Everyone, please cast your ballot tomorrow! Voting is our opportunity and our obligation. And while it sometimes seems that our voices are drowned out in the sea of election noise, some races are won or lost on the strength of one tiny voice. Whatever your political opinion is, let it be counted!

Voting, gentle reader, is your ticket to complain. As I tell #1 Son: Ya don’t vote, ya don’t get to bitch.

Besides, waiting in line at the polls is an excellent opportunity to flash your sticks in public! So get out there and knit the vote!

Oregon voters, remember that it’s way too late to mail your ballot in. Please take it to any of the official drop-off sites or to your county elections office by 8:00PM Tuesday.

I’m going to take a short, non-knitting side trip here to remember that this is the 25th anniversary of Banned Book Week.

Banned Book Week celebrates our freedom to choose and to express our opinion, even if that opinion is unpopular; and emphasizes the importance of making each opinion available to those who want to read it. Our freedom of speech is one of our most precious rights. Without it, I wouldn’t be blogging here today and you wouldn’t be reading my words.

I grew up in a town that had a good library. It was housed in a big, imposing, two-story building. The adult section of the library was on the first two floors. The stacks seemed to go on for miles. The children’s section was in what was essentially the basement. It had its own entrance around the side of the library. There was a narrow flight of stairs from the depths of the children’s section up into the light of the adult section, but kids were not allowed to use the stairs. Kids under 16 were not allowed in the adult section at all, even if accompanied by adults. Even if they were quiet. Even if they only wanted to read.

Mama took Bro and I to the library at least weekly. She would go up to the rarefied heights of the adult section while Bro and I stayed down in the children’s section. We were all great readers. So by the time I was in 5th or 6th grade I’d read pretty much all of the books in the children’s section. I started reading the books that Mama brought home for herself. Then I started asking Mama for other books by authors I had liked, or other books on the same subjects or written in the same way. (I was really big on historical fiction, as I recall.) Then, with Mama’s collusion, I began to break the rules. When the Children’s Librarian was looking the other way, I’d sneak up the back stairs and into the back stacks in the adult section and pick out books that looked good. Mama and I would rendezvous in the back, and she’d check out the books for me so I could read them.

Mama believed that if you were old enough to be interested in a book, you were old enough to read it. She never censored what I read or what I watched or what opinions I was exposed to. Instead we discussed our books and she would explain to me why a particular book did or didn’t fit into her own value system. I was allowed to have my own opinion. I grew up in an environment of intellectual freedom that I still treasure, and I raised my own son the same way.

Years later when I was in town for a family gathering, I visited the Library with Bro and Mama. It’s a county museum now, with exhibits showing the founding and early history of the town. I believe that was the first time I’d entered the Library building through the front door.

Please see the web site of the American Library Association Banned Books Week for more information on banned and challenged books and on Banned Book Week activities. I have a permanent page here where I list the top 10 banned and challenged books of the previous year, plus other frequently banned and challenged books. Please take time to read at least one this year.

Next time we return to knitting…

I’m seeing reports on the local news that gas companies and/or local service stations are asking people not to top off their tank, but to wait until the tank is almost drained before filling up. This is supposed to prevent runs on gas station.

Why? This makes absolutely no sense to me at all.

Let’s say I drive 500 miles per week and use an average of 10 gallons of gas to do so (hey… I drive a Prius). That means that every 50 miles takes about 1 gallon of gas. If I decide to buy 1 gallon of gas every 50 miles rather than 10 gallons of gas after 500, I’ve still used 10 gallons of gas in roughly the same amount of time. The difference over the span of a week to the local gas station is zero. They’ll get to see my smiling face more often, but they won’t be selling me any more gas.

If the price of gas is going up, then I’ll come out ahead because some of the earlier gallons of gas will have been purchased at a lower price than the last gallons. If I wait until the end of the week, the gas station (or probably the oil company that supplies them) will come out ahead because I bought all of those same 10 gallons at the highest price.

So who benefits if I wait? The oil companies.

One of my work colleagues lives in another part of the country and travels here for part of the week. When here, we often “do lunch.” She’s been watch in fascination while I knit on a project or two, so I offered to teach her how to knit.

Last weekend she went to a LYS in her home town and picked up some lovely blue worsted-weight yarn and a pair of plastic needles.

Plastic needles that, she tells me, were so flexible that they could easily bend and then spring right back.

I never got to actually see these needles because they were confiscated by airport security. Despite the listing of knitting needles TSA list of permitted items as OK in both carry on and checked luggage. Despite her helpful demonstration of the flexibility of the needles that rendered them almost completely unsuitable as stabbing weapons.

Knitting lessons have been postponed until replacements can be obtained. I’m thinking bamboo and plastic circs, which won’t show up on xray.

I feel so safe now, knowing that some over-zealous TSA employee has kept the skies safe from attack by a needle-wielding knitting neophyte.

I think the TSA should encourage knitters to travel often with large pointy sharp needles in hand. We’d make a terrific backup security team, donchathink? Even though most knitters are actually quite peaceful people. Heck… they should pay us to fly with needles!

So apparently there was a dearth of qualified women and minorities available and Shrub was forced to come up with a white guy for his nomination.

I never dared hope he’d pick someone who leaned toward the center, but I did sort of wish that he’d pick someone who would stand out a bit more amongst the white male faces.