So after almost-finishing a third Caps to the Capital hat, I gave in and started on Ysolda's lace-up opera gloves. I'm at that tricky fifth row, with the picking-up-and-knitting, and I'm afraid I'm doing it wrong. Hopefully the fiddlyness and the crazy tightness just come with the territory and it will all turn out okay.

The Craftster thread about them has helped, especially since Ysolda herself has answered the most likely questions there! Such is the wonder of the internet.

Yesterday was a great day in my life: I learned how to ride a bike! Yes, at my ripe old age. I vaguely remember learning how when I was five (training wheels!), doing well for a month or so, and then moving somewhere (city-like, I assume) where I had no bike opportunities.

That suited me fine for another, oh, thirteen years or so, but my college's campus is enormous. This past year my dorm was a good ten or fifteen minutes away from most classes by foot, not to mention a very daunting twenty to thirty minutes away from the gym. I made it through, but with many envious looks at the students zipping by me.

This coming year I am living a few minutes further from the center of campus, so in the interest of my not wasting hours a week walking to class, Novio had given me a lesson (i.e., gotten me outside on my bike falling over a lot) during the school year a few months ago, and yesterday we had the follow-up.

"How long do you think it'll be until I can bike to class?" I asked him before we found an empty parking lot.

"Until you believe you can." Oh, Novio, you and your Marquez-like Latin wisdom.

What followed seemed like magical realism indeed -- there were only a few, eh, unplanned stops, and no real wipe-outs. I cheerfully wheeled around the curved lot, making sharper and sharper turns and even (almost) biking in a straight line. Then I fell and scraped my hands up and thought more handlebar-gripping might not be in the cards, so we headed home.

On the way I started biking again, up a hill even (!), and finally we had the option of taking a shortcut down an inviting hill or going longer down a flat road.

Obviously I made the intrepid choice.

And of course construction had apparently just begun on the hill, creating invisible-from-the-top but big-and-terrifying-and-painful-from-the-middle craters in it.

I wiped out, ending up on my back looking up the the hill, and the bike landed on top of me. Fortunately all my organs are intact, but I've got impressive-looking bruises all over my legs and scrapes on my hands and a particularly nasty half-moon scrape on my belly, where I think the end of a handle landed. Eesh.

But now I can finally ride a bike. The bruises are so worth it.