Avoidance Blather

I specifically took this picture a week or two ago, to prove I was still knitting ... then forgot to post it. It's the current status of the log cabin blanket. This 'simple project' has turned into a life's work. I like it, but I'm kind of tired of it. I'm seriously considering converting it to a 'lap blanket' and calling it done. I may get back to work on Celtic Icon ... if I try really hard, I may be able to get it done for fall weather, which is exactly what it'll be great for - it's a hooded, zip front sweater. It's been so long since I worked on it now, I imagine I'll have a seriously hard time matching my former gauge until I get back in the swing of it. It's DK weight yarn on size 3 needles - ridiculous, but that's what I had to do to get gauge.

I haven't done much new work on the pond garden, but here's it's current state of affairs as well - a definite improvement over how it started out this spring. I have lots more I want to do here (and over the rest of the yard) but time and energy have been lacking lately. In addition to that, I managed to hurt my shoulder somehow over the last few weeks (I can't remember exactly when it started hurting, so I don't know exactly what I did to it), and don't quite feel up to digging and hauling around heavy bags of soil. Hmm, maybe that is what did it in the first place.

I'm specifically going on about all this other stuff to avoid the one thing I most need to do ... deal with this mess.

Since my dad passed away, I have to collect the mail at his house whenever I get over there (a couple times a week; I have a change of address card to fill out, so his mail would come directly to my house, but haven't managed to get around to that either). Which means I have all my own bills to pay every month, plus his. This shouldn't be a big deal, but for some reason a few years ago I began having trouble paying my own bills - I mean, the money would be there, I just couldn't seem to make myself sit down and write out the checks and pay them until right up on the due date -and now that there are two batches (and the accompanying two checking accounts, and two bank statements to reconcile every month), it just kind of snapped something in my already overwhelmed brain, and I have not been able to deal with it. So the bills (and other things, like the life insurance paperwork, stuff I have to deal with from an old worker's comp claim I have, etc., etc., ad nauseam) just stacks up on my table in a threatening, annoying pile. The only concession to doing something with it that I accomplished this week was to sort it all into piles. I really need to sit down, do the bank statement, and pay those bills - some of which I know are late ... and I just can't seem to work up to it. Maybe if I just do one at a time, then take a break ... .

Or, I could just knit.

Blahdy Blahdy Blog

Still here. Still not doing much on the creative front. I've got to fix that soon.

But there's been a lot else going on. One of my stupid co-workers quit. There are only three of us total, and that's barely enough to keep things going. Now that she quit, there are only two, and it's a disaster. I am barely treading water to just meet each day's deadlines, and getting nothing done on the backlog of stuff that isn't an emergency yet (but probably will have to become one before I can get to it). I've had to increase my hours, something I really don't like. And to add insult to injury, the only way out of this mess is for us to hire someone new and then I have to train them. I really hate training people. I don't know why, I just do. I don't like to be bothered. I like to come to work, be left alone to do my job, and go home. Training people is tedious and time-consuming. It takes me three times as long to explain how to do something as it would to just do it, so I just get further behind - but it has to be done, else how are they going to learn?

I really wish my boss's practice was small enough that we didn't need to hire a new person, and I could just handle the work ... it would really be preferable to me to hiring someone new. The way our office is set up, that third co-worker sits at a desk that's about five feet away from mine, in a tiny little room in the back where 80% of the guts of the office are crammed in - 2 desks, all the filing cabinets, the copier/printer/fax/scanner monstrosity, and an extra printer. There is barely room to move in there. Having to work in such close proximity with someone else all day long is, I think, one of the things that makes my job so draining. I am not a people person. Some people enjoy being around people, it recharges them or something. I am just the opposite ... being around other people (most of them, there are a few exceptions) just drains me. I think having that third person in my face all day is what makes me so tired after work, far more than the actual work I do.

I've talked to my boss numerous times about rearranging or remodeling the office - heck, I'd be happy to have a cubicle. At least I'd have some privacy. He always says, "Yeah, yeah! Great idea!" then does nothing. I'd start on him about it again now, except he has a new scheme.

He has decided he's tired of practicing law, and plans to shut down the office and open up a pizza shop franchise. Well, that's the Cliff Notes version. It's a bit more complex than that. I've been asked if maybe this is just all talk. It may well be, but I will say that he's far more serious about this than he has been about anything else I've heard him come up with in the 11 years I've been there. He's not prone to spouting off strange ideas like that. He's been talking about this for quite a few months. So he may actually do it, I don't know.

But as long as he's still talking about it, there's no way he's going to invest any money in remodeling the office now - not when he's planning to close it in a year. So I guess I'm stuck with at least another year of working in the closet with another freak co-worker.

Oh, and arrrggghhh. The new Pirates movie came out last night. A bunch of us are going to see it tonight, then coming back to my place for a little pirate party. Maybe I'll remember to take pictures to post this weekend.

Psycho-Knitting-Babble

I thought it was about time I earned my keep on the knitting rings I managed to get myself onto, and since it's 2:00 a.m. and I Can't. Sleep. ... some blather on knitting.

No pictures tonight, as ... again ... it's 2:00 a.m. I don't feel like going to bed, but I don't feel like getting out the digital camera and unrolling the quickly-becoming-unwieldy log cabin blanket for a midnight photo op.

The bottom line is, I haven't felt like knitting for a long time. I both admire and detest ... admiringly detest, perhaps ... those people who, when faced with crisis, hit the stash and whip out some beautiful piece of finished knitting in, if not a day, a weekend. I've been working on the log cabin blanket since late winter. We don't even want to talk about how long ago I started Celtic Icon. Or that pair of socks.

It's not that I've lost interest in knitting. I still passionately love knitting. I just can't seem to find a solid chunk of relaxing time for it. I used to be so obsessed that I'd knit in any spare moment, even 30 seconds worth. When working on a deadline (holiday, for example), I'd even take knitting to work, keep it in the truck, and when out on a cigarette break, go knit standing at the open truck door, cigarette dangling from my mouth.

There have been times when I was able to finish something in a reasonable amount of time. I did a whole felted tote bag for the Knitting Olympics (okay, yeah, it was "only" a tote bag, but for me, *any* finished thing was a big deal). I knit an entire Faroese-style shawl in a few months one winter/spring. Those were the good old days.

Now I can't get an entire row completed on the log cabin blanket without my brain going all Rainman on me, and taking off on some tangent or another that absolutely Must be dealt with Right Now.

I'm wondering if I'm burned out with my current projects for the very reason that they've been languishing so long. I used to have a sort of self-imposed rule, that I wouldn't have more than three projects going at any one time - socks, something simple, something complex - and I wouldn't start anything new until I'd finished one of them. Maybe that strategy isn't the proper one for my current frame of mind and life circumstances. Maybe I really need to just chuck them all for a bit, and start something spiffy and new, with a hope of finishing in a few weeks. A new pair of socks (something quick and easy, not ungodly complicated). A new bag from "Bags: A Knitters Dozen" or whatever the hell the name of that book is, I bought it years ago and never made anything from it. Even another Faroese-style shawl. That was probably one of the most enjoyable projects I ever knit, because I discovered I really liked lace knitting. Albeit, I knit it on sport-weight yarn, so it didn't take the rest of this life and a lien on half the next. But I dearly love that shawl, and could easily make another similar one in that weight of yarn.

I just made a Freudian typo ... did you ever notice how close the words "yarn" and "yearn" are. Hmmm.

I wanted to learn to design my own lace last year, and got a book on interlibrary loan about that. I was having a blast with that book when the time was up, so I asked for it for ... I don't know, birthday, Christmas, something. The Dread Reverend - World's Most Perfect Boyfriend that he is - got it for me. But since then I never took time to get back to it. Maybe that's what I need to do ... work through that book, and begin learning my own lace designing. At least, it would certainly get my mind off my current troubles.

Not to put too fine a point on it, I told my friend Wren tonight I was considering spraying the walls with ketchup and then running away, in a feeble attempt to make it look like Something Had Happened To Me and it wasn't my fault. Or perhaps burning some bizarre substances I could find around the place ... an old radio, an entire carton of cigarettes including the cardboard, acrylic yarn - and leaving the pile of ash in the middle of the living room floor, with a few charred pieces of my clothing.

I would, except ... I wouldn't do that to the Dread Reverend (aka The World's Best Boyfriend). Who, unfortunately is in Kansas City ... a large contribution to my current mental state.

I think it's time to go to bed before I get any more bright ideas.

Decisions Made; Reclaiming My Haven

I've finally made my decision about the house dilemma, and I feel so much better. It's quite a relief, so I know I made the right choice. I've decided to stay here, in my own home, and not move to dad's house. Instead we'll sell it.

There were lots of reasons for the decision. First, and maybe most important, I don't really like the other house. It's definitely not something I'd choose if I were buying a house. One of my favorite things about my house is my large back porch; the deck at the other house is way smaller. One of my next favorite things here is my back yard, which while not huge is very shady and private. Because of the way my garage and the neighbor's garage are situated, it gives a lot of privacy at the sides of the yard, and behind my house is nothing but the back corner of an elementary school yard. The yard at the other house is larger, but it's also all open, with neighbors right there on three sides, and no privacy. Inside isn't much better - when I really thought about it, that house isn't that much bigger than mine - it only has one additional room mine doesn't have, a dining room; the rest of the rooms are all about the same size as mine (with the possible exception of the kitchen, but I love my kitchen since I had it remodeled some years ago). It does have a basement, but I don't like basements and had no intention of using it myself for anything but storage; otherwise it was going to be the kids' play area. I, on the other hand, have an upstairs.

So the size differences just weren't enough to make it worth moving to a house I otherwise don't really like. This wasn't my childhood home or anything like that - my parents bought this house after I'd moved out when I was 19 or 20. So yeah, they probably lived there longer than they lived in my childhood home, but it's never been my 'home' - so I have no particular attachment to it. (I wish the place I grew up was still in the family, I'd have leaped at the chance to move there - but unfortunately we only rented that place).

After making the decision, I felt much relief, and got all gung ho about fixing this place up again. When I first moved here, I used to try to take better care of the place, often working on fixing it up, both inside and out. Then at some point I just kind of abandoned it all, and in the past few years especially, when I've been so busy with other things, I've completely neglected it.

I had a little landscaped area in the corner of my back yard that used to be the highlight of the place for me. I'd quite let it go to hell in the past several years. Sunday I spent about 5 hours outside doing yardwork, and began cleaning that area up. It's not done, but here's the progress so far, with 'before' and 'after' pictures.

I'm looking forward to the ideas I have for the rest of the area, which should take shape over the next few weeks. Now that I have the time and even sometimes the energy, I'm trying to do a little bit every day, rather than saving it all for weekends - that spreads things out too much, and takes too long. Yesterday after work I stopped and got some topsoil to fill in and even out the area for planting, and I bought some impatiens. I still want to get a couple ferns, and then I'm not sure what after that. Baby steps.

My boyfriend and his kids helped enormously with the yard work Sunday, too, so a veritable ton of stuff got done. It is really shaping up out there.

Now that I've decided to stay, I'm really psyched about all this, fixing the place up again and having my haven back. Eventually I believe I'll get back to my other hobbies ... knitting, and the quilt. But, strike while the iron's hot and all that - the weather's been gorgeous, so it's a perfect time for working outside before the summer SCA event crunch closes in.

Speaking of which, the first event is only next weekend, and I am so totally unprepared. That's something else I have to work on in the next two weeks.

So things are percolating along, and I'm figuring out and settling into this major new routine in my life. Having all this spare time is very strange, but I'm adapting.