What do you enjoy listening to?

A lot of people crochet and knit while they watch TV.  I try to, but since I take my glasses off when I do handwork, and I need my glasses for TV viewing, I either end up doing a lot of frogging, or rewinding.  Actually, to be perfectly honest, I do a fair amount of both those things and it's often less than satisfying.

My happiest arrangement is to watch/listen to YouTube videos on my phone while my hands are busy with something else - especially if my brain doesn't need to be deeply concentrating on what my hands are engaged in.  The types of YouTube videos I watch rarely need me to pay close attention to a screen.  I also listen to Spotify sometimes, and more rarely, I listen to a recorded book while doing my handcrafts - rarely only because I have trouble concentrating on someone reading aloud.

Recently, I have rediscovered two of my favorite podcasts from the not-too-long-ago past now on Spotify (and other platforms).

I was pretty hooked on Darkhorse Podcast from its inception, but once COVID hit, and it soon became evident the news media were doing their best to keep us frightened and ignorant, I found Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying a breath of fresh air.  The insights, that come from their professional backgrounds as biology professors, who also have real world experience, were (and I'm sure still are) an exercise in thinking logically.  Never downplaying the seriousness of COVID, they pointed out many of the things that didn't make sense in how it was being handled.  For those of us who were nearly driven crazy by the blatant censorship of information during the most worrisome years of COVID, I found their podcasts to be a dose of sanity.  Instead of fear mongering, they applied their intellects to the situation, and while they certainly didn't always have answers, they had logical responses.  All that said, they are two very long-winded and heady individuals.  While I love that up to a point, even I can only take so much.  In time I watched them less and less, probably as COVID became less and less scary (thanks to their insight, if I'm honest), hence now I'm re-discovering them.  I see they've moved on from COVID, and appear to be applying their intellects to various topics that I imagine are interesting to a wide audience.  Not everyone will like everything, but there's probably something in their catalog of videos that will interest nearly everyone.

A few years ago a fellow blogger made mention of SmartHerNews, and when I checked her out I was truly impressed at the non-biased news reporting Jenna Lee does.  I don't know Jenna Lee's story well, but she says she left traditional news media (at the time, she was with Fox), so that she could cover the news from as unbiased a position as possible.  She was among the first people (even before mainstream media) who had contact with a journalist on the ground in Afghanistan right in the middle of the evacuation in 2021.  I have not been disappointed in her or her interviewees.  I only wish she produced more content.  I was just wondering where she was, and why I hadn't heard from her in a while, when an email today pointed me to her podcasts on Scoop and Spotify.  Jenna Lee is actually the inspiration for this post.

I look forward to getting my fill again of these podcasters while I crochet, knit and stitch.

And now, to finally share my latest finished crochet project.

You may remember seeing this some posts back:

It has turned into this:

This pattern is, no doubt, available free somewhere by another name, but I used The Bertie Blanket pattern, and I have to say it is a fun stitch to do.  I've made it differently in the past, and I can imagine a number of possibilities using this pattern with scrap yarn.   I don't remember if the border I made is the same as the pattern's, but in case you're curious, the final round of the border is the crab stitch - it's single crochet stitched backwards.  It always sounds impossible to do when I haven't done it in a while, but it's actually super easy, and makes for a nice, understated edge.

Soon, I'll have another blanket to show.  I just need a sunshiny day to get some good natural light inside to photograph with.

Enjoy your weekend!