The first personal website I ever saw (circa 1994) belonged to an Australian guy who lived in the basement of my dorm my freshman year in college. He had a rubber chicken named Keith, and he had traveled all over the world photographing Keith in dozens of countries (the phrase “every continent except Antarctica” comes to mind) and then publishing these photos on a website. I remember thinking it was hilarious but also extremely bizarre – not knowing that twenty years in the future I would spend about 35% of my waking hours looking at websites and creating my own websites and trying to figure out how to make things “go viral.” I thought this classmate was just weird because it was college, and people who live in the basements of college dorms are supposed to be eccentric. But it turns out that he was weird because he was living in the 21st century, seven years too early.
This is all a long way of saying that I have found yet another way to photograph the brown sweater that I’ve been knitting since before Daylight Savings Time. Yep, here it is – and yes I did work on it this weekend, quite a lot – on the coffee table in the kitchen with some evening sunlight slanting down in an Emily-Dickinson sort of way. I’m reading Robert Stone’s Damascus Gate and not liking it as much as I wish I were, but I’m only about a fifth of a way through it, so I’m giving it a chance.
And I promise I will not name the brown sweater Keith. Ralph maybe, but not Keith. And yes, I’ve started pricing fares to Antarctica.
Yarn Along is hosted by Ginny on her blog, Small Things.
Postcards From Purgatory 
I think you photo is very pretty, as is your brown sweater.
I love the story of Keith the rubber chicken, what an interesting soul.
Thanks! I should probably google that classmate and find out where he is now…
That rubber chicken story is hilarious! Sweater looking great too. Happy yarn along.
Thanks! Happy YA to you too!
love the story! who knew, had he do it a few years later he could have a book deal. LOL
Haha — I know, right? Telling this story makes me realize that I haven’t heard anything about where this classmate is now or what he’s doing. I may have to do some research for next week…
I had a college boyfriend who had a rubber chicken. That takes a certain kind of guy, it seems.
I have tried Robert Stone a few times, and I don’t think I’ve finished one of his books. I tend to like a more female approach.
I *should* love Robert Stone, given the others that I like, but this book, while written, moves too slowly. We’ll see…
Yes, I guess rubber chickens are a college guy sort of thing. I rarely even hear of them in “real life.” Thanks for reading!
Very funny 🙂
Nice photo. It is amazing how we view people not realizing that they aren’t “weird” just ahead of their time.
There’s a small chance that this guy was weird in addition to being ahead of his time. 🙂
Love the rubber chicken story! 😉 Good luck with your sweater.
Thanks!
I feel like I should know about Keith but I don’t remember him. It seems like he should have been a topic of conversation during one of our emailing back and forth conversations our freshman year of college. While I was sitting in my dorm’s computer lab. Because my dorm didn’t have ethernet. And my Mac Classic couldn’t get online even if the dorm had had ethernet. And here I am now, twenty-one short years later (oh dear, people who were born the year we graduated from high school are old enough to drink now), on my laptop on the free wifi in my room in a hotel in Florida, thinking about those days, and wondering how things could change so quickly. 😛
Maybe we talked about Keith. Or maybe we skipped right over Keith and started with the fact that the same guy also had sex with my 17-year-old prospective student that I was supposed to be taking care of. That part of the story is more newsworthy.
Did the prospective student (was there some sort of cute abbreviation for those folks at Dartmouth? I feel like at Stanford they may have called them probies or Pro-Frosh or something) end up going to Dartmouth? Because if so, then losing her in the basement den of a rubber-chicken loving fellow was probably worth it.
Nope, I never saw her again. We called them “prospectives.”
As the mother of 3 sons, I must say, rubber chickens are totally a guy thing! Hang in there with the sweater–some projects just seem to hang on, don’t they?
xoxo
Stanford says pro fros. Great stories. Great that your sweater is making progress!
Thanks! It really is making progress, even though it looks the same in every picture. It’s hard to show the detail with the brown yarn.