Still Catching Up

I got a chance to spend some really quality time with my very ill kids this week...in a self-quarintined kinda way. But for the loads and loads of soiled laundry that piled up on an hourly basis in the first 24 hrs. and the heavy odor of Lysol all around, being locked in a house with five vomitting children for three days has it's upside. For one, they simply stop.....no bouncing, no jumping, no digging through drawers, no food mess (with exception), no littering, no loitering, no screaming, no fighting (believe it or not), no begging, no nagging and just a wee bit of whining...and they lay like little wet rags wanting little but to be watered and petted and given a heartfelt kudos everytime they managed to make it to the toilet in time. There is a certain peace to it all, once you figure out how to run a house as a hospital.

Adding to my downtime was my ka-flooey internet connection. We rearranged our office just before my husband left for work (in the Gulf of Mexico...for two weeks) and my computer was moved across the room. Well, certain restrung cable lines, plugging this device into that device and so on, failed. I spent the first week, before the kids got sick, trying to troubleshoot the problem on my own, begging advice from anybody who would listen. Turns out, both my mother and my husband (he calls when he can) have a heck of a lot more computer savvy than the lady who gets paid to troubleshoot bad internet connections on the other end of the bleeping phone. So long story short, after deciding it wasn't worth my worries until the kids got well, I had to re-rearrange the devices that make a virtual exsistence possible. And here we are.

Finally, things are mostly back to normal. My house is messy...again, the kids are fighting on their out the door to school...again, my husband'll be home just in time to miss all the fun, and I miss the quasi peace already. But now I'm free and able to share with you all what I got done between laundry loads and catch up on that recap of WIP's.

First up...progress on the 'Icarus Shawl'. My zen project. I love it, I do, but it's a whole lot o' black yarn and repeats. We're down to the very last chart, a mere 28 rows, then the trim pattern. Doesn't sound like much until you consider these last rows are 400+ stitches across. Needless to say, I only have patience enough to finish one or two rows in a single sitting, kids' needs not withstanding.

Next up, pre-emptive Christmas knitting. I blame this effort on a lady from the local knitting group. While I've only been to one meeting, I do keep myself informed of their goings-on through the website, which is how I was informed about her Christmas Knit-along site. This coupled with the desire to make something..er, anything.. from this book made for easy motivation. Alas, we've got Christmas decorations and many, many cast-ons and frogging of these two gorgeous projects, either of which I'm determined to make in this aubergine yarn.

Almost to end now with the knitted toys. Without much explanation of why he wanted it, my 10 year old asked if I could knit him....a torch. Yes, a torch. It made for good short-row experimentation and he seems to love it dearly. You've all seen the rocket, but there is one other that I will put in a sperate post. And that's about all. I'm having more fun playing and experimenting than I am doing patterns.

However, not to be left out, the dishclothes. More than anything, I do them for instant gratification. Quick, charming, mostly useless and hard to give away.

So that's just about all of it in a nutshell, sorry you had to wait so long to see so little. And now I'm off to make Halloween cotumes....