Sunday, November 4, 2007

Alive, on Ravelry, and the funk is beginning to lift!

My cold has finally said goodbye (yay!), parent conference week from hell has ended (double yay!), I got my invite to Ravelry, and started listing my stash (I need pictures, and a Flickr account, but it's a start, anyway), and I do believe my knitting funk is beginning to ease up. I've been eying some gorgeous royal blue Lang Venezia, wondering what I can make with just six balls of 130 m each. It says it knits 18 sts/4" on 8s, but I haven't swatched yet, so I'm not sure. It's 50/50 mohair/acrylic, and it feels incredibly soft against my skin. Maybe a pullover vest?

I don't wear scarves or hats, or mittens or gloves, for that matter. I mean, this is SoCal. Not much use for those sort of things. (Not much use for wool or mohair or alpaca, either, but that's never stopped me. I just wear them to work, which is air conditioned on the cold side.)

My Masters program is eating up a lot of time. It's crazy, to be honest. This is just the first course, one course! ( A 6 unit course, but still), and it has 2 to 4 assignments each week, as well as 3 to 5 required discussion posts, and feedback requirements for those posts, as well. Seems like a lot to me, considering this is a program for working adults. But I haven't been a student in a long time, so maybe this is normal, and I'm just out of touch. I have about 500 -1000 pages of reading each week, which has to been done before assignments and/or discussions, and I'm finding that I have to give up being online much at all in order to complete the readings, as well as having no time for recreational reading or blogging. With this past week being conference week, and me never being home before 7 pm, it was a very tough week.

A week ago Friday I had a personal disaster. I walked outside to go to work that morning, and my car was gone. I immediately thought it had been stolen. Talk about panic! When I called the police to report it, however, they assured me it hadn't been stolen. It had, however, been damaged in an accident very early Friday morning, and they had towed it to a towing yard. When I called there, they would only confirm that they had it, but couldn't be bothered to tell me what condition it was in. He just worked in the office, you know? I scrambled to write emergency lesson plans and emailed them to work, scrambled to call in for a substitute when none of the numbers we'd been given for the new system worked (I finally logged into the new website, and was able to request a substitute, but no one ever showed up. My kids were taken by a 4th grade teacher all day ~ that woman deserves a medal for coping with 35 5th graders on top of her 35 4th graders!), and then finding someone who would give me a ride to the police station for a release, and then to the towing yard. Where I found out my car wasn't just damaged, it was totaled. Completely. Whoever hit it (I'm still waiting for the police report, so I have no idea who, or how many, hit my car, or whether they were insured), after smashing the backend into my backseat, flipped onto the roof, crushing it, blowing out the back window, and fracturing the front, which held in place a million fragments, but leaned inward onto the steering wheel. The roof was resting on the seatbacks. One rear wheel was parallel to the ground, instead of vertical, and the front driver side wheel tilted at a 45 degree angle. The driver side passenger door was bent badly enough not to be able to be opened, and that window was also gone. The front end was crumpled, but not that badly considering the rest of the car. It's a total loss

I had the towing yard tow the car to my mechanic, who agreed that it was a total loss. I had my ride drive me to a car rental place, where I was able to rent a car for the week (and now a second week). I drove (the same car like I had, in a different color) home, went inside and threw up. I was a bit stressed, I think. Then I just sat down and cried for a while. My insurance company won't do anything until I get the police report (10 days, they say), and we find out who hit me and if they're insured. (Please, God, let them be insured. I need a break!)

So, my life has been a little strange lately. And it's likely to continue being strange for a while longer. But after all this, my knitting funk is beginning to lift, and that makes me feel hopeful. Something I haven't felt in a while, and have missed, greatly. Now, if I can just find the perfect project for that Venezia!