• Kindness of strangers

    9 min read

    We had the privilege to witness the 2024 eclipse in beautiful Durango, Mexico. To get there we took a bus from Mazatlán, and it did not go as planned, as a four hour trip turned into an eighteen hour ordeal; an ordeal that became one of my favourite parts of the trip as we experienced, first hand, the wonderful kindness of strangers.

    #travel #mexico #eclipse2024
    A photo of Lenore and I on the side of the road. I'm holding up both hands indicating how long we were told we'd be waiting. It took much longer.

    After traveling to Utah to view the annular eclipse in November, an experience that was absolutely incredible, both because of the eclipse itself and because of the people with whom we shared it, Lenore and I knew we had to travel somewhere to view the great North American total eclipse of 2024. After looking at cloud coverage maps, it didn’t take long to make our decision: we needed to go to Durango City, Mexico.

    Now, despite being a location of deep and fascinating history, beautiful architecture, and delicious food, Durango isn’t exactly a common tourist destination, which means, in the past, traveling there would have been a bit challenging. Fortunately for us, ten years ago a brand new highway was opened that connects Mazatlán to Durango, turning what was once a 7 to 8 hour journey across a highway colourfully referred to as The Devil’s Backbone into a 3-4 hour trip through 63 tunnels and across one of the highest cable-stayed bridges in the world.

    Realizing this, we came up with our plan: we’d fly into Mazatlán, spend a couple of days there, and then take a bus to Durango the day before the eclipse, tour around that afternoon, view the eclipse the next day, and then return to Mazatlán the day after and enjoy a few more days of sun and sand before flying home.

    I would’ve never guessed that bus trip would turn into one of my favourite memories from the trip. And not for the reasons you’d expect.

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  • Sock Knitting 101

    13 min read

    Someone recently asked me for pointers to good sock knitting lessons. Not a pattern. Lessons on how to really grok knitting socks. So I decided to try throwing something together, specifically for how I approach toe-up socks! Warning, this is definitely a first draft, so it’s very possible I’ll come back and update this post to fix things up…

    #knitting
    An image of the completed sock whose construction is illustrated in these lessons.

    So, way back in the before time, I decided to attempt to knit a pair of socks. Not one to do things the normal way, I opted for the toe-up lessons from Denise Powell on the now defunct socknitters.com. The thing that really attracted me to toe-up was the idea that I could just try socks on as I went rather than trying to nail the sizing up front, something that, as a not very confident knitter, I didn’t think I had a hope in heck of getting right.

    Now, many years later, I can’t imagine knitting socks any other way. Toe-up just feels inherently intuitive to me (though, admittedly, it isn’t without its downsides, as most patterns are set up for cuff-down socks, which means you’ve gotta do extra work to reverse them).

    In part, I think this is because of Powell’s approach to teaching sock knitting, which did away with teaching the reader to follow a rote pattern, but instead focused on the structural elements of socks and how you knit each component. This gave the reader a much more fundamental understanding of sock construction, thereby helping the knitter build that necessary intuition that allows for later improvisation.

    Well, I decided to take a crack at writing a new set of lessons inspired by Denise’s work and my own experiences both knitting socks and teaching others to do the same. I hope this is useful to aspiring sock knitters out there!

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