To brighten up a rainy day.

I made these from a kit I got at Paper Source — a frightening cash-vacuum for a gal with a paper fetish.

Vacation. It’s a beautiful word. I’m on vacation next week — the first real time off I will have had since early November — and I’m finding it really difficult to concentrate here at work. My brain is slipping away for vacation early.

So what to do? Luckily, I have several meetings, tours and presentations this week which will help take up the time. Today, however, is wide open, and I’m just not here.

Once upon a time, when I re-started knitting, I decided to make Mike a sweater. I had never made any kind of garment or spent any time on gauge, or even sewn any pieces of knitting together, but I would make a sweater, nonetheless. I went to my LYS, bought a pattern for a simple drop-sleeve pullover and some beautiful Mountain Colors 4/8s Wool in a colorway that compliments my husband’s eyes, and dove in.

Well, I soon realized that this beautiful yarn deserved better than my beginner knitting skills, and set it aside for a while to work on other things. I picked it up again during last year’s Knitting Olympics, but ran into a major snag: I was working the two sleeves at the same time, but had picked up the two most disparately dyed skeins so that the sleeves looked like they were knit from two entirely different colorways. I had to put it down again after working on it so intensely during those couple of weeks.

Then I picked it up again last fall and got it done. Alas, it still wasn’t meant to be. Somehow my measurements at the beginning of the project were different from my measurements at the end of the project, and it fit so wrong: it had just enough ease to keep it from being ridiculously tight across the chest, it was short enough to have been classified as a cropped sweater (not so good on a guy), and the sleeves were wide enough for two arms to fit in. Frustrated, I put it down again, vowing that I would start completely from scratch, building an entirely new pattern that wasn’t just a plain stockinette drop-shoulder pullover.

So! Mike was leaning toward an Aran-style sweater. We went through a bunch of books and he chose some patterns and motifs that he liked, I swatched and did a bunch of math, and came up with a game plan.

I started knitting. The Mountain Colors yarn? Still beautiful to work with. The cables? Much more entertaining to knit. The size? Appearing to come out much closer to reality. It really looks lovely.

But there’s a problem. When I bought the yarn, I picked up six skeins — 1500 yards — which was plenty for the plain stockinette sweater, in fact plenty enough that I made him a hat with a 5-inch knitted hem out of the leftovers. The cable pattern is eating up yarn like crazy, however, and I am growing increasingly concerned that even if I pull out the hat (which he loves, by the way), I will still run out of yarn.

And the bigger problem is that Mountain Colors has discontinued the colorway, Midnight Sapphire. There’s none to be bought anywhere. If I could find some random skein, or even mill-end or leftovers from someone else’s project, even if the dyelots weren’t close, I could still make it work. But there will be no finding of random skeins. When I’m done with this yarn, I’m done. And I won’t know I’m done until I’m trying to finish the second shoulder strap and find I’m two inches short.

Cross your fingers for me.

I’m slated to give a presentation to a bunch of librarians next week entitled “15 New Technologies in 50 Minutes.” I’m putting together my list, and here’s my dilemma: What constitutes “new”?

There are technologies that have been out there for a while — blogs, Flickr, YouTube — that aren’t at all new to me or anyone who’s interested in Web 2.0-type stuff, but there are still librarians who haven’t played around with them at all. The actually new things I’ve identified (Nintendo Wii, iPhone, downloading content to my TiVo from Amazon) aren’t immediately library-relevant, but does that matter? Is the point of this session to teach people about tools they can use right now in their jobs? Or is it to familiarize people with the things their patrons might ask about so they don’t look at them like they’re crazy?

Now that I’ve written that down, I think it’s the latter. There’s just too much to say about blogs and wikis and such that’s actually useful on a day-to-day basis to fit in a session this short. So a whirlwind tour it is.

I have time issues. Not the “I-don’t-have-enough-time” kind, but the “why-does-the-time-I-have-not-come-when-I-need-it” kind. I’m a big time morning person, which for any normal person would mean that I prefer getting up early to staying up late. For me, it goes so much farther than that. For me, there is basically no functional time in my day past 2:00 pm. The implications of this fact are far-reaching and difficult.

• My motivation to do anything drops off mid-afternoon. On a day like today — when I work the reference desk at night and don’t go into work until noon — this is a problem. I might have an hour or two of productive time when I get in, but the day is essentially a wash. Good thing half of my work day is taken up by answering questions people ask me.)
• If I don’t get up and doing essential stuff in the morning, it isn’t going to happen. If I haven’t started a project by noon, be it doing laundry or working on my scrapbook, my day is shot.
• Although I have free time after work, it doesn’t count because of the aforementioned lack of motivation thing. When 5:00 pm rolls around, it’s just a waiting game until dinner and bedtime.

With all that said, I was just thinking about why it’s seemingly so hard for me to post more regularly to the ol’ blog, and I think I’ve got it (or a big part of it, anyway). It’s pictures. More to the point, it’s the feeling that a post without pictures is no kind of post at all. (Lately I’ve been checking out Moo cards and wanting some so badly, but without a Flickr account to speak of, I have no suitable pictures from which to make them.)

Here’s the grand production that is putting pictures on my blog:

1. I wait for a good time to take pictures. During the times when the light is good enough for picture taking, I’m usually focused on tasks higher on my priority list, so it often just doesn’t happen.
2. I get out the camera and do the photography.
3. I turn on the computer — takes f-o-r-e-v-e-r.
4. I upload the pictures from the camera.
5. I squish them through Photoshop for more blog-appropriate sizing.
6. I FTP them to my web host.
7. I get them linked to a post.

It’s convoluted and not terribly fun, and, like I said, often much less important than clean underwear or the designated project of the day.

Without pictures it seems pointless to tell you about my current works in progress (Mike’s sweater — again — which is knitting up beautifully, but for which I am certain I will run out of yarn. Mountain Colors 4/8s Wool in the discontinued Midnight Sapphire colorway? Anyone?) or finished objects (a shawlette for my mother-in-law or anyone she thinks might like it because the last shipment from the Petals Collection, Bird of Paradise, while lovely, is so not me).

This Saturday is another geekend for Mike in Indy, and I will not be going with him. I don’t need to go to Mass. Ave. Knit Shop and buy more yarn — I have way too much already! — and since he’ll be getting up early to leave, I’ll basically have a day all to myself. I see a major photo session coming on. Maybe.

I said I wasn’t going to do it again, but I did it again. I signed up for Sockapalooza 4 and volunteered to be a sock savior in case someone else drops out. At least I have several months before they have to be done — the mailing date isn’t until August 2, so there’s plenty of time.

• Deb’s funeral was extremely cathartic, a chance to sob all the sobs I’d been carrying around with me for most of that week. I knit through the service — Deb wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.
• I talked to my doctor about the incident at the optometrist’s office, and she basically said not to worry about it. It isn’t common, but it’s normal.
• My quasi-lenten attempt to not eat out fell apart the week Deb died. As it happens, it had neither the effect of saving money nor of causing me to eat less, so I’m not too torn up about it.