the comfort of a hat

I actually finished (mostly) something!!

After a very long hiatus, I picked up the neglected Nadia hat I had started so long ago. It was a lazy weekend for me - nothing much I really needed to do, and it was wonderful to have two whole days of afternoons and evenings left up to my discretion, which translated into...knitting! I was also pretty chilly this weekend, due to it still being freezing outside, and so in addition to spending most of the weekend in sweats and under a blanket, I also endured most of my time donning a hat and scarf (yes, while inside... I really can afford to heat my home, but even so, I tend to be cold all the time, and covering one's head really helps with that! In fact, as I pranced around the apartment with my hat on, I thought perhaps I should make more hats to wear with everyday clothing. They're pretty fun! Maybe I could become like Alison and be a funky hat girl!).

Anywho, the hat:

see how rosy my cheeks are - that means the hat was keeping me warm! this is me on my bed, where i spent most of my weekend... oh man, there's underwear in the background - long johns, but still. and also a huge tupperware container, which had veggies in it, i promise! oh, but you all should be admiring the hat. yes, the hat!

I even made a pompom on the top attached with an I-cord, just like the pattern said to.

I still have to make and sew on the earflaps - one is 80% done, and it should only take a little while to finish the hat for good. It's quite warm, thanks to the alpaca and wool blend, but it doesn't stretch very much thanks to the alpaca and the fact that I did not loosely strand in the snowflake motif part -- that section is thinner than the rest of the hat. Makes for a very tight fit, which could possibly keep one's head warmer if it does not cut off circulation. Next time I should at least go up one needle size when I strand or be more careful in how I place the yarn.

Project mostly finished, lessons learned, a matching scarf planned...a very knittingly-productive weekend!

at night

I had a really bad dream last night that Blogger got all crazy on me and started charging me for every photo I wanted to post (they also were offering pictures that you could buy to post onto blog entries, I guess just in case you didn't have any of your own or you wanted to appear to have way more friends that you really did or that you had travelled to an exotic island for vacation). I'm glad that this is not the case. Not that I have a lot of photos to post right now. But still.

Speaking of dreams, I have been sleeping an incredible amount recently. I first thought this was because I had experienced some insane work hours, but even after that I found myself not being able to drag myself out of bed until 9:30 on weekends (this is not normal). And so maybe it was because I was getting to sleep later than normal - which has been true. But even so, this past weekend I found myself sleeping between 10 and 12 hours a night! And still wanting a nap!

One of my biggest fears (and...in a sense - hopes, because I'm lazy) of life is that I will contract mononucleosis. That would completely wipe me out. It might be a good thing for me to be forced to take it easy for several months (it would certainly be lovely to have a great excuse to not work too hard and spend much time sleeping and knitting), but it's not terribly conducive to finishing a PhD thesis. I'm quite sure that my wanting to sleep so much has very little to do with the possibility of having mono. And being that in the past couple weeks I've become sort of a hypochondriac - having worried at various times that I have broken my finger, have some kind of terrible dermatologic disorder, have a congenital syndrome, or just plain carry bad genes - I am not taking my sleepiness too seriously, because it's most likely my imagination running away with me.

Actually, the tiredness is really most likely due to psychological stress and not consistently getting up at the same time every day. These are things I know full well how to deal with!

Anyway, a few bits and bobs I had begun blogging about but never finished posting earlier in the month are related...

You'd think I would have realized when I posted on January 2 that it was knitting day, especially because one of my knitting projects had everything to do with New Year's. But I didn't. I had many other things on my mind (see, for example, the parenthetical statement in that day's post), some of which were actually causing me to lose sleep because I'd lay (lie?) in bed at night and not be able to get my brain to stop thinking about them. But...I dealt with the majority of those things by the end of the day and was quite capable of drifting off to sleep - hooray!

The project I forgot to write about was the Nadia hat, which I had intended to make to wear for a New Year's celebration on the dunes of Lake Michigan. Obviously, I was in Pittsburgh for New Year's...and the hat is nowhere near being completed. BUT I did in fact make it to some dunes on Lake Michigan while I was visiting my parents, although it wasn't the original destination I had planned for the hat.Mom and I went to Rosy Mound Park, which has trails through both wooded and non-wooded dunes, and if you climb up the dune and on over...you get to Lake Michigan.I was pretty lame and didn't even have a single hand-knit item with me, but at least I got a picture of me at the beach in December!On another note, remember all those silly things I was doing? I was convinced they were because of thoughts of a person taking over my brain. However, what I did January 4 can't really be explained by such reasoning. (I instead blame lack of sleep.)

It was going to be a long day. Very long. I was up around 4 and ate, dressed, fed Joelle, packed up food and other essentials for the day, then drove to work. I worked. And worked. And worked and worked and worked. And finally, when I got home around midnight, I opened the apartment door and looked over at Joelle's cage as I normally do - she has a tendency to shake her cage when she is kept in it for a long time, in an effort to express her anger at being cooped up for so long, and I had been musing to myself on the drive home how far off its base the cage would be when I got home from the 18 hour work day.

To my utter surprise, I did not find the cage moved a centimeter from where it should be. However...

However, the door to the cage was wide open. Not only was it wide open, but it was clamped wide open, which meant that I had not ever closed the cage when I left in the wee hours of the morning, and that in turn meant that Joelle had achieved free range of the apartment for the entire long day! That is a very long time for a rabbit to destroy many, many, many things.

The first thing I checked was the lamp cords. There's only one that is accessible to a rabbit without climbing over a large object. All cords were fine.

Next, the couch. There's one favorite corner Joelle has tried to start nibbling, and I've put some blockades around it, but they're easily movable. Yet...the couch was fine.

I was getting a little scared because how likely was it that this critter truly didn't destroy anything?, and all the other things I could think of that were destructible were much more dear to me than the lamps. For example...my Fairly Easy Fair Isle cardigan sweater, which was laying in a heap on the bathroom floor - exceedingly easy prey for a mischevious rabbit!

Nope. Fine.

Everything was FINE. I couldn't believe it! (I also couldn't believe that I had forgotten to close the cage door.) I was very, very proud of my wonderful bunny for being so responsible even when I was not. Now, I'm certainly not going to make letting Joelle run around unattended become a habit, but it sure gave me a lot of respect for her. I gave her as many treats as I could allow myself to spoil her with and told her over and over again what a good, good rabbit she was. And I felt a bit guilty when I had to shut her in the cage the next morning knowing full well that it would be another very long day...

stress relief

After a wonderful week of relaxing and knitting during my visit to my parents', I have managed to not knit a bit since Thursday! What with the moving and the bird and attempting to unpack, I haven't found the time. All that changed yesterday, though...

When I finally got back from work at 7:30p.m., I had a Situation to deal with, and it ended up with me yelling at someone. I don't normally find myself yelling; I was very upset. Without going into detail, the person I was yelling at is extremely good at using manipulative speaking to try to make the listener feel guilty about whatever the Situation is - and manipulation is one of my Very Strong Pet Peeves. Reflecting on the conversation now, I can take away this life lesson: when you repeatedly are told you are doing the opposite of help when you think you're helping, the problem isn't all the people you've been trying to help -- it's you.

After the yelling conversation and some salad greens and a bite of banana for supper, I had to go continue dealing with the Situation at another location. I did not complete my dealing until 11:00p.m. This was well past my bedtime, and I was exhausted and hot and dirty (the Situation involved some trash). And so I took a shower (my shower had not been working very well at all, but yesterday it got fixed. It was LOVELY!!!) and put on pajamas...and dug out the Nadia yarn and a half-eaten box of Whoppers.

Oh...Nadia yarn. You are so soft and cuddly and full of long, beautiful fibers. You will make a sumptuous and warm hat that will be a joy to wear on a cold, cold day! I don't like most textured yarns, but you are simply pleasurable with your thin and thick spin. I could knit with you for a long, long time. You make me feel much better, even when I know I'll be tired in the morning after staying up late with you.

(I was intending to post an entirely different knitting-related item here today, but since the battery recharger I need to properly power my camera is still packed and I haven't had time to turn on my laptop to transfer some other image files...this will have to do. Plus...this is more timely! The regularly-scheduled post will appear next Tuesday, I trust.)

packing up

Over the weekend I packed most everything that I don't require in the next two weeks so that I can more easily move on July 5 & 6. It turns out that I don't require my yarn, so all of it that was hiding in closets or laying at the foot of my bed and wasn't already in the Big Trunk o' Yarn or the new Little Red Trunk o' Yarn went into boxes.

there's a sweater on the needles in that blue/black bag; there's also some stuff to be felted hanging out in that knitting pile.

I have determined that I have entirely too much yarn for a frugal graduate student. This was further confirmed when I ran across some old receipts from the yarn store for yarn I had forgotten I'd bought... Eeks.

And, with that decided, I pulled out the Nadia yarn, knit up a swatch (because I already have two sweaters and a sock on the needles...the sweaters having been there for nearly a year each...and of course that's not enough projects to have going concurrently...!), and am trying to determine how much more of it I should go buy...