long on wind, short on interest
*tap tap* Is this thing on?
It's amazing how totally I don't feel the desire to blog lately (as in about the past year)... the main attraction of LiveJournal to me was its combination of blog and social network. However the social network has died. Part of that is just the general fickleness of internet communities I'm sure (whither MySpace?) but a great deal of it was mishandling by the succession of owners. And when people left they left to all different places... It's a kind of social network entropy. I've managed to keep in touch with some who connected with me on Facebook. A great deal of my family does Facebook, and I've joined a local mothers' group on Facebook also, so it's become where I do most of my "here's a funny thing my kid did today" or "this is what bugs me about the weather" inanity that I used to do here.
Gordon came by and tried to talk to me while I was writing this and I said basically "I'm trying to brain and my brain is not braining", which I think is a big reason I'm not blogging. Forming a clear, orderly, decipherable series of paragraphs is a bit beyond me. I started writing about my new hobby of crochet originally, and I'm going to leave that at the bottom of this post, but I was having the issue that my mind kept going in all kinds of directions as I was typing about crochet. I know how I would TALK about crochet if I was having a conversation with someone about it, but WRITING about it, I feel like I'm being hopelessly opaque and disjointed.
It's very disheartening because I don't feel like I have the right set of brain skills right now to edit myself, at least not without stress, and since blogging is pointless unless it bare minimum doesn't add to stress, that's why I'm not blogging. I guess that's about it.
My life right now is, first of course, taking care of my two children, which is still a 24 hour kind of job because the younger child still wakes several times every night. Anyone who feels keen to tell me what to do about that, I feel a bit like I feel about people who seem to think they're the first people in human history to notice contradictions in the Bible. Thank you, we've thought of that one actually, thank you. Yes, a couple thousand years ago, actually. Yes. Yes well we'll certainly take your concerns into account. Thank you.
I also do in-home, license not required daycare of another child as a minimum student loan-paying mechanism. I volunteer at a local community centre, helping connect other families to resources in the area. I'm taking a certificate course about physical literacy (physical literacy = basically foundational movement skills, the underlying skills that are really necessary for everyone's development, such as proper balance, being able to catch yourself when you fall, etc, as well as the skills which will enable someone to later build on for athletic purposes, such being able to throw or kick) for children age 0-6. In addition to the certificate, which I can add to my resume, I am getting a small stipend for teaching two classes, which I've already done one class so I have one left to go.
So basically it's kids, kids, kids, kids, and also kids.
Not kids wise, I like doing crochet (of which more anon) and watching QI XL on YouTube, which are two great tastes which taste great together. I also go on kicks for silly little mobile arcade or puzzle games. Currently my kick is for Disney TsumTsum, the one before that was called Disco Bees. I only pick games which are satisfying without spending any money whatsoever and that work for two or three minute mini-breaks.
I've also continued to increase my interest in hockey, which is actually not only entertaining but also useful, as there have been several times where I've been in somewhat awkward social situations and have been able to use hockey and my now relatively good knowledge of same as a subject for small talk with someone whom I wouldn't otherwise have known what to discuss with. Part of living in Canada I guess. Here in Canada hockey is everywhere, and it's so much lesser in the US that it's almost a shock. We went to a hockey game in Allentown when were down there as a date night, and after the game was over we walked over to a nearby pub, which had many televisions, some of them duplicating each other and some of them playing replays, and we could not get them to change any television to a (live) hockey game. Boo.
I still really like cooking, and I do a lot of cooking with my three year old now. It's probably one of the most powerful incentives I have to get her to listen and follow my directions because she knows that first strike you're out in the kitchen.
I'm still attending the same parish. I'm slowly, slowly making more friends and connections in Vancouver.
I haven't read the book of this title and don't really know anything about it other than the title, but I definitely feel like I'm in a bit of an "all joy and no fun" phase of life. I've never felt more important, mature, competent, needed, and aware, nor have I ever felt this meaningless, selfish, inept, clueless, and overwhelmed. But, over all, I feel like I'm moving in the right direction. And the consolations are very, very cute.
Now, if anyone wants to read it, below are the possibly nonsensical crochet musings. (Although it occurs to me that probably what I've written above is not necessarily any better written. But enough of that editing brain stuff.)
I mentioned back in the summer that I was going to take a crochet course and I've become completely crochet mad. I now have five boxes of yarn (through savvy shopping, swaps, and freebies), and I have put myself on a strict moratorium on acquiring new yarn (other than free, because it's too hard to turn down free) until I manage to use enough yarn so that I only fill three boxes. You can follow my yarn exploits on Ravelry here.
Crochet suits me down to the ground. I was a really slow knitter and I found advancing in skill really daunting. One thing I like a lot about crochet is that getting the hang of it in the beginning was really difficult (MUCH more difficult than learning how to knit and purl) but that once the basic skills were acquired, I could jump into fairly complex stuff very quickly, and that I felt a freedom with crochet that I never felt with knitting, in terms of feeling free to just be like "Well the pattern says to do this but I don't feel like doing that, and then it says to do 30 but I think I'll do 25 instead because 30 is feeling too long" etc.
Lightning flash: knitting is baking and crochet is cooking, in terms of my attitudes towards them. I know you can be really creative and free in both knitting and baking but I could never see how to get there.
I am hampered by crochet's innate non-stretchiness, as what I'm drawn to doing is wearables--hats, sweaters, mittens, etc. Crochet excels for stuffed animals but stuffed animals are basically taking over my house already and believe me I'm not buying them; and crochet is awesome for afghans, but they use up amazing amounts of yarn and time, and I don't think I'm up to tackling one yet. I hope to do so at some point.
One of my firm principles of doing any kind of craft project is never to do anything where if I saw the finished result lying on a "free!" table at a swap, I wouldn't take it. That's the absolute absolute bottom. The next tier is "I would willingly pay more than the price of the yarn for this item at a store". The top tier, hard to achieve, is "I would willingly pay the price of the yarn plus a fair hourly wage for how many hours it will take me to finish this project (assuming for the sake of argument that I could afford to do so)." I try to only do projects that are "I would take it for free but frankly I wouldn't pay the price of the yarn for it" if the project is going to enable me to learn some skill. The first hat I ever made, which I do wear sometimes, honestly if I saw it in a shop for $6 (the value of the yarn, although I actually got that skein for free), I would probably not buy it, as it's not a super attractive design to begin with and I didn't make it super well, but I did learn a lot by making it.
It's amazing how totally I don't feel the desire to blog lately (as in about the past year)... the main attraction of LiveJournal to me was its combination of blog and social network. However the social network has died. Part of that is just the general fickleness of internet communities I'm sure (whither MySpace?) but a great deal of it was mishandling by the succession of owners. And when people left they left to all different places... It's a kind of social network entropy. I've managed to keep in touch with some who connected with me on Facebook. A great deal of my family does Facebook, and I've joined a local mothers' group on Facebook also, so it's become where I do most of my "here's a funny thing my kid did today" or "this is what bugs me about the weather" inanity that I used to do here.
Gordon came by and tried to talk to me while I was writing this and I said basically "I'm trying to brain and my brain is not braining", which I think is a big reason I'm not blogging. Forming a clear, orderly, decipherable series of paragraphs is a bit beyond me. I started writing about my new hobby of crochet originally, and I'm going to leave that at the bottom of this post, but I was having the issue that my mind kept going in all kinds of directions as I was typing about crochet. I know how I would TALK about crochet if I was having a conversation with someone about it, but WRITING about it, I feel like I'm being hopelessly opaque and disjointed.
It's very disheartening because I don't feel like I have the right set of brain skills right now to edit myself, at least not without stress, and since blogging is pointless unless it bare minimum doesn't add to stress, that's why I'm not blogging. I guess that's about it.
My life right now is, first of course, taking care of my two children, which is still a 24 hour kind of job because the younger child still wakes several times every night. Anyone who feels keen to tell me what to do about that, I feel a bit like I feel about people who seem to think they're the first people in human history to notice contradictions in the Bible. Thank you, we've thought of that one actually, thank you. Yes, a couple thousand years ago, actually. Yes. Yes well we'll certainly take your concerns into account. Thank you.
I also do in-home, license not required daycare of another child as a minimum student loan-paying mechanism. I volunteer at a local community centre, helping connect other families to resources in the area. I'm taking a certificate course about physical literacy (physical literacy = basically foundational movement skills, the underlying skills that are really necessary for everyone's development, such as proper balance, being able to catch yourself when you fall, etc, as well as the skills which will enable someone to later build on for athletic purposes, such being able to throw or kick) for children age 0-6. In addition to the certificate, which I can add to my resume, I am getting a small stipend for teaching two classes, which I've already done one class so I have one left to go.
So basically it's kids, kids, kids, kids, and also kids.
Not kids wise, I like doing crochet (of which more anon) and watching QI XL on YouTube, which are two great tastes which taste great together. I also go on kicks for silly little mobile arcade or puzzle games. Currently my kick is for Disney TsumTsum, the one before that was called Disco Bees. I only pick games which are satisfying without spending any money whatsoever and that work for two or three minute mini-breaks.
I've also continued to increase my interest in hockey, which is actually not only entertaining but also useful, as there have been several times where I've been in somewhat awkward social situations and have been able to use hockey and my now relatively good knowledge of same as a subject for small talk with someone whom I wouldn't otherwise have known what to discuss with. Part of living in Canada I guess. Here in Canada hockey is everywhere, and it's so much lesser in the US that it's almost a shock. We went to a hockey game in Allentown when were down there as a date night, and after the game was over we walked over to a nearby pub, which had many televisions, some of them duplicating each other and some of them playing replays, and we could not get them to change any television to a (live) hockey game. Boo.
I still really like cooking, and I do a lot of cooking with my three year old now. It's probably one of the most powerful incentives I have to get her to listen and follow my directions because she knows that first strike you're out in the kitchen.
I'm still attending the same parish. I'm slowly, slowly making more friends and connections in Vancouver.
I haven't read the book of this title and don't really know anything about it other than the title, but I definitely feel like I'm in a bit of an "all joy and no fun" phase of life. I've never felt more important, mature, competent, needed, and aware, nor have I ever felt this meaningless, selfish, inept, clueless, and overwhelmed. But, over all, I feel like I'm moving in the right direction. And the consolations are very, very cute.
Now, if anyone wants to read it, below are the possibly nonsensical crochet musings. (Although it occurs to me that probably what I've written above is not necessarily any better written. But enough of that editing brain stuff.)
I mentioned back in the summer that I was going to take a crochet course and I've become completely crochet mad. I now have five boxes of yarn (through savvy shopping, swaps, and freebies), and I have put myself on a strict moratorium on acquiring new yarn (other than free, because it's too hard to turn down free) until I manage to use enough yarn so that I only fill three boxes. You can follow my yarn exploits on Ravelry here.
Crochet suits me down to the ground. I was a really slow knitter and I found advancing in skill really daunting. One thing I like a lot about crochet is that getting the hang of it in the beginning was really difficult (MUCH more difficult than learning how to knit and purl) but that once the basic skills were acquired, I could jump into fairly complex stuff very quickly, and that I felt a freedom with crochet that I never felt with knitting, in terms of feeling free to just be like "Well the pattern says to do this but I don't feel like doing that, and then it says to do 30 but I think I'll do 25 instead because 30 is feeling too long" etc.
Lightning flash: knitting is baking and crochet is cooking, in terms of my attitudes towards them. I know you can be really creative and free in both knitting and baking but I could never see how to get there.
I am hampered by crochet's innate non-stretchiness, as what I'm drawn to doing is wearables--hats, sweaters, mittens, etc. Crochet excels for stuffed animals but stuffed animals are basically taking over my house already and believe me I'm not buying them; and crochet is awesome for afghans, but they use up amazing amounts of yarn and time, and I don't think I'm up to tackling one yet. I hope to do so at some point.
One of my firm principles of doing any kind of craft project is never to do anything where if I saw the finished result lying on a "free!" table at a swap, I wouldn't take it. That's the absolute absolute bottom. The next tier is "I would willingly pay more than the price of the yarn for this item at a store". The top tier, hard to achieve, is "I would willingly pay the price of the yarn plus a fair hourly wage for how many hours it will take me to finish this project (assuming for the sake of argument that I could afford to do so)." I try to only do projects that are "I would take it for free but frankly I wouldn't pay the price of the yarn for it" if the project is going to enable me to learn some skill. The first hat I ever made, which I do wear sometimes, honestly if I saw it in a shop for $6 (the value of the yarn, although I actually got that skein for free), I would probably not buy it, as it's not a super attractive design to begin with and I didn't make it super well, but I did learn a lot by making it.