Life is an ebb and flow and I'm not sure why I'm always surprised when I suffer a setback. This week I am on vacation from work, so I'd set the goal to start and finish the Flax Light sweater from Tin Can Knits. I've struggled hard with this pattern for some reason. I don't know why, because it's pretty straight forward and I fully understand what I'm supposed to be doing. But for some reason I keep making the same mistake over and over, leading to a lot of tinking. The last time I made the mistake of knitting 3 consecutive rounds on the garter stitch panel, I didn't realize it until about 4 rounds later and decided "oh, well" and kept going. I was not about to unknit 2000 stitches to fix 40 wrong stitches. At least that time I'd made the same mistake on both sides. I'm calling it a redesign element and moving on. Then I got done with the raglan increases, reviewed my stitch counts and found that somehow in my knitting and re-knitting, I'd gone 2 extra increase rounds beyond the pattern. So now it's a ML+ sized. Again, not ripping out 4 rounds to make the correction. I have enough yarn to make the size L, so having an extra 1.5" in ease shouldn't be a problem in that regard. I've gotten to a "work even" stage, thank goodness, so I just have to keep track of which rounds knit and which rounds purl on the sleeve garter stitch panels and can ignore all the other markers where I was having to increase. This sweater will not be done this week or maybe even this month, but it's a lightweight knit I can wear in March and April, so that's gonna have to be okay.
Upstaging my knitting time was my urge to shop for organizing materials for my bedroom - causing me to buy new cube furniture on Monday. I bought 2 more units to add to my side of the bedroom, along with the bins that go into them. Right now my side of the bedroom is a literal disaster. I have books, journals, writing utensils, beauty products, healthcare supplies, even some laundry detergent and fabric softener hanging out on top of my shelves. The bins that are still left don't close all the way because they are overflowing. Most of the bins have been removed because the stuff wouldn't fit in them, like oversized books and binders. I had 3 different colors of bins, none of which I liked. So I bought all new white ones, to make the area look cleaner and more spacious. Now comes the hard part of getting stuff into the bins and off the tops of my existing furniture, and taking out an old drawer cart I have been using as a nightstand for the past few years, so that I can put in the new cube units. Yesterday I began the purge, but my husband arrived with dinner after I'd been at it about an hour, so half a bag of garbage was all I accomplished. I dumped all the writing tools I came across into one bin and all the knit/crochet tools and supplies into another bin. The notebooks and journals got stacked on the floor for now. The area looks just as bad as when I began. One of the units came overnight and arrived yesterday. It took me & Jo to bring it into the house. I need to assemble it upstairs somehow because it's too heavy to move up the stairs assembled. The other unit will be arriving today. That one is smaller and can be assembled downstairs and then carried up and plopped on top of my existing cubes, so that might be my goal for tomorrow - to clear the way for that to be done. Looking at my belongings, I'm not sure where I'm going to be able to fit all my oversized books, as they are taller than the 11" cubes and my shelves go over 7 feet tall, so it's not like I can put them on top of that. My "nightstand" cubes are only 4 feet tall, but I bought house plants to go on top of that already (those arrive later this week, to give the place some sign of life.) I may or may not have room for them in my office - that disaster isn't on my agenda for this week.
Along with ordering the furniture and houseplants, I also had purchased Loop Engage Plus earplugs, which arrived yesterday. So far, I like them. I was relieved to find that I can hear the phone clearly with them in, which would have been a dealbreaker for wearing them at work. I wore them all day yesterday and slept in them because Dan was snoring when I went to sleep. They are built to filter sound so that I can hear people talking clearly but not so much background noise. I am praying they help me concentrate better at work. Courtney said she's not thrilled with the Loop Quiet earplugs she bought a week before me, so I know they're not for everyone. If you click the link, it'll give you a discount code.
Monday was my birthday, but I didn't do anything except spend a lot of money shopping online and in the stores. In addition to the furniture and cubes, I also went to Target and bought a bunch of other organizing bins and some brownie & cake mixes. I came home and decided I wanted to go to a paint & drink studio, but Jo didn't like the picture they were painting that evening, so I decided to look up online options and found a picture I liked. The site offers an unlimited subscription for 4.99/month and gave a supply list. So I went online and ordered the painting supplies from Michaels. Then I took a little nap and woke up to eat my favorite non-pizza home-cooked meal, Creamy Cheesy Ziti, which is an Instant Pot recipe. Dan cooked dinner while I baked brownies. After dinner, I went to Michaels to pick up the painting supplies and stopped at Barnes & Noble's, where I picked up some calendar notepads for work that were on clearance for $2 and a book of 3001 Would You Rather Questions on clearance for $9. By the time I got home, it was too late to do a 2 hour painting, so I watched old episodes of The Rookie where they introduced John Nolan's con-woman mother so that I had some idea of who this week's episode was about. And then I stayed up too late trying to knit my sweater.
Tuesday was Valentines Day, which we don't really celebrate, other than a text saying Happy Valentine's Day. LOL. It's more of a holiday that we can't go out to dinner because we don't like the crowds, like Mother's Day. So Dan called and asked what I wanted to do, and we agreed that he would bring home Chipotle. This is at least the second time I've gotten the wrong meat on mine, which is annoying because I'm not a meat eater normally, but I force myself to eat chicken occasionally. This time they gave me pork. Gross. Then we watched The Rookie, The Rookie: Feds, and Will Trenton. I'm annoyed that all the good shows are on the same night - 3 hours is a lot of TV for someone who rarely watches TV. I gave up on the sweater during the first show when I was making the same mistake on the garter panel even after I was at the Knit Even section. Clearly, I can not multitask. I opted to take my night pills and listen to an audio book about cleaning my messy house and get a good night's sleep rather than going downstairs and knitting some more.
OOOH! I just got an email saying I'm going to be testing out a new platform for one of the crafters I follow on YouTube and Facebook! I can't wait to see how it works and hopefully share it with you when it's out of Beta! What a great start to my day!
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