Blah. After today I have to start driving to work; Rudder’s got an offsite seminar for a few days, then a trip out of town. It’s not horrible, but it’s not as nice as getting to knit during the drive. I’ll also have to decide whether to cancel Chinese lessons while he’s gone. He’d just as soon I didn’t (so he gets to miss a few) but I think I will; he’ll be fairly lost if he comes back and we’ve skipped a couple, and we need to skip two weeks anyway when we’re gone for Chinese New Year. (Plus, I admit, I really don’t want to drive in that area. Tienmu traffic is ugly, and it’s a hard place to find your way around: twisting streets, name changes, back streets barely wide enough to clear the mirrors.)
I’m promising myself a trip to the big bookstore I haven’t yet been to, while he’s gone. According to them they have the biggest stock of English-language books in town; others say they’re second best to Page One. Either way, what I’m hoping is that they’re strong in areas Page One is weak in, like SF/F and mysteries. There’s also the company family day; I figure I should go to that just to see how it differs from a US one.
The driving for the next two days cuts into my knitting time, too; I’m up to the heel flap of a second sock, and I’d really like to get these done in time to send with Rudder as he goes to colder climates. I didn’t get much knitting done in class yesterday because we have the good teacher on Tuesdays and I really did need to give her full attention – I couldn’t knit without making mistakes. I can do it on plain stockinette no matter what I have to think about, but with something like this slip stitch heel flap where I have to keep count, I can only do it when I’m not being really challenged. This teacher also worked with us based on what we told her about how we learned, and spent the beginning part of the class writing characters (which Rudder wants to focus on because Pinyin doesn’t come easily for him, nor do hearing and remembering the vocabulary) and the second part really challenging me on vocabulary, making changes on the fly when I pointed out that I was having trouble repeating long sentences while they were nonsense syllables to me but could do it when we could focus a bit more on their meaning. That’s why she’s the good teacher; the other one just wants us to follow the syllabus; we’ve been throwing the word “dyslexia” around a fair bit in reference to Rudder in hopes she will understand we want to change things for good reason, not just to be demanding.