Ka-fluey

Just when you think you're getting back in the swing of things....

Just when you've wound off another ball for Fulmar....

Just when you're about to do the decreases on the Clapotis....

Just when you've gone to The Fold for their New Year's Day bash. (Hello? Classic Elite mulberry silk and cotton blend for a dollar-eighty-eight a skein????)...

The flu strikes. Not just any flu, either, but that weird flu that's got people in the hospital, the one that knocks people out for weeks.

I spent four days in bed, completely immobile. Couldn't even swallow water, but I forced myself to make the effort because the doctor said drink water or go to the hospital, and I didn't want to go to the hospital.

I sort of turned a corner yesterday. I can eat a little, and drinking is no problem. I sat up for about two hours in the morning and an hour in the evening. So there is improvement, but that's just to say that now I feel like I have the regular flu instead of some medieval, vermin-borne, wrath-of-god virus.

Improvement, but no knitting. I'm a little stronger today and hope to at least get through a row or two. Of something. Anything. Because I'm starting to get that stir crazy feeling -- today is day six, and there's only so much reality tv one person can doze through -- and I'm really out of patience for the not-knitting thing.

Happy New Year!

Did you think I died? Crawled under a rock somewhere and committed harikiri with some aluminum straights? Was kidnapped by yarn-hoarding aliens who smelled the sheepiness of my stash from twenty light years away?

Yeah. It was beginning to feel like that for me, too. The combination of work and the holidays really did me in.

There has been a little more knitting in the past few days. I'm grateful for that because it does help me stay on an even keel, and my stress level has been pretty high. I can't show pictures of my minimal knitting progress because my photo software and my new computer don't play nice together and I haven't had time to sort that out, but I have managed to knit most of the rest of a clapotis and part of a sock. So this past week saw more knitting than the three or so weeks before that combined.

I'm setting some January goals -- these aren't new year's goals so much as new month's goals, something I do routinely when I have my act together. Here is the knitting list for January.

1. Get life back in balance so knitting is a part of the routine again. Working out, too, which leads to --

2. Get back on the skinny-4-stash plan. Holidays + stress + change in meds = weight gain. This is not the result I want.

3. Finish the clapotis. I'm probably two repeats from the decreases, so the end is near.

4. Finish one pair of socks. I have three pairs currently OTN. Two is plenty -- one pair to sit on my desk, and one to carry along.

5. Frog the Butterfly. And how many times in life can we say that sentence? I've done everything I can to wiggle and stretch so that the yarn will be enough to complete the garment. But I'm officially admitting defeat here. I have maybe 50 yards more than the pattern calls for. I've altered the pattern and spent hours with a sketch pad and a calculator, but at some point I just became aware that no math in the world is going to make the yarn stretch far enough for this pattern. So I'm frogging it. It will be knit into a vest or something some day.

6. Make some progress on Fulmar. I think I've knit about four rows since Thanksgiving. I'd like to finish the front, but may not make it that far. But any regular progress would be an improvement -- even just one pattern repeat per week would be enough to satisfy me.

7. Dye Lady Eleanor and her matching hat so that they actually do match. Then weave in the ninety million ends and reblock the hat. It would have been nice to be able to wear this lovely heavy wool shawl over my coat today. (Current temperature: 7 degrees, with winds gusting and more snow falling. ...sigh...)

And I think that's enough for one month. Especially one month where my real goal is to get my life back in line.

Cr-r-r-r-r-u-u-u-u-unch!

Yep, I'm still feeling it a little. That crunch. That pressure. That OMG-what-am-I-forgetting-to-do panic. It's better than it was -- the transition and damage control resulting from the departure of a former disgruntled employee is about 80% complete -- but then the holidays hit.

I still have shopping and wrapping to do. I still have baking and cooking, and cleaning, and where the hell are all my gift boxes? My new computer still needs some set-up work, and for some reason my camera software and my computer aren't on speaking terms. I have to fight to get any pictures at all to load, and I just don't have the strength for that right now.

There has been some knitting. I'm maybe three rounds away from finishing the fair isle banded bottom of Catherine Parr. I finished a sock gusset -- the same sock I'd managed to knit half a gusset on during the worst of the work crunch a few weeks ago. I don't think I'll ever be able to look at that sock without remember this time in my life. Wish I could show you a picture of it. Someday!

I was going to take off work the entire week next week -- my big plan was to lay on my couch for as many consecutive days as possible with the clicker in one hand and a jug of wine in the other -- but it looks like I have to work at least a little.

But there will be knitting. Oh, yes, there will be knitting. And someday soon, maybe even pictures of knitting.

The Breaking Point

This is what my breaking point looks like. Take a good look. It's rare that an averted breakdown takes such tangible form.

The story starts, as most of my stories from the last three weeks start, with me chained to my computer in the midst of yet another 14-hour workday. (To be fair, some of my workdays recently were only 12 hours. But some were 16. So we'll call the average at 14 and leave it at that.) (And that's 7 days a week, too.)

Now, some of this extra work has been due to staffing changes at my editing job, and some has been due to one-off issues like the arrival of three new computers which needed set-up, and some has been self-imposed -- I am still trying to maintain an active freelancing business, after all. So we can't really blame any one factor for all the extra work, though the editing job has been more demanding than anything else just now. (But in a good way.)

As much as I love what I do, it was starting to feel a bit like a deathmarch, a long, hard walk that would leave many casualties along the roadside. My knitting was one of those casualties.

Funny thing about knitting. It's a stress reliever. A coping mechanism. What happens when you take away coping mechanisms during a demanding time?

Yep. The pressure starts to build.

So Tricia at Nana's Knitting shop emails me Friday morning and mentions a new shipment of Shaeffer Anne. From that moment on, I can't think about anything except:
1) Knitting, and
2) All the things I had to do that day which would prevent me from knitting.

These emails were exchanged around 45 minutes from lunchtime. As those 45 minutes ticked by, I became more and more impatient to do something at least related to knitting. And, did I mention, a new shipment of Anne?

So naturally, I went to the shop.

Where a funny thing happened.

People were knitting at the back table as they often do. I was watching them, picking out my yarn -- at this point, by the way, I've abandoned my skinny-4-stash plan because the damn doctor changed my damn meds and I gained 8 pounds the first week alone and I am super-pissed, but that's another story -- and the sight of all that knitting was almost mesmerizing.

I wanted to buy ever skein of Anne. (Nothing unusual about that.) I wanted to buy pairs of every color of the new shipment of Dale Baby Ull, one of my favorite yarns of all time.

But mostly, I wanted to sit and knit a while.

I think Tricia could sense how close I was to cracking. She let me rattle on about a problem at work for a while, and then mentioned a few or ten times how she was just sure my knitting bag was in the car. It was not. It was gathering dust back at the house.

But with every word she spoke, and with every stitch taken by those beautifully calm and smiling knitters at the table, the need to knit built in me.

Until finally, I literally threw up my arms -- I just barely managed to avoid shouting, "Fuck it all!" -- and announced I was buying sock needles to go with my sock yarn so that I could join them all for an hour of bliss.

The release, the rush, it's hard to explain. It felt like chains fell off my body in that moment. My hands were shaking. No exaggeration. I literally felt like I had called a halt, right then and there, and was giving myself permission to return to a more sane life.

So you see that little baby sock cuff at the top of the post? It's not just any ordinary sock cuff. It's a blow for freedom and sanity and a balanced life.

These might just turn out to be my favorite socks of all time.

Not Dead. Not Kidnapped. Just Crazy Busy.

I'm still here, y'all.

A few days before Thanksgiving, we had a staffing change at my workplace. This led to me temporarily taking over someone else's workload while we figured a few things out. And ... to be delicate ... there were some problems in that workload. 'Nuff said.

I've been putting in monster hours trying to get pieces of that workload either finished or set up to hand off to others. Other things are going on, too. Hello, holidays? The staffing change became official about 40 hours before my entire family arrived at my house for Thanksgiving dinner. And then we began the inescapable round of shopping and other related activities with my mother, who gets a little wacky this time of year. Dad is threatening to start grinding up valium and hiding it in the orange juice. Sounds like a fine idea to me.

Guess we know where I get it from, eh?

I have knit exactly half of one sock gusset in the last two weeks. This is not improving my stress level.

So today, this morning, to celebrate the fact that I can see a vague flicker of light at the end of the maddening tunnel, I decided to try to read a few blogs. Get caught up with what's going on in knitlandia. And I found this entirely too appropriate quiz on Rabbitch's blog.


Which Historical Lunatic Are You?
From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey.

You are Gaius Caesar Germanicus - better known as Caligula!

Third Emperor of Rome and ruler of one of the most powerful empires of all time, your common name means "little boots". Although you only reigned for four years, brief even by Roman standards, you still managed to garner a reputation as a cruel, extravagant and downright insane despot. Your father died in suspicious circumstances, you were not the intended heir, and one of your first acts as Emperor was to force the suicide of your father-in-law. Your sister Drusilla died that same year; faced with allegations that your relationship with her had been incestuous, you responded, bafflingly, by declaring her a god.

You revived a number of unpopular traditions, including auctions of properties left over from public shows. When a senator fell asleep at one such auction, you took each of his nods as bids, selling him 13 gladiators for a vast sum. You attempted to have your horse, Incitatus, made into a consul and hence one of the most powerful figures in Rome. It was granted a marble stable with jewels and a staff of servants. At one point you forced your comrade Macro to kill himself - in much the same vein as your father-in-law - accusing him of being his wife's pimp. You, of course, were having an affair with said wife at the time.

Things went from bad to worse. When supplies of condemned men ran short in the circus, you had innocent spectators dragged into the arena with the lions to fill their place. You claimed mastery of the sea by walking across a three-mile bridge of boats in the Bay of Naples; kissed the necks of your lovers, whispering sweet nothings like "This lovely neck will be chopped as soon as I say so,"; dallied with your sister's lover and made her pull her unborn child out of her womb prematurely. Towards the end of your reign, you had a golden statue of yourself made and dressed each day in the same clothes you yourself wore. When you eventually died, the terrified people of Rome refused to believe that such a cruel reign could ever end, and believed you to be alive for years afterwards.

Star(t)more

Awww, lookit this cute widdle baby Catherine Parr.

What's that you say? It doesn't look like Catherine Parr?

Well...yeah. In my usual damn-the-torpedoes fashion, I decided to skip the row of bobbles outlining the big fair isle section at the hem. It's not that I hate all bobbles. I just hate them on me. Curse of the cleavage and all -- why encourage anyone looking at me to think about nipples or any other part of the breast any more than they already will? I'm about as likely to knit bobbles as I am to wear a t-shirt with a picture of two side-by-side cantaloupes.

So I started playing around with other border options, things I could use in place of the bobbles that would preserve the fluency of the design. I tried a couple of checkerboard and lice designs, but none of them really had the look I was after. I wanted something fluid. Curved. Something that might mimic a few of the lines in the wide fair isle border at the hips and cuffs.

Out came the Ann Feitelson book and a few other books with plentiful charts. Catherine Parr's main fair isle chart at the hips is 24 stitches wide, so I was looking for something I could pattern in a 24-stitch repeat. It had to have some visual impact, but it had to avoid any eye-fights with the rest of the sweater. And I wanted something a little more gentle than all those colored bobbles.

I was beginning to lose hope when I hit on the curvy V scallops used above. The shape is actually part of a Feitelson chart -- I clipped a little section of one of her medallions and decided to flip it up and down as I go around the hem. Each piece is 12 stitches wide, so a pair is 24 stitches, just the size I needed.

Unfortunately, the hem is curling so much that it may never matter. Nobody may ever see the beautiful little shapes if I can't figure out how to flatten this section later. Current ideas include the use of crocheted edging, grosgrain ribbon, many four letter words, and a mallet. OK, so the mallet is more for show than for results....

This will probably be the last thing I cast on for a while. At the moment, this gives me three pairs of socks, three sweaters, one blouse and one bag on the needles. Oh, and the clapotis. I'm still not back up in double digits of projects OTN, and I want to keep it that way!

PS. Thanks for all the great tips, on and offsite, for computer stuff. My new computer was ordered today and should arrive the first week of December. Here's hoping the current one lasts that long!

Interference

Lately, my computer looks like this.


















It.s supposed to look like this. Actually, it switches back and forth between the right way and the weird way. Yes, I'm shopping for a new computer. <-----Imagine that said in an Eeyore voice. Because I hate computer shopping, and because it's not going well. I found one I liked in a price I liked, but then discovered it won't work with some voice recognition software I've been wanting to install. So now I'm back to the beginning, and I hate shopping for computers the same way I hate frogging mohair. It sucks.
























Also, special shout out to the guys from the phone company and the guys in the construction zone for the new housing development. I just lo-o-o-o-o-ove what you're doing to my phone service. Especially with being on dial-up and all. (Anyone else think it is rather odd that he leaned his ladder against the wires? Isn't that a safety hazard?)

So that's why I'm an intermittent blogger these days. I'm dealing with constant postus interruptus.

In knitting news, Fulmar is now twelve inches long, meaning I'm 2/3 of the way to the armhole decreases. It's a slow knit and doesn't provide much blog fodder. I mean, how often can I say "I love it! It's so fun! And it's a half-inch longer now!"

At my current pace, I should have the front finished by the end of the year.

But I do have one bit of excellent news on Fulmar to report. Row 5, that queen mother of all rows, used to take me around 50 minutes to knit. Yeah, 50 minutes for one row. One. Row. It's a doozy.

So the other night, I found myself with a half-hour of free time before I had to go meet with someone. An episode of That 70s Show was just about to start. (Providing additional support for my theory that, at any time of any day, you can find an episode of that show on some channel somewhere.) So I pulled out Fulmar for a half-hour, knowing that the end of the show would signal that it was time to put down my needles. I tend to get a little lost in Fulmar, yanno. I start knitting it, and day turns into night while I'm counting my purls. It really is a fun, absorbing knit.I realized I was on row 5, and knew I could never knit the whole row during a single sitcom rerun. What the heck, right? Half a row five is better than none.

You've probably already guessed where this is going, right? Right. I got the row done.

You can't imagine what a big deal this feels like. I mean, I suspected that I was knitting this a little faster as I gained familiarity with the charts. But shaving 20 minutes off my row 5 time? HUGE. That clips 100 minutes out of the time needed to finish the front. 160 minutes out of the back. That's like four and a half hours of knitting time. I've knit entire hats in four and a half hours.

So I started paying attention to my row times, and discovered I really am knitting faster now. Not fast, mind you, but faster. I'm still at about 15 or 20 minutes for a back side row, but my cabling rows are picking up momentum. Yay!