Oh Dear!

Why do these things happen to me? I have to admit that I've screwed up bigtime! I didn't read the dates and calendar correctly and managed to make a big mistake — double-booking two events next week. What makes it really painful is the decision involves my family vs my students. The solution to the problem creates another problem. Soorrrryyyy!!! I feel really bad about it. I'm not only Christmas-impaired but calendar-impaired. Help!

Ahem. Moving on...my mitred heart sachet has gone to its new home with one of my fellow guild members. This year we exchanged with the person who got ours, so in trade I get a lovely basket-woven ball filled with jingle bells from her! She says it's "Grinch-green and festive red with a bit of sparkle". I love it! And happily she really likes my smelly heart. The potpourri was driving my sinuses nuts so I'm actually glad to get it out of the house before I was forced to chuck it out. Knitting the heart was a challenge that took several days and some frogging, but I'm very happy with the results. I have no idea how many hours total the whole thing took beginning with the spinning and I don't think I want to know! I doubt I'll get around to doing another one anyway.

Now it's back to knitting socks. Sis's pair need to be completed up to the toe graft for next Wednesday's class. And the other pair need to be finished up to the toe decreases. How come I have more homework to do than my students? Oh well, it makes a good excuse to finish them both.

And if I should finish up to where I need to be on the socks, I've started Marnie MacLean's fingerless mittens "Del Mar" from the current Winter issue of Spindlicity. I'm using the same yarn I spun from Aurelia rovings that I used in the heart sachet. However, I'm using needles that are larger than the heart and smaller than the pattern calls for. I thought that 4.5 mm needles is too large for this yarn so I went down to 3.75 mm and am knitting the larger size mittens to compensate for the increase in gauge. If it doesn't work out, I'll know pretty soon so I can frog and try again. On something this small it's stupid to try to knit a swatch. The item is the swatch.

It's yet another lovely sunny-but-cold day today. I feel like I should go for a walk somewhere. However, vacuuming this pigsty...er, house is far more important. That bright sun allows me to see all the swiftly growing dust bunnies (they've grown up to dust buffalos now) that need taming and all the dirty windows that could use cleaning. Don't hold your breath on that last one. I hate cleaning windows much worse than I hate vacuuming. On the advice of my physio, I've been trying to spread out the vacuuming to one floor per day (week? fortnight?). Otherwise my shoulders and neck doth protest too much. The drawback to this is it gives the dust bunnies more time to commingle and reproduce. And we won't even talk about the trouble the spiders get into when I'm not looking.

Oh, speaking of spiders, I caught a glimpse of a spider the other night that looked suspiciously like Queenie! I don't know if she was just sniffing around (sorry, spiders can't smell) checking things out to see if it's safe to move back into the kitchen window or not. We'll see. I missed her. Queenie Jr. just doesn't give me the same thrill — she's barely 2 mm long. Wonder if the original Queenie will "eliminate" her competition? Sorry! Gross. But inquiring scientific minds want to know.