I succumbed to Erika Knight's Classic Knits yesterday (only 3 days after it arrived from Amazon!), and ordered some Big Wool Fusion from Webs to make the tank top in it. The pattern has a mistake in it ~ says it has a gauge of 18 sts to 4 inches, on 17s! ~ but if you just drop the 1 from the 18 it works just fine. Silly mistake, and I seriously don't understand how books get published with errors in it, considering how many people read the damn things before publication.
Anyway, in a few days (or more than a few days, considering it's Web's sale days) my yarn will be here and I'll be knitting away on a very fast tank top, one I can use right away. Until then, I will be working on Mariel, since it seems to have cooled down here. Unbelievable, I know. But even the weathermen are talking about the spring-like weather we're having. I can't remember an August that was this cool (well, 88 is cool for here, anyway). If this were the regular summer weather here in SoCal, I might actually like living here, instead of dreaming of moving away to someplace that has real seasons, and doesn't have furnace-like summers. But I just know that in a few days or a week, we'll be back to the regular August weather of 100+ temps, just when everyone has relaxed and begun to believe in this balmy weather. Life is like that.
I know I shouldn't have bought more yarn. Somewhere in my stash I'm sure I have something bulky like Big Wool that would have worked. I am just addicted to the purchase of yarn. Yarn and books. I can't seem to live without either. I mean, I'm single, and I live in a 3 bedroom apartment, because I need the room for my books and my yarn. And that's not even enough room, if I'm going to be honest. My books take up one whole bedroom, plus, in boxes, part of the closet in another, and about half the room in my bedroom (the one I actually sleep in). I have a *lot* of books! And yarn? It's everywhere. One bedroom is full of it, and it's overflowing in my bedroom, and in the living room, and.... Well, there's a lot of it, okay?
I really, really need to knit from my stash. Really. I need to make some sort of promise to only knit from my stash, and stick to it. And to knit, for that matter. I get startitis, regularly, but I don't want to tell you how many unfinished projects I have sitting around here. And the really amazing part is that many of them are finished except for the seaming up and weaving in of ends. Some are even seamed, but haven't had the ends woven in. I seem to get to the end of the knitting, and just lose interest. That has to stop, too. (So many things I have to stop!)
Ah, well, it will all be good for me. I'll spend less money (yay, says my budget), I'll have new(ish) clothes to wear, and I'll still be knitting, which is good for my blood pressure and my soul. Now, of course, I just need to find the time for it.
School will be starting in 22 days, although I'll be back in my classroom in just 5 days, to get it all set up for the new year. And I'm starting my Masters program this year, as well. I've applied to start in October, online. It will be the first class I've ever taken online, but it really does fit my life better than committing myself to physical attendance in a program. Most days I'm physically tired after spending the day with 35 ten year olds, plus dealing with an incompetent principal, and meeting with parents or my teaching partner. So, online just sounds better.
I guess I really like being busy, though. Between teaching, and learning, I also fundraise like mad for my students so they can go on the DC trip my partner and I do each year. It's pretty expensive for the kids ~ last year it cost $1500 per kid, $1700 per parent ~ but it's such a terrific trip for our kids. We go to DC, but also to Williamsburg, Jamestown, and Yorktown. 5th grade history is all about the founding of America and colonial life, so this trip is perfect. And the kids get so much out of it. So, their teachers commit to hours and hours and hours of fundraising. As well as the accounting of said fundraisers, crediting each kid with the amount he or she has earned, or that the parent group has figured out the division of a lump sum to credit them with. (That's a terrible sentence, but I'm too tired to care.)
I think I need a time budget in addition to my $$ budget (which I'm not very good at keeping, but I'm working on it!) I wonder if there's a program out there, like Quicken, that helps you budget time?
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