That winter lull. January is always so busy, with end of year wrapping up at work. It always feels more like just a continuation of the craziness from the holidays, just morphed and evolved into a new kind of crazy. February, though… February I can breathe. I can think of things other than deadlines. The sun is noticeably returning, and mornings are getting a bit brighter on my drive to work. I can start looking forward, officially, to the spring and all that it entails: warmer weather, the smell of the freshly turned dirt, and being outside more. I’m having more good days than bad, which is fantastic. I’ve done a few things to change up routines and try to hold life together a bit more. We’re eating more meals at the table, for example, and I’m planning dinners a month in advance instead of weekly since I hate meal planning. I used our fancy new color laser printer and made myself a cleaning schedule/routine that I can use a dry-erase marker on, and printed out some other family planning pages based on some ideas I’ve had brewing for a while. Basically, February has given me the much needed time to do all the things I’ve needed to do (focusing on myself/our home, that is).
The scarf for the husband has stalled. I was doing so well, knitting on it every chance I got. I never once got tired of it – I think switching colors every 2 rows helped. And then a horrible, no good, rotten thing happened: I ran out of black yarn. I have all of this handspun left, and it isn’t long enough. I broke down and ordered a 2nd skein from Webs, and I’m not happy about it. I’m trying to make 2015 a year of stash knitting/projects, which is why I’m so upset about needing to order more yarn. But that’s how knitting goes, I suppose. I did, at least, come away with only ordering that one yarn, and not a single item more. It was a very difficult task, because yarn is pretty and soothing and tempting, but I managed it.
With that project stalled, I paced around the house feeling restless for something else to work on. I’m trying to limit myself to just 2 projects at a time, but that kind of goal doesn’t work in situations such as this. Well, it does. But it required going to my car to retrieve my sock project that I keep in there for emergency knitting. One could argue that not having something to work on is an emergency, but I worried that if I took the knitting out of the car I’d forget to put it back and then I’d be stuck somewhere with time on my hands and no yarn or needles to work with. Not wanting a situation like that, I referred to my Google spreadsheet (I took the idea from the Yarn Harlot with her holiday spreadsheets she talked about and I made myself a spreadsheet of projects that I have yarn/fabric for, projects that have deadlines, etc so I don’t miss things – like a Ravelry queue but for EVERY project, not just the knitting ones) and cast on a scarf for my friend. It’s on the list, and is a project that I cringe every time I see the yarn in my closet and think “I should get on that” and never do. So now it’s in progress, though it knits painfully slow compared to the other scarf. Every row feels like it takes f-o-r-e-v-e-r. On the bright side, today and tomorrow I have knit group, which hopefully means lots of knitting on this without distractions.
