Summer, how I love thee...

I woke up with a dime sized, multy-pimply bump yesterday morning, right above the bridge of my nose. And although it had the familiar telltale signs of something else, I immediately coughed it up to my neglecting my skin, as well as everything else over the past few weeks in order to get my fiscal year end work in on time.

This morning as I peered at a much redder, larger series of bumps on my neck, below my left ear, I finally acknowledged that which was only subconsciously registered yesterday: I have poison ivy.

Hello summer, nice to meet you to you, now F off, would ya?

I'm trying not to be a drama queen, but it's plainly a less than valiant failure. I've already begun wishing the rash was considered a communicable disease so that I could stay home from work for a few more days, or more. Yes I would like some cheese with that whine. And ice cream and french fries too, if you wouldn't mind. :-/

I'm just now trying to get back in the groove of my fiber sports. After trying to cut the displeasurable task of high speed work by alternating it with spinning and knitting, a cloud of misery soon infected both obsessions. Hating on both, all of last week's free time was spent ignoring all but the basic responsibilities (yes, my hair must be washed, and no, Kit Kat's are not a meal). I finally had to bequeath my non working body and soul to mindless movie watching, with some home improvement shows thrown in to spice things up.

We've all been there right?

The knowledge that this miasmic state would end soon enough surely hastened it's departure at the end of last week. Taking a comp day Friday, for a holiday I had recently worked through, I found the mental acuity I needed to face a long suffering stand off with my Sherbert Bayerische project.

As I've mentioned previously, the toe up pattern conversion I began with has major issues. So I found myself with a well established toe and only a vague idea of where to go. Vagueness in a new to me pattern is like knitting poison. So Friday, I opened up my MS Excel, and after reviewing several pattern sources, I rewrote the pattern, through the gusset, using a more familiar charting key, the one employed by Yarnissima.

I still have to reconcile closing a heel with greater circumferential stitches than what you begin with, but now that the first quarter is made concrete in my new charts, I am confident I can fudge my way through the rest. One step at a time.


Finding my way through this problem project is a must, as the soothing, mindless knit of my lace scarf, has turned the corner.


It's gotten to a size where the joyful knitting for knit's sake has been hijacked by the knitter's nemesis of "when the F is this scarf going to be done." At over 30 inches, I fear it will be sloggsville from here on out if I don't have other knitting to distract me. I'm still hoping (delusionally?) I can navigate away from the path of slogg so that the next 30 inches wont be a repeat of the hate which most of the chevron scarf was.

This is where I leave off for the week ahead. I hope to finish some lingering chores so that I will have time today to take a couple of new steps with my spinning sport.


Using this niddy noddy, made by my dad, I will pull off some single ply scraps on one of the bobbins to make way for plying together the two bobbins of the natural romney I have spun over the past few weeks.

The excitement of this task was what percolated my sleeping mind into consciousness in bed this morning. I had dreams of perfection not to be met with, surely, but I plan to be be proud of whatever I come up with. So off I go...