A Commission!

I've been asked by one of my dearest friends to make a tea cozy for her mother for Christmas. I spent a lovely day searching out patterns on Ravelry, and have narrowed down my search to three or four. I spent some time reading the patterns, to get a feel for them, and to maybe figure out how long it will take me to knit the pieces.

It's a win-win. I adore my friend, I think her mother is awesome, and, hello, KNITTING! I've never made a tea cozy before, so this will be a fun project. I'm thinking her mum might get more than one tea cozy if the first one knits up quickly. To the yarn store!

Other Knitting

I still haven't finished the body of Bruce's sweater, but I did start a sleeve today. I have been knitting on circulars (needles, J) so much recently that I'd completely forgotten how awesome it is to knit on straights (still talking about needles, J, get yer mind out tha guttah). It's a nice change. I find that I hold the needles completely differently with straights than I do with circs. Anybody else do this?

The Koolass (Koolhaas) is coming along slowly. Plus, I'm not knitting this evening so as to give my poor sore fingers a break.

A Cleansing Breath

I need to step back and take one from work and... well, work mostly. It's pretty stressful right now, and I am not going to go into it, but my dear husband is my saving grace. I think sometimes that if it weren't for him I'd be off picking nits out of my own hair living in a mud hut in the furthest reaches of Alaska. It's good that I have somebody around to help me deal with my hermit tendencies.

I'm also having one of those weeks when I'm starting to wonder about my own sanity. For the most part I'm a fairly go-with-the-flow person, and have been able to deal with the bizarreness of living in a foreign country (if you think the Bronx is not a foreign country... then you've never been here) where the customs of the locals are so amazingly different from my own. But lately I've been so much on edge that things that I used to be able to ignore (or sleep through) are causing me to enter a state where I'm so enraged I can barely function. One example: Loud music. I'm not talking just slightly obnoxious, I'm talking about so loud that I can't even hear somebody talking to me when they're standing right next to me. Just writing about this is making my blood pressure go up. Which is weird, because my blood pressure is usually as close to dead as somebody can get without actually being dead.

I'm off to read some Byron Katie (she's pretty amazing, and exceedingly helpful for me to pull myself out of my own b.s.) and calm down for a while. I think the stresses I've been under for the past year are catching up to me right now.