Crash and burn

I used to work with a young woman who was perpetually "exhausted". She went from one specialist to the next trying to find out why she was so tired all the time. Even after a battery of tests and procedures, it was a mystery why this 33 year old woman could barely stay awake. Here's the thing: she drank Mountain Dew and ate Pop Tarts every day for breakfast. For lunch she ate frozen appetizers and several jello cups. I can't even tell you what she ate after work, but I'm sure it involved sugar and starchy junk of some kind. Hello!!! Can you say malnutrition?? I'm telling you this because I finally figured out why I've been dragging around for the past few days. I have been eating way too many peanut clusters and potluck pasta meals. We won't even talk about the beer. I need a break! Sugar is evil! It whispers in your ear: "eat more, you're hungry, you know you want it, you deserve it, it's the holidays..." Humbug! Tomorrow I eat salad!

Oh, but you want to know if I've been knitting!

Coral Crossing re-blocked very nicely, but still didn't fit me properly so was given away to my friend Cathryn who wears it very well. Ahh. That's a relief!

I finished the longer version of the Cable Hat, and will post the pattern for both versions in my knitting gallery soon. Here's the long version, knit in Lamb's Pride Worsted.

As you can see, it covers my ears. On Mr. Strange it fits like the shorter version fit me. I will also add the directions for a version that will fit a larger head to cover ears. In honor of the fine body of water surrounding my little city, I'm calling it the "Casco Bay Cable Hat".

I must be on a cable kick, because I started a little aran sheep ornament I bought in a kit at Patternworks this spring. The finished product is supposed to look like this.
Mine, however, in it's pre-blocked state, looks like knitted porn. O'Keefe Sheep! {blush}

While browsing the Lands End catalog, I came across this scarf and fell in love. Their online catalog has a great feature where you can click on the image and zoom in so closely that you can actually count the stitches, which is what I did. This is my version, knitted up in the Malabrigo in color Natural. The really, really stupid thing is that I only have about 120 yards of this yarn. There isn't a snowball's chance in Jamaica that I can knit a 60 inch scarf with that amount of wool. A smart knitter would find another yarn. I am not a smart knitter. I am downright nuts. How else to explain why I keep going? I even went to the Halcyon Yarn store to find 2 more skeins, but they were out. I briefly considered buying another color, but changed my mind because (this is the really dumb part) they didn't have a swift and winder in the store and I was visiting my mom for the weekend and she doesn't have one either and I wanted to start knitting right away. So I bought 3 overpriced skeins of Encore in the same berry color I was attracted to in the Malabrigo. I knit 3 repeats (that's 48 rows) before coming to my senses. It's acrylic!! It wont block! It looked beautiful and felt cheezy. So, I continue to knit the scarf that can never be finished.

In an attempt to stay on the higher moral plane before the pilot makes an emergency landing, I will not rant about our office-party-from-hell, but I will show you the gift I made for our Yankee Swap. I didn't feel like spending money, so instead I spent 5 hours. Oh well. The whole time I was making it, I knew that it would be perfect for one woman in our office, whom I will call "Grace".In case you have never heard of this particular gift exchange, in the version we play, everyone brings in a gift with a $10 value. On the big day, each person draws a number. The person with #1 takes a present and unwraps it. The person with #2 has the option of stealing the gift from #1 or taking a different gift, and it goes all the way to the last number, with each person having the option of stealing from any of the previously opened gifts. At the end of it all, the person with #1 gets one more chance to steal from everyone else. Other people play it differently.

OK, the moral plane is going to lose altitude.

In our office, we had one spoiled brat who lost her gift (Grace stole it) and had to pick a new one. She pitched a fit and said, while opening it, "Great, just what I need, more Christmas crap!!" ~ It was a table runner with matching kitchen towels. We were all horrified. I felt so awful for the woman who brought the gift, (who, I found out later, was Grace). When it was my turn, I stole the gift from Grace who had to pick a new gift from under the tree. She just happened to pick my gift and was really pleased and no one stole it from her. Today she showed me a photo, taken with her cell phone, of it hanging on her door.

There is good karma out there somewhere.