Personal accomplishments

Holy foop, I can't believe that I haven't posted since Rhinebeck! I guess I haven't been in a bloggy mood. That, and my body has been demanding more sleep than I feel is strictly necessary, so my usual online night-owl activities have been kind of lacking.

But I'm back now! I am here, I am alive, and I have been knitting!

First, though, one other reason that I haven't blogged much: this year, I once again participated in the insanity that is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short. And I wrote about...wait for it...knitters! Well, knitters and quantum physics, but knitting was a big part of the story. I'm not sure yet what I'm going to do with it, but I am proud to say that I worked hard enough to be able to display this here:



I feel strangely less accomplished than I did last year, maybe because I wrote a great majority of my novel in bizarre chunks using Write Or Die, an online application that gives you a variable grace period after you stop typing before it starts playing annoying sounds at you. Yep, annoying sounds like squeaking violin practice, noisy goats, and Hanson singing "MmBop". It's amazing. If you suffer from writer's block at all, I highly recommend giving it a try. It gets you typing, and I found that I was more inclined to roll with my crazy ideas rather than spend inordinate amounts of time debating about whether or not they would work.

Now for the yarny stuff. Remember that multicolored merino I got at Rhinebeck?

The blue stuff is yarn now.





I think I've mentioned that I love spinning merino. I'm a compulsive predrafter, so once I'm done with that, the roving practically spins itself. This spun up into a beautiful blue-purple two-ply with occasional slubs of yellow.

And, due to a silly incident that wasn't comical at all and which left me with only one glove, that yarn became these:



Broad Street, from the young days of Knitty.



I gave them a test run last night, and I have to admit that I don't miss my old gloves at all.



(They're less purple and more blue in real life.) I'm still not sure if I'll sew on a button to keep the mitten flap down when they're open, or just skip it. For now, they seem to work well without one.

Other things that have been giving me those little moments of joy lately: the Twilight soundtrack, hot cinnamon spice tea, and Killer Bunnies and the Quest for the Magic Carrot. Plus I'm knitting another sample for the local shop, and finishing the mittens gave me a big boost of energy with which to attack my other WIPs. All in all, knitting and life are good right now.

Mood: decaffeinated
Music: Iron & Wine - Flightless Bird, American Mouth