Stretch

Talking with my knitting friends Monday night about how overstretched I feel lately, we came up with a great knitting analogy for it.

When you've knit something and it doesn't come out exactly the way you want, you can sometimes, and to a certain extent, change it during blocking. You wash the item, and then reshape it the way you want it to be, stretching and pulling it (gently), sometimes using pins to keep it where you want until it dries that way. There are limits to how far you can go, though, leading to a knitting saying that is often brought up as a joke.

So if you want to make something wider, you usually can.

Longer? You can do that.

Both, though? Unlikely to work. The fabric has just so much "give" to it, and you can't have it go all ways.

So right now, the move and condo sale prep have me very stretched in one way, and that leaves me with next to no stretch for anything else. New work thing to handle, or the boss acting clueless? I can almost feel my fabric stretching to the breaking point. Computer acting up? Hulk smash. The usual annoyances of life (hunger, too hot/cold, tired)?

I don't bring this up because anything else has gone wrong. It's just a window into the scary place that my head can be, these days. I'm okay, mostly. And it will pass.