to get out of Dialysis that I'm a failure.  I'm almost (was almost) done with the second sock in a pair for my mom.  Yesterday in the waiting room I was apparently in my own little world, and I slipped half my stitches off a needle.  Epic Fail.  I'm good at picking up lost stitches, except for this was a whole row of them.  And I picked them up, but it looks terrible.  I'm just going to have to frog the whole sock :'(  I'm very upset.

What has everyone else been reading this week? 

Weekend Reads

Back when I first turned my "Life in France" blog into a book blog, I used to do a weekly feature I called Weekend Reads, where I basically talk about what I've read that week, what I'm planning on reading the next week, and what's been happening in my life in general.  I liked this feature a lot and have decided to get it going again :)

So this past week I read a lot, but I was also really busy getting ready for school to start back up and with work.  I am almost finished with The Jungle, which is SO depressing but really good.  I finished The Gendarme, a new book that will be out this coming Thursday.  It was fantastic and I highly recommend it.  I'll be posting a review on Thursday!  And I lost my copy of The Time Traveler's Wife!  How, you might ask?  Beats me!  The only thing I can think of is that I put the book down somewhere in the big mess that was made when my sister was packing for her semester abroad, and after she left and we were cleaning up, my mom or little sis put the book somewhere.  I need to find it asap though.  I hate getting halfway through a book and then losing it.  (because yes, this has happened before!) 

This week my mom and I rented The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo movie!  The Swedish one, with subtitles.  It of course didn't live up to the book, and they had to change some things, and (obviously) shorten the story a bit.  And I was *quite* disappointed by the lack of SAABs in the movie.  There's one part in particular in the book where a SAAB plays a pretty big part (in my SAAB-obsessed opinion, anyway), and they totally changed that part in the movie to include NO SAAB at all!  But I did spy a few on the road throughout the movie ;)

This week, classes start at Buffalo State College.  I'm excited but also sad, because I won't be able to read nearly as much.  I also won't be able to work as much, which is nice, but also sucky, because I do need the money.  I do plan on finishing a few books next week, though.  And my knitting challenge starts on Wednesday, yay!

So that's it for this week.  I discovered some really awesome new blogs on the Book Blogger Hop this week and added them to my Google Reader :)  Hope everyone has a really great week, and OMG first week of September!!

A Knitting Challenge: 6 Socks in September!

Yes call me a little crazy. But I'm doing it! As some of you may know, as well as being an avid reader, I also spend a lot of time knitting. Socks are just about my most favorite thing to knit, and I found the other day on Ravelry.com (the ultimate knit/crochet community with loads of free patterns!) a challenge that I just had to sign up for. The 6 Socks in September Challenge! That's 3 pairs of socks, in one month. I am crazy to think I can do this. School starts the day before this challenge begins, and the first month of school is always the worst because you have to get used to your classes, and you never know how much homework your new professors are going to give. But I'm determined to give this a try. I need a new pair of socks for those cold and snowy Buffalo winters Goshdarnit! So I found a great pattern that uses nice thick warm yarn for that. I found two more patterns that will be perfect for gifting to my mom and little sis for Christmas. One has a neat zigzaggy design, the other has hearts. I'll be starting on September 1st, and (hopefully!) finishing on September 30th. I'll be posting weekly updates with photos of my progress on this blog! So wish me luck and let the knitting begin! If you are interested in signing up for the challenge, then head on over to http://www.ravelry.com/groups/six-sock-september !