New Button!

Thanks to Cara, who is a much better button designer than I - here is the new Philly Button. If you have a chance, hop on over to her blog, and give her a big Philly Yo!

In other news, Ene is finished, however, unblocked. I had some problems near the top, when I discovered that I had more stitches on one side of the center stitch (making it no longer the center). I fudged around a bit, and I think it looks fine. The proof is in the blocking, I guess, and that mystery will be revealed this weekend, while I'm resting between the short program and long program of my pinwheel baby blanket. But, I can tell you this . . . when I discovered the mistake, the word that came out of my mouth wasn't fudge . . .

After knitting circle, I went to my friend's for dinner. My friend has two small children, one of whom, a boy, is six, and apparently is trying out his new colorful vocabulary. My friend asked me to explain to the boy why it's not good to use dirty words. I stuttered . . . me? I drop the "f" bomb on an hourly basis (less than an hour ago - at knitting circle when I discovered my stitches were off), and you're asking me? I talk about blow jobs in front of juries, and you're asking me??? The girl, who in college, wrote a whole column on the beauty of the f word, and what a different world we would live in if Rhett had said to Scarlett, frankly my dear, I don't give a f-!, and you're asking me??? So, I told the child it was unattractive, girls didn't like it. I told him that it showed a lack of creativity, the inability to find the right, correct word. I told him to think about what he wanted people to think of him - smart little boy, not dirty little boy. He looked at me curiously, and I knew it went in one ear and out the other. After he had disappeared from the table, my friend told how the first time she said a dirty word, her mother had grabbed the back of her head, dragged her into the bathroom, and washed her mouth out with soap.

Now, maybe I'm being unmodern - but that worked for me, too (well, until I went to college, and there was no soap weilding mom around). And, I still won't say dirty words in front of my parents (no, they don't come to see me in court, unless it's a good clean shooting). And, when I was five, and I took all of the plastic red price tags off all of the shelves at the grocery store, my mother looked right at me and said, if you do that again, you'll go to jail, and they'll lock you up, and you'll never get out. I never took another thing in my life that didn't belong to me. What really gets a kid to stop doing something - the truth, or crazy consequences?

Is it more attractive to say, Oh Fudge, or Oh Sugar? I don't think so. When I say bad words, do people really think I'm stupid? uneducated? Maybe. If you saw Andy Reid mouth on the sidelines, Oh Darn, when McNabb threw another interception, what would you think? Maybe that he's taking too many antidepressants? The world needs color, and sometimes colorful language, and . . . you know, it's probably a really good thing I'm not a parent . . .

And, sorry, it's a good thing to have an aresenal of expletives when you drop a stitch.