Already Ready for Next Weekend; Car Show!

Spam update: Over the weekend, I continued to not delete the spam messages, and they continued to pile up. Shortly before 1 PM today, when they reached 400 (since Friday morning!), I couldn't take it any more and deleted them all. By 5 PM, there were 15 more.

I enjoyed my long weekend so much, and I'm so looking forward to my three-day trip next weekend, and really, I think I am meant for a life of leisure. This week at work we're shorthanded and it's the end of the month and busy. I would rather be planning for my trip than reading about cervical cancer. (Don't you envy my job?)

Ah well! Want to see pictures of something we did this weekend? Went to a car show! It wasn't that big, and not as many of the really old ones (I love the 30s and 40s), but it was fun all the same.

If a Tree Falls…

If a knitter knit something way back in The Before Times, that is, before she started a blog, and before she joined Ravelry…how is she supposed to know what she did? What the yarn was, what size needles…huh. Interesting.

Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam

I use Gmail for my email, and their spam filter is very good; I almost never get a spam message in my inbox, only direct to the spam folder. I don't get that much spam normally, just a few here and there, but it does seem to pick up sometimes, and this week is one of those times. Dozens of messages a day! Many with very graphic language in the subject lines, which, ew, no thank you.

I normally go into the folder to check that there isn't anything legit there, then delete the messages. This morning, I decided to let them build up and see how many actually came in. 

There were 54 messages there at 8 this morning.

By 4 this afternoon, it was over 100, and tonight at 8, it's at 106.

Good grief.

Again

So, the elevator went out again.

Saturday afternoon I went downstairs without trouble (trash down, mail up). A bit later, Mom and I decided to get take-out for dinner, I placed the order, and when I went out to get it, oops, no elevator.

Sigh.

So I went down the five flights, got the food, came back and carried it up five flights, puff puff puff* (my lungs are second only to my knees in disliking that many stairs).

*"Puffing like a steam engine! His wind can't be very good." Name that movie.

I definitely did not go out on Sunday: there was nothing I wanted to do enough for those stairs. (Mom did go to the grocery store, and I thought she was crazy to do it, but hey, if she wanted to.) Monday, however, we had made appointments to have both cars in for service, so we went out early to drop the first one off, then home and climbed the stairs again. It was fixed by the time she went out midday to switch out the cars, and hopefully it will STAY fixed, ahem. If not, you can be sure I'll let you know.

Here, cute kitty photo to end on a better note.

Sometimes she sleeps under the blanket, sometimes on top of the blanket. It's a good blanket!

Now That's a View

I tend to think that we have a nice view from our condo, which is on the sixth floor, and overlooks the gulf of Mexico. But the other day, I got to see the "seventh floor, overlooking the beach from a giant patio" view that knocks ours out of the water.

Will the panoramic photo come through? I haven't tried this before.

If not, here are the regular photos. If there's anything regular about a deck the size of my condo.

See the boat in the sun ray?

And another boat

It was amazing. A fun event with friends, but also just stunning views.

Blocking

Today, I blocked the Roam shawl. Here it is before, just laid on the mats.

Swish, swish.

Get the water out.

And pinned! It grew nicely.

It’s still damp, so I shut it in my office, where it can spend a peaceful night under the ceiling fan. Can’t wait to try it on!

On and Off the Needles

I've been knitting!

Back in November, I started a shawl, and threw up a teaser photo, but then I don't think I ever followed up on that (2021, aka The Year of Not Following Up On That). So here we are now!

The pattern is Roam, by Dawn Barker (Ravelry), and it is part of her group of assigned pooling patterns: you take a yarn that is dyed in one color for three quarters of the skein, and in a contrasting color or multiple colors for the rest, and then you knit plain on the main color and do the patterny bit when you get to that second part.

The yarn I used is from Yarn Snob (Ravelry link), 100% Merino wool, and the colorway is Times Square: the main color is a deep, almost blue, purple, and the contrast is multi-colored and highlighter bright. I love it!

The pattern starts at a point and widens. A decent-sized shawl could be made with two skeins, but this yarn was sold in a three-pack, which meant I could make mine as large as I want without worrying about running out. 

Every once in a while, I put it on a longer needle so I could stretch it out, and each time until last week, I've kept on going. This time, though, I decided it was big enough that I could move on to the edge/border, which is in linen stitch. 

(The end of the second skein came several rows into the linen stitch.)

I love how the yarn is showing in the linen stitch! I bound it off last night, and am eager to see how blocking smooths it out.

Now, as the end of this drew near, and also as my trip draws near, I wanted to be sure to have a good social knitting project ready to go. I liked the look of the Wheelwright Shawl, a free pattern from Purl Soho. It's a simple, circle-plus shawl design using short rows to make wedges, and it uses DK yarn, which I happened to have enough of already in my stash (Three Irish Girls Springvale DK, in the colorway Pride in the Name of Love). I had been planning to make a little blanket with it, but that hadn't happened, and hey, here we go!

Funnily enough, I wound a skein of it at the same time as I was winding the third skein of the Yarn Snob, and my, don't they have a lot in common?

Anyway, I cast on and knit one wedge, just to be sure it would work as social knitting, and the answer was yes! I lightly wet it and pinned it out to photograph, since it wanted to roll a bit.

I like what the colors are doing, and though I enjoyed the assigned pooling project, it's also kind of nice to just knit! (And purl, but you know what I mean.)

So that's ready. I pushed myself to finish the Roam, mostly because I want to wear it on the trip. I'll also bring a sock project with me, and though I have one in progress, it isn't really grabbing me for some reason. Nothing wrong with, it just... isn't grabbing me. I might cast on another one (in fact I may have done some stash-diving already; I might have pulled out the swift; some casting on may have happened). Because there are no knitting police and I can do what I want (in this, if in no other aspect of life).

It's Been More Than Two Years

I'm going on a small trip in a couple of weeks, and I'm both excited and a little nervous! I don't think I've spent a night away from home since my trip to Hawaii, two years ago last month. Have I? No, pretty sure not. So, two weird, weird years and now I get to try to remember how to pack.

I'm leaving two weeks from Sunday, and will only be gone for three days, no flying, so it's not really as major an expedition as it feels like. I'm just so rusty! I love the anticipation of a trip, always have, but there are definite nerves this time, and I keep reminding myself that there is very little I could forget that will ruin the whole trip. 

I even started a new knitting project to be sure it would make good social knitting (I need to catch you up on recent knitting, I'll do that soon). What could be more important than that? Well, clothes count too. And, you know, stuff.

I wonder when's the last time I went two years between trips? 

Help Me Out Here

I have a couple of topics I want to write about soon, updating on my knitting and talking about an upcoming trip, but first off, I could use some advice. It's annual review time at work, ugh, and I am just stumped by this question:

"What did not work as well as planned?"

Other than "I did not win the lottery in 2021," I have no answer to that; I kind of want to write, "Did 2021 work as planned for anyone?" or just "I mean, 2021, am I right?" 

More seriously, my only personal job 'plan' involves doing the work that I am given as well as possible in a reasonable amount of time. I do that. We have no control about what comes in when, so it's hard to be any more concrete than that.

Last year, I went with the angle of "we hoped to be ahead of the curve regarding the busy period at the end of the year, but given 2020, not surprisingly that didn't work" (I'm paraphrasing). And while 2021 was also a weird year, I'm not sure I can hit that again.

What angle am I missing? 

Which Are You In?

Ah, XKCD, that's it.

I have nothing against the game or those who play it. But I'm in the control group.