Selective Hearing

There are few things I find more relaxing than mindlessly knitting while watching tv. Since I've been wound a little tightly lately, I thought I'd revisit this time-tested stress reliever.
I love knitting socks - they don't take up a lot of space in the knitting bag and they're fun. When I'm knitting stockinette in the round I don't need to pay much attention to what I'm doing, and I've even trained myself (finally) to knit in the dark for better tv viewing. Looking through my stash for something sockish, I found some yarn that really spoke to me. It said, "I long to be made into those adorable Irish Fisherman stockings that are in your vintage sock booklet." It went on to mumble something else, but I was too excited to listen.
How handy, I thought, to have yarn that was so helpful. The yarn had obviously also been thinking that I needed to watch less television, so it chose a pattern with cables and popcorn that was written as a flat pattern.
I sat down and did some swatching, followed by some rewriting to change the pattern to work in the round, and then a practice cable or two. Something was nagging at me though (shut up yarn, I'm not listening). I only had one large ball of this yarn in a color that had long been out of production. It was so very pretty, though, and the ball seemed oh so large that it HAD to be enough. Finally the yarn stopped its mumbling, looked me in the eye, and said in a voice that could not be misunderstood, "Take your blinders off you silly girl. My length is clearly written on the tag, and only someone who failed second grade math would think I could make anything more than one knee sock." I spent a little while trying to convince myself that I'd be happy with two different colored socks (I know! I'll do the heels and toes of each one in the mate's main color!), but finally gave up the idea (for now anyway).
I have since bought some new yarn (so much for stash-busting!) and cast on for the over-the-knee socks in Melanie Falick's Handknit Holidays book (it's kind of an unfortunate title, in my opinion, because it conjures up images of reindeer sweaters and knit trees, but it has some really cute patterns in it that don't seem at all holidayish to me). Judging by how tall these are, I think they're going to be relieving stress for a loooong time.