Weekly Recap

This week turned out to be busier than I anticipated. There was lots of stuff happening at work, including a trip to Richmond to attend an Excellence in Government awards ceremony, where our VP was one of the recipients of the Innovation in Government award for the procurement software created by the team I work with. There were also performance evaluations to write, meetings to attend, and documentation to review. And of course, most of it seemed to happen on Friday.

Best of all, I seem to be firing on about half of my cylinders. A month ago, I was probably firing on about half of a cylinder. (Yes, that's physically impossible, but work with me here.) I have more energy! While I'm not quite ready to take on the world or run a marathon (or even run a mile), I'm no longer totally and utterly exhausted by the time I finish getting ready for work in the morning; I'm only slightly exhausted.

Yesterday proved to be busy as well, although I did take some time to knit a few rows on Counterpoised in the morning before my yoga class. After yoga, I returned home to find Tom preparing pork and sweet potato empanadas for dinner (the pork had to marinate in a dry rub for a couple of hours and then cooked slowly for several more hours, hence the early start). We put up the outside garland and lights in preparation for the Christmas parade that evening. Even though the Christmas parade takes place the first Saturday in December every year, this is the first year we've actually been decorated for it. Then it was off to the grocery store to pick up the ingredients for a Spanish-style split pea soup to round out dinner.

Today I've got the usual complement of chores to do: laundry, housecleaning, straightening my work room, which once again looks like it exploded. There's also some cookie baking in the works and possibly some bread baking as well.

Knitting Progress
Most (which is to say not much) of the knitting this week has been focused on the second Gentleman's Fancy Sock. I still like knitting this sock, which says a lot about the pattern. It's easy, yet engaging. I'm on the fourth (of 12) pattern repeat of the Counterpoised shawl, with very little ripping out. The pattern is finally beginning to make sense and is working its way into muscle memory.

When I called my mother today, the first thing she said was "I have a knitting question for you. How many times can you rip out something before the yarn isn't good anymore?" Uh oh. Despite the ominous nature of the question, her knitting is going well. She frogged the scarf only once but is glad she did because her gauge relaxed a lot the second time 'round. She's ready to frog it again because the stitch pattern section is not working out. If I had been thinking, I would have given her some test yearn yarn (why is it that I always initially spell "yarn" "yearn"?) so she could get some knitting practice in. Oh well...lessons learned.

During the course of our conversation, Mom mentioned that they went to their local farmers market, where there was a woman selling alpaca yarn. Get this...she was selling a 110-yd. skein of hand-dyed, hand-spun alpaca for $15.00! Personally, I think that's an excellent price, especially when you factor in that the purchase of said yarn is supporting a local business and helping to keep land in agricultural use. Mom didn't buy any. However, I did a quick search on the Internet while we were talking and gave her the name, phone number, address, and directions to the farm. Maybe some fine, local alpaca yarn will be the beginning of Mom's stash!

Oh my! Will you look at the time?! Time to start the chores!

Happy knitting!