mamacate

Blah...blah blah blah

Hey there.

What does a knitblogger do when she's not really knitting?  This isn't a riddle (I'm not feeling nearly clever enough for that).  I think the answer is not really blog.  Which is what I'm not really doing.

But despite appearances, I do still value this here knitblog community, so I will whine at you in an unfocused sort of way.  If you like that sort of thing, feel free to read on; if you don't, I fully understand. 

I'll try to do things with wool again at some point.  I trust that I haven't completely given up on this stuff, I'm just in the doldrums.  Call it the winter blues.  Call it a January blah.  Call it an under-treated thyroid disorder.  (I swear I didn't write that email in the link.)  Whatever.  I have all these unfinished projects and none of them make me happy.  Elizabeth I.  A self-designed sweater gift project.  An almost-finished garter-stitch jacket that will look like ass but will keep Rhys warm and very happy since she doesn't care if her sweaters are ugly when she just wears them around the house.  That's not even close to being all of it.  I could be knitting an already-started hourglass, a handspun shetland triangle, a handsome pair of mittens, an ancient fair isle, or a no-longer-mysterious mystery stole.  I could even fix the damn Autumn Rose (which I wore again last week in hopes that I would decide I didn't need to fix it anymore, which didn't exactly happen).  And socks.  Myriad single and half-knitted socks longing for companionship.  Yet I knit not.

So everyone knows the answer to this problem.  Cast on, right?  A kid sweater.  Quick, easy, low-stress, high-reward.  Eh.  Didn't last.  How about a summery sweater for me to wear to the Caymans?  Again with the quick (no sleeves!), plus it keeps me focused on the fact that I will experience sunlight again the future.  I cast on, and am no longer interested.  It doesn't help that, as a fellow raveler pointed out, the yarn rather resembles a potscrubber when knit up.  I caught some whiff of some re-design of the yarn and that the new version is lovely but I have the potscrubber version.  Insert heavy sigh here.  Why knit it if you already know the project is doomed?  Doooooooomed I tell you.  Doomed.

Yes, friends, it's a case of knitting dysfunction (also known as "KD").  A terrible syndrome characterized by proliferation of UFOs, acts of sudden frogging, inability to obtain buttons for completed projects, and the loss of interest in fibers that you have traditionally enjoyed (a more severe, but related disease is knitting psychosis which involves an aversion to yarn shops and immunity to luxury fibers).  Assuming the disease has not progressed to the psychosis stage, we have only one solution, the  first-line treatment of choice:  Chocolate, Wine, and Cashmere.

I predict a full recovery.

Merry New Year!

You have to say that in a fake African accent, a la Eddie Murphy in Trading Places.  You can actually see the section here.  Love YouTube.

Rhys and I quote this movie all the time.  Ja, from Sweden....Please to help me with my rucksack?  We're not the highest of the brows, what can I say?  Anyway, I finally bought the movie on DVD, so we can watch it EVERY New Year's Eve.  It was the Dukes...it was the Dukes...

With regard to this here holiday:

So my new year's resolution is to deal with the insanity that is my house.  I have no illusions that I will become a neat or organized person.  I just want to be able to find crap when I need it.

I don't know if I told you this, but my MIL is taking the entire family to the Cayman Islands in February.  As you might imagine, I'm deeply psyched, despite any stress that sharing a house with 12 of your closest in-laws might produce.  Dude, it's the Caribbean in February and I'd spend it in a house full of Republicans if I had to.  Oh wait a minute, that's exactly what I'm doing.  Never mind.

Anyway, as you probably know, you now have to have a passport in order to go to the bathroom travel anywhere from the US (and get back in at the end of it), so I had to update mine, which expired in '06.  So I went looking for it.  Hmm.  Not there.  Or there either.  Or in the safe deposit box.  Nor in the Big Pile Of Crap That Is Now In A Box But That Was On The Junk Counter Last Time People Came Over.  You know that box?  It wasn't in that box, or the box from the time before.  I know, I know, life is crazy, what can I say?  Well, then I figured I'd better find my birth certificate, which I always knew where it was before the renovation (you know, the one where we were going to have so much more storage space and shelving and organization?  Yeah that one).  Well, nowhere to be found.  So here I am in mid-December realizing that I might actually be waving goodbye to my family from the airport because I didn't have a freakin' passport.  I ordered a new birth certificate from the City of New York but you can imagine how much confidence I had in the timeliness of that.

My point is that I couldn't find a flipping thing in my damn house and there's no reason for this.  So after returning from nearly a week of Christmas with the Republicans in-laws, I went to the basement and I kicked some paperwork-clutter-disorganization butt and I a) found my passport within an hour and sent my expedited application off for a new passport because dude I am so going to the Caribbean and b) threw away a big pile of toys and old junk and c) organized a bunch of stuff in the basement.  Now I have to go to IKEA to get one of these for the basement and, if I can just stick with it, we're going to have a basement where we can FIND STUFF.  Seriously.  I'm also going to be selling and giving away stash over the next few months.  Watch this spot and my Ravelry feed.  (Do you know that you can subscribe to your Ravelry friends' activity on Bloglines or whatever RSS reader you use?  It's a great way to keep up with friends' projects, and it's interesting to see how virally fellow bloggers queue patterns.)

Solstice Knitting Recap:

When I said I'd be knitting for teachers, a few people questioned my sanity asked if I was completely sure that was a good idea, given my stress level in other areas of life.  That's entirely reasonable, of course, but for some reason that even I don't understand, I actually like doing that kind of knitting.  I think it gives me an excuse to make small, easy projects, and there's no pressure--the recipients aren't expecting knitted gifts so if I don't finish, no one will be disappointed and they won't be my kids' teachers next year, so I'm not setting up any expectations for the future.  I'm not sure why I'm capable of knitting gloves for my kids' teachers but can't seem to do the same for myself, but let's save that for therapy, mkay?  Here's the pile on Solstice eve (missing one pair of cashmere-silk fetching mitts, just for the record...):

Among these, for the most favoritest teacher of all, were a pair of chalice mitts, designed by the fabulous Alison. 

I test-knit these, though the pattern was perfect already.  Hopefully she'll be releasing it soon.  I used Elsebeth Lavold Angora (on closeout at Webs, of course), and it was kind of a marriage made in heaven.  I wasn't happy about this at first, but because I ran out of yarn on the second mitt, I wound up having to buy three more skeins because it would have been wasteful to just use a few yards of the third skein.  So now I can knit some for MEEEE!  Okay, WHEN is a whole other question.  Let's not get into that whole therapy thing again.

Well, I never tell you people anything, it seems, but then when I do I do ramble on don't I?  We've had a wonderfully snowy start to the winter here, and my skis are itching to get on the slopes, but it's not likely it will shoehorn its way into the schedule.  The kids tried it while we were in New Hampshire, but it never got past the frustrating stage for them.  Someday soon.  All this white stuff makes me wish I lived where Ruth lives...