New Skills

On Monday, I learned two new skills from Tara: knitting and playing World of Warcraft. I hadn’t thought much about knitting till Tara showed me some of the things she had made and insisted it wasn’t hard to learn. So I thought I should give it a shot. My mother had shown me how when I was little and I had knitted a couple of scarves for my bears, but that was a long while back and I didn’t remember how to do it. Tara and I went to Joann’s and I got some blue yarn and a pair of bamboo needles. Of course, I needed a project and I didn’t want something that would be too hard to start with. I settled on the idea of a scarf, but I don’t have any use for a scarf here, so I thought of my nephews. This made my small starting project a bigger one since I have to make three scarves—one for each nephew. But I think that will give me plenty of practice with simple knitting. I thought putting a pattern into the scarf would be beyond my beginner’s skills till Tara showed me just how easy some of those patterns can be. I have made a lot of progress on my first scarf since Monday and have over 40 inches already knitted. The pattern looks cool too! I knitted several rows at Tara’s house after she taught me the basics and she helped me fix problems there. At home I’m on my own and with one of her books I’ve managed to fix the mistakes I’ve made, including a dropped stitch this morning that made me panic for a moment. She had told me to go find her in the bowling alley on Tuesday if I was stuck, but luckily that didn’t become necessary. I know I will need some further help when it comes to actually finishing the scarf, and I will also need a little help starting the next one, but I think I’m doing rather well for a beginner!

As for World of Warcraft, Tim had been trying to get me on the game for a long time since it would be something we could do together. Well, the game just sounded so complicated since he was always talking about numbers that it just didn’t appeal to me. On New Year’s Eve, we were over at Tara and Jim’s house and Tara and Linda were telling me more about the game and the people they play with and Tara invited me to come learn the game with her someday. She insisted that the game didn’t need to be as complicated as Tim made it sound and that I didn’t have to worry so much about keeping track of numbers. So I agreed and finally made it over there Monday morning. She created a character for me and showed me the basic commands so I could see what the game is about. I have to say I enjoyed hunting boars and picking cactus apples for some big guy’s “Cactus Apple Surprise,” and the evil familiars were amusing even if annoying. Yesterday Tim and I set up my account and created a new character for me. We got Tara online as well and the three of us attempted to play together. Unfortunately our internet connection had been very flaky for the last few days and while we’d had a technician here yesterday morning, we continued to have problems. As a result, Tim and I were losing our internet connection every few minutes and finally we just had to tell Tara that we were quitting for the night. Earlier this afternoon yet another technician came over to look at our cable connection and came up with another fix. So far our internet connection seems happy, and we are hoping this time it will last. In a while Tim and I will get back on the game and we hope we won’t get dropped like we were getting dropped last night. We also hope that Tara will be available to join us on our adventures.