december? already?

I'm pretty sure I just finished taking the tree down like last week.

This has been a year when a significant number of my friends have had babies, concluding with two born this week. I have been churning out booties and cardigans at a steady clip, which is fun, because they're tiny and quick, and there's nothing I enjoy more than imposing my taste upon innocent newborns too tiny to stand up and assert their right to cartoon character embossed t-shirts, which I irrationally loathe. They've all been boys, though, and I selfishly want somebody, anybody to have a girl, because I have a really great matinee coat pattern I am dying to knit. (Well, somebody, anybody I like well enough to knit for.) Dear friends: Your babies are just vehicles for my handknits. Take pictures. Itchy-kitchy-coo.

The latest baby arrived in Paris, to one of Phil's oldest friends. A.'s a nice guy, but imagining him as a father, when I know way too much about his, er, history, is kind of difficult. When we heard the news he'd got married, a couple of years ago, there was a long moment when we just sat there, looking at each other and blinking. Finally, P broke the stunned silence by observing, "Well, now I know how my friends felt when I told them we were getting married." All the same, he's happy and appears to be excited about fatherhood, even if his friends are going to think it's all an elaborate joke until he shows us some photos, and possibly the results of a DNA test.

I'm actually all on the ball this year, and my gift-making and -buying is going according to schedule. I've got two things to make that need to get across the ocean in time for the holidays, and I think I just might make it. I'm knitting my father a pair of slippers, and I hit Google to find out what his shoe size translates to in inches. As it turns out, in his case, shoe size translates pretty directly to inches, so yay, that's going to be easy. I typed "american men's shoe size in inches," into Google, and bang! First hit gives me a chart. Very good. Of course, the second hit was "Shoe Size - Penis Size Conversion Charts," which is really not the kind of connection I care to make when it comes to my Dad, but thanks anyway, Google. It's always good to get confirmation of my belief that whatever the subject, SOMEBODY will create an obsessively detailed web page about it. This one is apparently supposed to be humourous, and when I was twelve, I doubtless would've found it hilarious, so it's just a shame that I'm older than the hills and there was no WWW back then.

And now I know how my parents felt when I was amazed that TV was brand new when they were kids. Phil and I actually had a conversation about this the other night. He's seven years older than me, but still was born well into the age of television, and he can remember when they only had BBC1 and ITV, and then only for relatively few hours a day. So if you were home sick, after the morning's grim social engineering educational programming, you had the option of reading a book, or watching the test card. The test card was apparently more diverting than one of the six or so cheap-ass documentaries they had on rotation, the only one of which he could recall was "The History of Paint," which he estimated he'd seen at least 150 times.

"That sounds really kind of horrible," I told him.
"At least I was born after rationing ended," he replied.

Thus ended the evening's cultural exchange.