Reality Check

Reality keeps intruding on my happy little blog-knitting-crafting-verse. Not only did I get the sudden shock of what I will tell you below yesterday, I also came home to find my phone line completely non-function, as in, absolutely no dial tone. A call to the phone company and a nice chat with their automated voice system later, I found out that my service could potentially be disrupted by repairs (?!) that they are conducting in the area and that I can be assured of service restoration on THURSDAY evening. Since I use dial-up for the internet, I am currently web-less at home so the blog entries will be spotty this week until my phone line returns to life. Sigh. Here is the entry I meant to post up last night. Thanks to everyone who commented on my knitting journal! It makes the little Type-A person inside me feel validated and happy. :)
There is something about sick days and glum, raining weather (yes, the rain is back) that deludes me into thinking that time has slowed…like the whole world is on vacation. Then, reality intervenes to whack me over the head when I look at the calendar and realize that it is already March. Already the second week of March, in fact. And, as my calendar stubbornly insists no matter how I count up the days, less than four weeks lie between now and my mother’s birthday. That is less than four week I have to work on the vest that is her present, the vest that I have so far knitted zero rows on (after I finally purchased the correct size needles). That is also the less than four weeks during which stretches of time-consuming experiments were planned. So, a mild panic attack later, I have decided to attempt to knit exclusively on the vest so that I at least finish the back by the end of this week. These projects are now (sadly) going on the backburner for now.


Here is the result of some exclusive knitting today while I waited in lab for yeast cells to grow. (Those who know me know that a preponderance of my days in lab revolve around this activity. The end results of science are really quite exciting but the day-to-day portion of it often leaves much to be desired.)


I am finding the knitting rather slow going and I’m not sure why. While having to fiddle with the cable needle every few stitches slows things down a great deal, that only happens every seven rows. The rest of the time I am just knitting and purling. Perhaps it is the enforced exclusive knitting… I did try cabling without a cable needle but the yarn isn’t stiff enough to hold the loops while I switch their position so it ends up taking more time as I struggle to keep the stitches from dropping. Does anyone have any suggestions/pointers about cabling without a needle?