Badly-managed Monday
So very glad I got to bed at a bit past midnight last night, because my sleep schedule was really fucked up this weekend. Passed out with the lights on Friday night -- woke up around 4 or 5am and got myself properly into bed to nap for another few hours. And then Saturday night came the problem where I'm trying to make the bed in the wee hours when I'm already on the verge of collapse and just wasn't up to wrestling with the stack of blankets and clothes and boxes and whatnot on the linen chest at the foot of the bed to get the upper sheet tucked under the end of the mattress. Passed out for three or four hours, and then when I'd roused enough to finish dealing with the sheet I looked at the time and figured I might as well feed the cats and get a little breakfast. So I wasn't into bed until past 9am -- and Dad called me at 11:40. Under the circumstances, I think I was doing pretty good to drag myself out of bed at the crack of noon, get through my shower (leg-shaving included), and even pin out my Haruni Shawl before leaving. (Which itself may have taken thirty or forty minutes -- didn't realize it would wind up taking that long dealing with all the little loops until I checked my watch on the way out the door.)
Still, in and around the sleep I wasn't getting I managed a trip to the gym, got the rabbit cage cleaned Saturday night so I wouldn't have to try to deal with it Sunday, and visited Dad yesterday to bring him his belated birthday gift. (And also to loan him a book I'd gotten for myself at the same time. He passed me a book of his he'd just gotten back from the friend he'd previously lent it to, being about the great flu epidemic of WWI.) I unpicked the bindoff on the Haruni Shawl Saturday night and rebound it off (which is why I wasn't blocking it till yesterday), and then at Dad's yesterday I got well started on the Irtfa'a Shawl.
Here's the original bindoff, and you can see why I wasn't impressed with it. Not a lot of room left to be stretched out. (Also, you can see I finally got around to polishing my nails a week or two back.)
All finished and ready to block!
And here it is staked out yesterday afternoon. The final post-blocking photo should be taken when I get home from work tonight, so there'll be that to look forward to next weekend.
Here's the start of this. A bit of an unexpected headache last night since I was using my old pattern printout, which was fine except for the pair of charts that were one-use-only that I'd scratched the lines off of with a pen as I'd worked them for my previous shawl. So I stuck the pattern PDF on my thumb drive and I need to remember to reprint those two pages while I'm here at work today. (Maybe twice, so I'll have a clean copy of each in case I wind up working this pattern a third time in future.) Also, I should have pulled out my magnetic chart keeper far earlier in the process last night than I did, and for some reason I didn't think to stick stitch markers in to delinate the repeats between the markers setting off the pattern sections until after I'd gotten myself confused a few times. Still, I think I found and corrected my mistakes, and I got into the rhythm, and I'm glad I went ahead and bumped up my needle size because it's looking so nice. No worries about running out of yarn on this one -- I bought one skein more than I thought I needed for this shawl, and if that winds up not being enough I shouldn't have a problem ordering more. (BTW, for purposes of distinguishing it from my first Irtfa'a, this is the "Midnight Irtfa'a," that being the color name of the yarn I'm using.)
Randomly, a new-products-info mailing sent me to a website where I discovered a set of LotR-themed knitting patterns -- kits, in some cases, with yarn included with the pattern. I find myself taken with the Evenstar shawl -- which they offer as a kit in either "Dragon Fire" or "Snow Glint" colorways, though neither is the color used for the finished shawl shown in the photos and I'd just as soon buy the pattern by itself (available for $8) and find my own white yarn on that site or elsewhere. Or, hmm, I have 1460 yards of icy blue Baruffa Cashwool already in my stash...
Also, Barnes and Noble are getting into the ebook-reader-app game and e-mailed to tempt me with free e-books, and I forgot I had the Borders app on my Blackberry instead of the new B&N one and was inspired to attempt browsing for freebies via the Borders app. Not that they let me download the first one I selected -- continued fail on Borders' part -- and (not having noticed yet that e-mail was from B&N, whose app I should try installing to my phone, replacing thus-far-useless Borders app as a Kindle competitor) I wound up browsing Amazon instead for free Kindle content. Of which they have a metric fuckton, largely due to Gutenberg Project stuff but also the occasionally free story or novella meant to entice the reader into purchasing the rest of the series. So I took some time this morning to vastly abuse the privilege and acquire dozens of classics (most of which I'd never gotten around to reading, e.g. the Jane Austens I referred to in a previous entry), and I'm going to need to make a point of downloading all those to my netbook for archival purposes so I can just keep a handful actually downloaded to my BB at any given time and swap them for others as I gradually read my way through them. This library-in-my-pocket thing is incredibly useful and addicting -- so far the only downside I've turned up is waking up with numb or twinging wrists and fingers if I spend too long thumbing my way through a book on any given day. (Surprisingly this didn't happen on Saturday, despite the amount of time I spent reading -- at the gym, during my lunch, or just wasting time I could have spent taking care of things that needed doing.)
Amusing post by ursulav that comes with a fabulous included picture: Really? (I mean…REALLY?) -- "So today I got a very nice e-mail from a librarian who has participated in the summer reading program, for which I did the big poster and art and whatnot. (Which, hey, I can post now!) In addition to the main poster, I did a bunch of little spot art that went into various T-shirts and bookmarks and tote bags and stuff. They kept the aquatic theme, and the committee was very clear on what they wanted, so honestly, a lot of it looks like something that would go on a pair of board shorts, and at one point I found myself doing a shark covered in tribal tattoos, about which my feelings were…well, damnit, if anything in the fish world would get tribal tattoos, it would be a mako shark, and did I mention they were paying REALLY well? The shark became a bookmark. I thought no more about it. And then the very good-natured librarian wrote me, eyes rolling audibly-and I shall not mention name or location to protect the innocent-to say that one of her patrons had become concerned because those squiggles! They looked like Arabic! And the patron had used the bookmark in her Bible! You know, not a single person has said 'By the way, your poster is a GIANT GOAT GOD RISING FROM THE SEA! Repent, sinner!' and thrown holy water. I was kinda braced for that. I had a little speech prepared about the mythological representation of Capricorn as a sea-goat and the Tropic of Capricorn and so forth."
Also, there's been an outbreak of pet deaths on my friends list, which makes me want to learn how to take Marvin's temperature or some such, since right now it's hard to tell "listlessness that may be a sign of illness" from "listlessness that's due to Mom leaving the AC turned down and letting the house reach daytime temps of around 80F." He gets perky at night, at least. And this coming Sunday is when the local rabbit sanctuary is hosting a fundraiser thing that's basically kicking in $25 to hear a vet talk about signs of illness and rabbit first aid type of stuff, which I marked on my calendary way back when they sent out the first e-mail about it.
And today was really not a day on which I appreciated having been unexpectedly handed a task at the end of the day that involved a trip to the post office, thereby adding a half hour to the time it'll take me to finish the policy I'm inputting so I can leave. Because it's not like this policy wasn't already an all-day task likely to keep me here past 5pm in and of itself (that I was running behind schedule on, too, in large part due to poor time management on my part this morning), and me needing to make a grocery run on the way home, too.
I should go ahead and post this, yes.
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