Tying the Knot

First of all, it's good to see Pastor Dana of Kaleidoscope Faith back in business! She's been gone so long I almost forgot how to spell "kaleidoscope."

In other news, I started thinking about tying knots when I put a knot-tying toy on my amazon.com wishlist sometime last summer. I received this for Christmas from my parents:

First of all, let me just say that in the current political climate, when women are not being allowed to testify on the House floor about women's health issues, and Rick Santorum calls unwanted pregnancies, "a gift from God," far be it from me to advocate a sexist toy.

Therefore, please forgive me for a moment while I let my sarcastic show: BECAUSE GIRLS DON'T NEED TO KNOW HOW TO TIE KNOTS!!! *huff*

As my foray into knitting proves, apparently in order to learn a skill, my particular style requires that I:
1) read about it      2) see someone else do it in real life and      3) watch a ton of youtube videos about it.

Therefore, I followed the instructions in the All-American Sexist Knot-Tying Toy and then went to a knot-tying class at REI, where I experienced loads of social anxiety due to the absence of Miss Gokey. Soon, however, I was enjoying practicing the knots the instructor showed us, and then forgetting how to tie them IMMEDIATELY after we finished and moved on.

I supposedly "learned" a square knot (which I think I can do like a champ, but Amanda says this guy is doing it the right way, and this way is nothing like the way the REI instructor did it), a fisherman's knot (I can do this, but only with the help of the youtube video), a bowline knot (whaaaaat?), a clove hitch (this will require more practice), a taut line knot (I did this successfully in class, but I can't seem to make heads or tails out of the video), a figure 8 knot (huzzah! and [in the case of the video] British!) and finally a water knot which I'm not even going to hyperlink because it seemed so confusing and useless to me.

So...that's how you can get for free what I also got for free. Thanks to the sexist knot toy, for a little bit of someone else's money I also have a practice set of ropes and a tiny hitch.

Since I know that by this point you're saying, "surely these knots aren't the only reason I'm reading this post," when really they are, I'll go ahead and tell you what disasters are trending today on the Doomsday Dashboard. It seems nuclear war has overtaken pandemic as most popular, ringing in at 27%.