Feeling Fine

I am happy to have very little to report on vaccine aftereffects. My arm was sore after getting the shot on Thursday, and more so on Friday, but not bad enough to even bother my sleep much. Yesterday was not even as bad as Friday, and today is nothing. Whew!

I have heard that I may have more of a reaction after the second shot, and I'm ready for that, but for now, it's all good, I'm very relieved, and I want everyone to be able to get their shots. A surprising number of my friends got theirs last week too, based on what I saw on social media, and I bless every one of them. Let's get this done.

Shot 1, Done!

It's the red bandage of courage.

Thank you, Walgreens. 

I'm Getting Shot!

My goodness! 

Florida announced last week that starting this Monday, ages 50 and up could get the COVID vaccine, and I was able to make an appointment today! Two, actually, one for this Thursday and one for four weeks later. I'm getting vaccinated! And by May, I'll be able to (carefully, cautiously) do semi-social things indoors. What a wonderful thought.

And if you think I haven't been randomly saying, "I'm getting shot!" all day, you're wrong.

As if that wasn't enough good news to make up for The Day I had last week (when I learned, a day after getting my stimulus payment, that I would owe all that and more in taxes this year), I also got this surprise in the mail today. I knew it was coming, but we don't generally get mail on Sunday, and also, let's be honest, my mail isn't often this glorious:

I really want to show off the colors when I knit it up; I'm considering the Valente pattern, but may look around more before I get going. We'll see.

Bit of a Day

You know?

Some days are like that. 

Cat Trap

As it turns out, if you (being lazy) drop a box on the floor to deal with later, this can happen:

 

Reasons Today Sucked

Surprisingly, not the time change! Some bigger things and some smaller things.

• I woke up at 2 this morning, went to the bathroom, all very usual. Never fell back asleep. So that's half a night's sleep to function on today. Using 'function' loosely.
• After I was up (though not at all alert), Maggie threw up, so I had to clean that up. And then deal with her wanting to be fed, pesty-pesty, starving-cat routine, until I felt like it was safe again.
• When I sat down to start work, I opened the Word doc of the report I worked on all last week, and on the pop-up box that allows me to jump to the section where I last closed it, it said, "Someone made changes since you last opened this document." Well, someone better not have! No one should be able to open a document on my computer but me. Especially when the computer is turned off.
• My personal computer didn't want to start up at all. It did eventually, but it took long enough that I was facing the idea that it died overnight.
• Then I noticed that the clock on my work computer hadn't changed time. I looked, and it still said it's doing daylight saving time, but apparently they don't have it set up to the server in such a way that it will update. (It's funny, I'm pretty sure I would remember if it had been an hour off from a year ago to November, yet here we are.) Fortunately, it allowed me to change my preferred time zone. Turns out I'm in Santiago, who knew? Perhaps things are looking up.
• Then my period started. So that would be a no.

 In the category of 'trying to find a bright side, really stretching,' the Bruins played so terribly on Saturday that unless they do a complete flip, tonight's game will not tempt me to stay up. Yay?

Thinking about reading, and blogging

As you may have noticed, I haven't been blogging a whole lot lately; not near my usual pace, anyway. I just don't feel drawn to it the way I used to.  

Reading, though, I have been doing a lot more of. I've read about half as many books this year as I did all of last year. Interestingly, to me at least, is that it's been almost exclusively sci-fi and fantasy books. There are a number of reasons why that might be, and I don't know which or how many of them are true, but I do find it interesting.

My clear favorite so far, as I mentioned, is Winter's Orbit, by Everina Maxwell; I also very much enjoyed Winterkeep, by Kristin Cashore (you want to have read the previous books in the series), and The Return of Fitzroy Angursell, by Victoria Goddard (which, again, you really want to have read The Hands of the Emperor first), and of course Fugitive Telemetry, by Martha Wells, about which I will go into detail next month, when it is published. Lots of good reading happening.

A friend of mine is putting together a zoom book club for a whole group of people, some I know and some I don't*, and though my only past book club experience was not a positive one, I am willing to give it a try. We're having a kickoff meeting today.

*I imagine that to her, it's like the time my brother threw a party, invited people he knew from all different areas of his life, and looking around, realized that for a lot of them, he was the only thing they had in common. Which can be fun, I would think!

Meanwhile, there's more of this on my horizon:

I got one order in last week, the Community Matters colorways for January from Kim Dyes Yarn, which are lovely:

Oddly enough, this one is not in Ravelry, though many of her yarns are; it's called Cheesecake DK, and is 50-50 merino and silk. Mmm.

I have a few orders out there: one that is lost, hopefully not permanently, in the ether of the Postal Service, and two others that should be on their way shortly, and I look forward to showing them to you when the times come.

A Little Knitting (very little)

My low points of my headache today were at 3 and 7 AM, but the rest of the day I felt varying degrees of fragile, and work was busy. Survived the day, at least! And I have a tiny but optimistic piece of knitting to show (from yesterday, that is).

I dampened and pinned it out to make sure that the unblocked wonkiness of it was not going to be a problem.

But I think we're good! As (some) knitters (sometimes) say, that shit will block right out.

More details on it to come; I'm off to rest my brain.

This was a quick knit

While I often enjoy the projects that are longer and more involved, sometimes it's nice to just bang out a quick project! 

I can't find that I blogged it, but last fall I bought a skein of worsted yarn from Gauge Dye Works (via Indie Untangled), in the colorway Field and Pasture.

Looks mostly green, right? Well, wind it up and you get this:

Which of course was hinted at on the swift.

I knew that it was going to be striped or even kind of color-blocked, so I wanted to knit it in something of one width. I picked this simple chevron scarf (Ravelry link), but made it a bit wider than called for.

Which became this!

The blue bit at the tip of the green end was actually a small amount of a different yarn, since I was running out and didn't feel like ripping back to redo. I used up every bit of the skein of Gauge, and two grams of Symphony Layers from Prism that I had in the stash (colorway Sapphire). I think it fits in just fine!

The blocking added some length, so it's now almost my wingspan, long enough to throw over one shoulder, and softened it a bit (not that it wasn't soft before). This took less than two weeks, and I'm delighted with it!