It's been a while

Two weeks? What the heck happened?

Things are completely insane at work with the holiday coming up and the large freezer defunct. I'm getting various freezer donations, but it's like tetris over here.

I was happy to see "Shrove Tuesday Recipes" when I opened up allrecipes.com today - the historian in me always gets a kick out of that kind of thing.

I still haven't finished even the first Nibblers sock. I haven't been doing much knitting lately, due to some issues, and I can really tell that my mood is bluer because of it.

I ended up making a baby blanket for my cousin's shower - just a flannel one, with little pictures of birds in blue, brown and pink. I love those colors together! DP was actually jealous of the blanket, and if he'd been a baby, he would have stolen it for himself :)

My sister finds out in two weeks the sexes of her twins. I'm pretty excited, because once I know the sexes, I can start on the projects. DP will probably be annoyed at the craftosity, but c'est la vie. I can't wait! My hope is for one girl and one boy (that's what I hoped for when my mom was pregnant with twins, but she ended up with my brothers - sigh!).

I'd really like to work up my forest of Brethil socks for Ravelry. They're pretty easy, and I think people might enjoy making them. At the very least, I'd like another pair for myself :) Why don't I seem to be able to just sit down and pattern write?

Back to it!

I hate strife

Friday was such a horrible day - I was literally sobbing at my desk from about 9am to 11:30am. The worst thing is that nothing can be done about what made me so upset. "Oh God, that I were dead."

I got the extra skein of Madelinetosh for my woodsmoke scarf, so I should have enough to finish the edging. For scarves, that's my main issue when I don't check gauge. They'll always fit someone, but you might not have enough yarn to finish!

I finished one of DP's socks (I chucked the argyle for now and went with a straight stockinette sock with an afterthought heel). DP loved the afterthought heel, which makes it easy to keep the striping sequence in all these handpainted sock yarns I have running around. I'm also thinking of overdyeing the Schaefer Anne that I had gotten for his next pair of socks - it's a blend of bright oranges and pinks, but there's more orange than pink. I think I'll overdye orange...or maybe yellow?...to try to brighten the color up. He doesn't mind pink, but he asked for orange socks :)

Finally, I'm working on some wristwarmers/mitts for a swap. I bought the yarn without a plan for it, but I think I have something awesome now. It will be based on King Thingol's realm - he's the lord of beech and oak and elm - and it will be made of Malabrigo sock. I'm very excited!

High Holydays aka High Horror Days

So, why didn't I take pictures of all the great stuff I've been finishing up? Why didn't I post for 10 days?

The High Holydays.

Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are the biggest days at the synagogue, and tons of planning go into making them work. I'm the entire office staff of my synagogue, so things have been crazy since July. Add the Capital and Endowment Campaign, and it makes for one insane time period.

Rosh Hashanah begins tomorrow night, so I'll get a break until Monday. Then I have that week to get everything set up for Kol Nidre and Yom Kippur.

In my experience, people who don't work at the shul don't know how tough these days can get. For those of us that work there, it's one crisis after another until you wish you could kill yourself, but then you realize you'd be reanimated to finish your work, so it's not worth it.

Thankfully, my husband bought me a birthday present that got delivered yesterday: Moby Dick. I think I'll try to read a bit of it tonight to calm my nerves before the craziness of tomorrow.

And in knitting news...I finished the baby kimono and almost finished my STR August socks. I just have about 4 inches to go. I didn't decide which shawl to make, but the holidays made the question academic!

American Psycho

That was the theme of Friday at work. I spent all morning getting yelled at by a co-worker who was trying to frame another employee for theft, then I had a visit from my local psychotic. A year and a half ago, I had a person come into the shop at my work (I'm going to call my place of employment BI from now on). He thought he was Jesus, and he wanted to "baptise me". It was VERY scary, but I heard from the police that he was committed to the local psych ward. Well, he obviously got out, because he came back to my shop on Friday. I didn't recognize him at first, but he seemed familiar. Then he came back in to say one more thing, and I KNEW it was him. He left, and I locked the door so he couldn't get back in, but it was extremely frightening.

After I got home on Friday, I had to sleep because the events of the day had given me a migraine. When I woke up, I got to thinking. The employee that was yelling at me is an older guy, veteran of WWII from Poland. He can't do his job anymore, but BI won't let him go because of his age. I hired someone else to "help" him, and he systematically tried to frame her for all manner of things and generally make her look bad. Then she left, and I hired a new helper. Everything was fine until a month or so ago, when he started doing the same thing. I can't tell if it's dementia or a guerrilla war, but I can't handle it anymore. But what I started thinking on Friday was that maybe he's trying to get me to quit or be fired. Maybe he blames me for taking his job away from him. We're starting a big fund-raising campaign at work, and it would be a bad time for me to quit. But if this continues, I might have to leave. It's horrible to never know what is going to set him off.

On the crafting front, I decided that I'm going to make the silk slip from KLS for the KAL. I'm going to use Handmaiden silk-cashmere from my stash:


Now I just need to get to the material store and buy the silk for the slip part. I think I have enough interfacing for the knitted bits. I'm excited for this project!

I still haven't finished the sockies...for some reason, I feel like it's a slog. However, my next STR kit is in the mail so I better finish them before it comes. I wish more people would post spoilers for the kit, since I can't quite tell what the pattern is like from the pics that I've seen ;)

I also ordered some things from the Loopy Ewe, and I may integrate them into KLS patterns rather than socks. I'm on a reds/purples buying kick, and I'm feeling the need to actively make things and not just buy the materials to make them with.

Yarn drought

Argh. It may seem odd that someone with enough yarn for 10 pairs of socks, several thousand yards of laceweight and 15 pounds of unspun fiber could suffer a yarn drought. Alas, it's true. The one yarn I need more of is not here. It's on its way here, traveling from NYC, but it's not here yet and I'm totally bummed. I was hoping to finish my surplice bodice camisole from KLS this weekend, but if that yarn doesn't get here in tomorrow's mail, no dice. Double argh.

I read an interesting review of Kitting Lingerie Style here. I enjoyed seeing someone else's perspective on the patterns. The comments on the review are neat too. I think I'll be joining the KAL; I should have at least 2 pieces done by the time it starts, so I should have a grasp on how to knit the patterns.

In the "not all people are jerks" category, I had an awesome email back-and-forth with a rabbi in Israel yesterday. I've been looking for an English translation of one of his books, and I can't find it anywhere--I've asked booksellers all over the country, and no one has it. I found the author's email while surfing around, and I decided to take a chance. He emailed me back that he'll send me a copy! He was very nice about it.

I still need to finish the ribbing on the grasshoppers, so I guess that's what I'll be up to this weekend. I just got bored with the pattern and so couldn't make them kneesocks. Maybe I'll get more gumption at some point and be able to make a pair of knee highs.

Why is it...

That nothing I say at work can just be accepted? I have a policy in place about bringing donations to the library: call or email first. The president of the NP came in today with books that she didn't call or email about. I told her my policy, and then said that I'd just hold them for the librarian until she came in later, but that in the future she needed to call first. The prez got offended by that. Why? She's giving us junk and making us have to deal with disposing of it--shouldn't I be the one who's offended? Of course not. ARGH.

In other news, I finished both heels of my grasshoppers and an inch of the legs. I'm not sure when/if I'm going to do the increases, or if I'll do them as written. The lace is darn stretchy, so I don't know if they'll fall down if I add more stitches.

I also got my copy of Knitting Lingerie Style (finally!). There are a lot of interesting patters, and a lot of patterns I'd never knit in a million years. It's not that they're too scandalous, but that they're just ugly. There's a "camisole" in Douceur et Soie with ruching on the sides that looks like it's just an ill-filling cardigan sewn together in the front. But there's an amazing looking wasp-waist-style sweater that I think I'll have to make. It looks lovely, and I think I would work for those of us that have a bit of a tummy. A couple of the camisoles also look like good summer tank top patterns, so I might have to whip one up for my walks home from work. All in all, the book was worth the money.

I generally get bummed when people dis a book because they don't want to work all the patterns in it--you have to expect that not everything can be a must-make. I consider a 50/50 ratio of good to bad patterns make a book worth buying. You also need to realize who a book is written for. There was a pattern book that came out a few months ago, Twinkle's Big City Knits, that was written by a designer originally from Taipei. Her stuff is very interesting, but it looks best on those with petite and slender figures. So, if you don't have that kind of figure, don't buy the book! Don't buy it and then complain that she doesn't know how to design for "real women".

I should really get off my soapbox and back to my socks...

Notes

I got into my office today to find this note on my desk: "I can't find any grape juice--any ideas?"

Sitting right in front of my desk, where the person would have to walk around them to get to my keyboard to leave the note, are 10 bottles of grape juice.

Argh.

May Day!

Hooray for May! I can't believe that we're already almost halfway through 2007. Argh.

Yesterday was just awful. I got into work and found that the bad caterers had taken all the dirty tablecloths from the simcha on Saturday and put them into trash bags, instead of laundry bags. I went upstairs to get the laundry bags from the stage (where they are stored with the clean tablecloths), and discovered that the caterers had taken all the clean tablecloths, unfolded them, and threw them onto the dirty stage floor. I got the laundry bags, came downstairs and listened to my voicemail, only to find that the numbers I had for the luncheon Monday morning had gone up 20 people! I quickly went back upstairs and set up more tables and chairs, then came back downstairs and started putting the tablecloths into the laundry bags. Suddenly, my maintenance man came up to me and told me that the walk in freezer had died, and all the food inside was melted. I went back upstairs to find the good caterers (who respect the building and aren't idiots) trying to deal with the pool of blood spilling onto the floor from all the meat that had melted in the freezer. I then went back downstairs and got the mop and bucket so the caterer could mop up the blood, which he graciously offered to do. All of this happened between 7:30 and 8:15. The rest of the day simply followed the theme of madness.

On a more pleasant topic, I finished DP's socks, and he actually wore them all day Monday. I couldn't believe it--I figured that after they were done, he'd decide they were too scratchy or something. The stats: 2 skeins of Claudia Handpainted in Ink, size O and 1 circs. I ended up doing the foot in stockinette on 0, the cuff in 2x2 rib on 1 and the top 2 inches of the cuff in 2x2 rib on 0. The verdict: the yarn makes a great sock, springy and comfortable. However, knitting with it dried out my hands like nobody's business. I've make two pairs of Regia socks in a row, and that yarn has nylon, and my hands didn't get as painfully dry as with the CH. I don't think I'll use it again, unless it's in some color I have to try.

I'm doing more work on the CoH shawl; I've frogged it twice, so it's on its third iteration. I realized while knitting on the bus this morning that I can do whatever I want with it--the words of EZ floated through my head: you are the boss of your knitting. I stopped agonizing over the types of eyelets and whether the tree trunks were twisty enough and just knitted. I know it sounds silly, but it was very freeing.

I also stopped at the coffee shop this morning. I'm trying to cut down on coffee and sweet coffee house drinks (I generally don't actually drink coffee), so I only go Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays now. Unfortunately, a new creature is inhabiting the coffee shop, and supposedly he'll be there every day. He's nice enough, but I don't like to socialize with people first thing in the morning. I may have to change the time I go to the coffee shop in order to avoid him. How irritating.

Spring Cleaning

I've been doing a bit of spring cleaning at work--I can't do anything that will stir up dust at home until DP is completely well--and I'm pretty happy with the results. My desk has had tons of "work in progress" piles of papers since 2002, so I finally filed them away! I removed everything from my desk and sorted it into piles on the floor (no one was in the office on Monday except me, so this worked well). Then I just went through each pile, without looking at the other piles and distracting myself, and so was able to actually get through them. I've gotten several compliments already, along with some worry that the reason I cleaned off my desk is that I'll be quitting soon. Having a desk that someone else can understand is one of my goals before I leave this job...

On the knitting front, I haven't done too much on DP's socks. If I could just get a couple of hours of free time, I could probably finish them. I have t'ai chi tonight, and I'm hoping to use the time between work and my class to work on the socks. Positive thoughts.

Lace-wise, I decided to use Rosebud Mesh from Barbara Walker's Second Treasury. (Sadly, it's not yet on this site.) I think it goes great with the colors of the yarn, which are very rose-y. I started on the rose pink end of the skein, so it's going rose-pink, deep pink, pink-purple. I'm very excited about it! I'm also very happy with the singles--they turned out pretty even and washing them in hot water with a cold rinse took out a lot of the excess energy, so the yarn is not kinking up at all. Pictures will be forthcoming.

Has anyone been reading the Socks that Rock blog? It was getting so catty that the mod had to post tell people to play nice. Working at a non profit, I get a lot of spiteful complaints, and it seems like some of the people who call me at work are also posting on the STR blog.

I'm very interested in the next STR shipment--I think the April one is supposed to be shipped the 3rd week of April. The Monsoon socks are so comfortable; I hope the next pattern is as nice.

Socks for DP

First--hooray for vacation! Two days off to knit, spin and do laundry. Sweet. Before I left work, I picked up this phone call:

Me: Non-Profit X, this is Spider.

Weirdo: Hi; am I correct in assuming that you prepare chicken soup with matzah balls for purchase?

Me: I'm sorry, we don't sell food here.

Weirdo: Well, I was told that you did. I need some for my friend. Can you tell me where I could buy it?

What I wanted to say was that she should look up a recipe, but I refrained.

When I got home there was a surprise waiting: my yarn shipment from the Loopy Ewe. It contained (amongst other things) two skeins of Claudia Handpainted in Ink; a very subtle black/shades-of-grey colorway. I made my sweet husband, DP, feel them and then sprung the news: they'd be socks for him. He took it well, and if he decides he can't handle handmade socks, our feet are the same size...

In between knitting socks and spinning more yarn for knitting socks, I'm trying to come up with a motif for my next shawl. I have one skein of Shaefer Anne, which was enough to make a triangle shawl 3.5 feet long and 5.5 across the hypotenuse. I'd like to branch out into my own pattern, but I have to find something that looks right with the yarn and that won't require more than 560 yards of it. I'm thinking using starlight lace or bleeding hearts, but I don't know if bleeding hearts will be open enough, and starlight is a bit wacky to chart (the stitch count changes on the 6th row, I think). I'll probably go through my Barbara Walkers a few more times before I even get to the swatch stage.