Knitting on Impulse

Status Report

There is a sharply angulated hot poker lodged in my face, entering just under the left eye, with the tip lodged snugly against the left ear drum.  I am running a fever for the fourth day in a row.  Based on a small sampling of epidemiological evidence, I can expect to begin feeling better on Sunday (Rob has to wait until Monday.)  The children have just completed their respective weeks of misery and are now mostly bored and irritable.  Rob and I plan to engage in a feeble bout of arm-wrestling to see who has to bundle up and stumble down to the school bus tomorrow morning with the girl child.

On a less self-pitying note, I am immensely grateful for and touched by all your expressions of sympathy.  Seriously, it does help.  (Though I noticed a small but significant spike in subscription numbers since I stopped posting, and I can't help wondering what that means.... Perhaps I really do talk too much. :))

Sick

Well.  This is exceptionally unpleasant.  See you in a couple of days.... I hope.

Laying in Supplies

The kids are still miserably sick, and I can feel the telltale beginnings myself.  Though I haven't given up on beating this thing, as I lay awake coughing early this morning, all I could think was: What if I am laid up for a week (as all the adult sufferers I know have been) and run out of things to knit?  Could there be a worse fate than lying on the couch, too befuddled to crunch numbers, too weak to get up and rummage in the stash, having already finished all my WIP's?  (I am studiously ignoring the looming fact that on Sunday I am supposed to spend 12 hours in the lobby of the Chateau Fairmont smiling enthusiastically at strangers over a table of jewellery.)

There's the Little Knight pullover, which is just a few rounds away from starting the yoke - it won't last the week.  There's the second January mitten, but it is already half done, and besides, if my eyes hurt as much as the kids are complaining of, I might not want to read charts.  Cedar Serenade is stalled and awaiting inspiration to strike regarding the bodice, Tree of Life still needs some fiddly frogging and picking up. 

There's this:

Elann's Peruvian wool answer to Lopi, which is utterly scrumptious, and which I recently bought to make a small version of Mystery for my daughter, so as to be sure to accurately recall all the neat little finishing touches.  I picked up some in Cream too, which I plan to hand dye for the contrast - perhaps in shades of lime green and sunshine yellow.  There's the rub, I'd have to do the dyeing before I could start the cardigan.

Or this:

Same stuff, for a design that I am very excited about (and will therefore write up as I go along), but still needs to be swatched and calculated prior to casting on.  Might be do-able.

This one's a long shot:

Superwash wool/bamboo for February's sweet little-girl mittens and quite possibly a matching hat.  I think the design will be more stylized than January's Man Mittens, but still based on my some of my favorite winter-graphic days:

Unlikely that I would get these satisfactorily worked out on paper in time to start the mindless knitting bit.

I suppose if all else fails, there's always socks!

So we thought that Thing 2 had gotten off lightly with this bug - a couple days of coughing, rapidly resolved.  We were wrong.  Last night he too, spiked a fever, and joined Thing 1 for the all night hacking duet.  And in the morning, my eternally upbeat, stoic little guy acknowledged, for the first time I can remember, that he feels "awful."

At the back of all the maternal tenderness and sympathy however, is a growing sense of dread.  Looking after very sick children: busy.  Being very sick when childless: annoying.  Being very sick while also looking after young children: utterly awful with imminent potential for scary. (It is marginally better if there are two adults in the house, unless you are sick at the same time, and then there is also the joyous process of negotiating which of you feels slightly less awful and is therefore on the hook for childcare.  Default: mom.)  Nothing to do but wash hands a whole lot and cheer on my immune system.

I have been slogging through bits and pieces of busy work today, but again, the gems are the only photogenic bit (hope nobody minds.)

I have a huge soft spot for Labradorite.  So homely and nondescript at a glance, and just as you lose interest and begin to look away, there comes the brilliant blue flash.  It makes me think of magic, glimpses from another plane of existence, whispers of intuition and nameless longing. 

The apatite (above, left) is gorgeous too, but so... obvious about it.  Perfect clarity, perfect colour, impeccable sparkle - but perhaps just a little shallow.  No secrets.

Small Accomplishments

Incremental progress here and there today.  This is the photogenic bit:

Quiet

Thing 2 went to preschool today, and Thing 1 was so utterly miserable with flu and fever that she voluntarily gave up the rare privilege of weekday television in favour of her own darkened bedroom.  So I buckled down and wrote and thought and calculated and wrote some more and made good progress, but nothing that is really worth taking a picture of.  (I am discovering that translating the mathematical concepts of a custom fitted design into friendly but concise verbal instructions is somewhat more challenging than simply plugging the numbers into a series of "average" body types, but I believe passionately that it is worth doing.  I'm sure if this idealism is merely pigheaded, it will be beaten out of me in short order.)

Here's some progress on the mindless evening knitting:

And for no apparent reason, a white cat on a repurposed carpet of Syrian origin:

Still Working On It. Really.

It should have come as no surprise to me that the writing and formatting process has turned out to be considerably lengthier than the designing and knitting of the actual garment lead me to believe, perhaps because it requires considerable concentration and a degree of uninterrupted quiet that has been in short supply lately.  So the Mystery cardigan pattern is plugging along (and I feel a compulsion to apologize to my test knitters who lept up to the plate to volunteer for a pattern I still haven't finished), January mittens are in the process of preliminary test knitting via the second mitten and will be ready for someone else to have a go at.... soon.  This looks soonish, doesn't it?

All it would take is a couple of good productive days to myself - days not fragmented by meetings and errands, days where I was not awake half the night doling out acetominophen and wincing at each hacking cough, days where the kids were happily esconced in school rather than flopping about on the couch in feverish misery with intermittent breaks for puking.  It has to happen eventually, right?

Look to the Light

They say you shouldn't look at the sun, but sometimes, particularly in February, I really really want to.

Snow Day

Well.... not precisely.  Things don't get closed for snow up here (though if the powder is too deep, restaurant and shop owners may have to fend for themselves when their staff collectively calls in "sick").  In this case, the teachers have gone off to develop themselves, so today is for family adventures.

Happy Valentine's Day!