just another part of me

I stayed home from work today. Apparently I’m having an allergic reaction to the Z-Pak I was given for a sinus infection, which basically means low-grade fevers, stomachaches, nausea, a nasty headache, and not a lot of eating or moving, both of which cause lovely gastrointestinal pyrotechnics. I slept pretty much all day, but around 3:00, I decided I’d better get up so I’m not up all night. I have to go back to work tomorrow.

Since I’ve been up, I wanted to be productive, so I pulled out my Moonwalker batt. I’ve been kind of mulling over how to spin this, and then I saw a project on Ravelry. It was this lace scarf, knit out of handspun pastel singles. I loved the color progression more than the pattern, but the pattern really is pretty, looking at the other projects. My brain immediately replaced the pretty pastels with the blues and purples in my Moonwalker batt, and I went, “OOOH! DO WANT!” The nice thing about spinning singles is that, first of all, I won’t lose any yardage in plying. Also, there will be minimal opportunity for me to screw it up, unlike the great beaded yarn fiasco of 2009. It’s still in time out. We don’t talk about it much.

So anyway, I unrolled the batt, got an idea of the color sequence, and decided that I wanted to mirror it. So the pretty turquoise is in the middle, and will be flanked on both sides by purple, dark blue/indigo, and black. And once I decided that…I took a million pictures! Click for bigger.

So much blue. I love it. LOLRabbit says it best:

Mirrored from winged orange.

My weekend, in a nutshell:

Translation: Michael Jackson’s This Is It, two full bobbins of alpaca all spun up and ready to be plied, my stuffed llama buddy, and six pages of notes for the Personal Statement of DOOM.

I spent probably ten hours of my weekend – six yesterday and four today – hard at work on that damn statement. Man, this is hard. The last time I applied to grad school, during my senior year in college, I didn’t find it this difficult to write a statement about myself. I had one basic draft that I futzed with a little, but nothing like this. This go-round, I really struggled. I tried writing a coherent draft from the get-go and that just exploded in my face. I tried bulleting points to get me started, as Jacey suggested, but it wasn’t getting me anywhere. I tried walking away and leaving it alone, like Katie said. I read through Krissy’s personal statement from her applications about a gazillion times. I even looked at the other prompts for my other three schools. I think that was what ended it for me – there WERE no prompts for the other schools! Just “tell us about your professional interests and career goals”. Well, balls. What the hell was I going to do with THAT?

At some point, it dawned on me that I could, with minor adjustments, use the same statement for all four schools, since the other three had no concrete prompt for me to write from. I finally just stared at the prompt I posted the other day and broke it down into what they wanted to know. I made each one a heading in a Word file and wrote something coherent for each category: Personal & Work Experience, Research Experience & Interests, Coursework, and the Damn Diversity Crap (yes, that was my heading. I was a little bitter). I wound up with six pages of reasonably coherent thoughts, in no particular order, and with no transitions or connections to anything else in the statement. But it’s something! The max length for Lehigh (the school with the prompt) is two pages, so there’s a lot of editing that needs to be done. That’s where I stopped, because I couldn’t figure out what to cut and what to leave in. I’m going to let it be for a day or so and then come back to it to see if it makes more sense later.

I still kind of wish I could submit the version I ran past Katie: “I love my students with autism. I want to be a psychologist, so please accept me and give me funding, and I’ll knit you a sweater. I’ll even poop rainbows for you. The end.”

Yeah, that’s the state my brain was in when I was finished. So rather than do anything that required any of my neurons to actually fire, I pulled out my spinning so I could finally finish the alpaca for the Rhinebeck One-Row scarf. Halloween cake challenges on Food Network plus nice, mindless spinning helped my brain re-solidify a little. So in that picture, there’s eight ounces of alpaca – four of the brown and four of the gray – that will get plied together tomorrow after the singles have rested a bit. I’m hoping I’ll be able to start knitting by Thursday, because I have two days off work this week for NJ Teacher’s Convention. Hello, four day weekend. I’ve missed you.

Despite this year being the lamest Halloween ever, what with five trick-or-treaters, the rain, and absolutely no good movies on TV, this was still a decent weekend. I was very productive; besides the spinning and the statement-ing, I also made sugar skull dough for my Spanish lesson tomorrow on Dia de los Muertos. I went Friday and saw This Is It, which was as awesome as it could possibly have been, given the circumstances. I don’t think it’s possible for me to have any MORE love for “Smooth Criminal,” and I will probably giggle each and every time I see a cherry picker for the rest of my life. I’m going again on Thursday night with a friend, which makes me happy. Scott went to New York today and bought me a present, and that makes me happy.

It was a good weekend. :)

Mirrored from winged orange.

So after I spent all that time spinning, beading, and crying about my Aeolian yarn…I think it’s going to be okay.

I sat down yesterday to unply the beaded thread from the rest of the singles, and it was apparent in the first thirty seconds that if I kept it up, I was going to have a hell of a mess. Fortunately, yesterday was a rational day for me, so I stopped trying to unply and decided just to wind the hank into a ball. As I was winding (by hand, because my ballwinder kept trying to eat the beads), it became apparent that when under a little tension, the goofy plying issue with the thread evened out. It still looks pretty nutty in the ball, but I have faith that if I choose to knit with it, it’ll be more or less okay.

I’m spinning up the other half of the singles now, and once I see what kind of yardage I get, I can see how to proceed. I know that I will not be beading the second half of the yarn, just doing a standard two-ply. My thought so far is to use the non-beaded yarn to knit the main body of the shawl and then use the beaded part for the border. However, since the border takes 45% of the yarn, it’s really going to depend on what the yardage is on the second half of the spinning. If I’m short, I can always substitute a commercial yarn or spin something else.

It’s to the point where I don’t even know where I could possibly wear this shawl, but I’m so far invested in it that I. Will. Have. A. Handspun. Aeolian.

In other news – no, I still haven’t heard about my job. I’m hoping tomorrow will be the day, because I’m tired of literally ducking my principal to avoid being asked about my contract. Seriously, on Friday, I saw him coming down the hall and I dashed into the ladies’ room and stayed there until the hallway was quiet.  Scott’s making out a little better; he has a second interview for his job prospect on Wednesday, which is encouraging.

Let’s see. For those who care (i.e., Katie), I’m still going to the gym. I went Wednesday/Thursday/Friday last week, which may have been a mistake, because I am so sore. I’m used to doing every other day, but things came up last Monday & Tuesday, so I rearranged. Also, I completely stand by the claim I made on Plurk that Michael Jackson’s “Morphine” is the shit for workouts – I ran 8.5 mph on Friday while listening to it, which honestly is crazy, considering that when I started going to the gym (sans-”Morphine,” mind you) I could only do about 3 mph. It’s at the top of my workout playlist now, so we’ll see if it continues to motivate. :)

Mirrored from winged orange.

Have any of you felt cold lately? A bone-chilling, all over sensation that starts with your feet and works its way up? If so, I apologize deeply. It’s my fault.

You see, I’ve caused hell to freeze over. I did the unthinkable.

I went to the gym today. And I enjoyed it.

I’m not enjoying it now, though. My arms and shoulders are rebelling in the worst way possible. I put my hair in a ponytail after my shower, and let me tell you, it was an effort to raise my arms above my head. I’m going to be in even sorrier shape tomorrow. This is the part of my body that says, “See, this is why the gym is bad, you dumbass.” This is why I have avoided anything resembling heavy exercise for 25 years.

But while I was there, doing my 20 minutes on the treadmill and 25 on the elliptical, I was enjoying myself a little bit. The anti-gym part of my body was going, “Seriously, how can you possibly be liking this?!” The rest of me was kind of getting a kick out of working up a sweat, and pounding out the beat of “Smooth Criminal” on the treadmill. It was also saying to the anti-gym part, “You are not 20 anymore, and all of those pictures of you on Facebook from junior year of college? When you could still fit into those cute tank tops because you worked at the barn all summer and got buffish? Yeah, you don’t look like that anymore. You ain’t losin’ that spare tire unless you get off your ass and work for it!” I really felt like I was doing something good for myself, even though I was kind of dying there on the exercise equipment.

Also, I’m in my college roommate’s wedding on the 26th, and since she’s a low-key, nontraditional kind of girl, she decided we should all be allowed to buy our own sundress. Well. I bought a killer one. I’m not a girly girl. I don’t like dresses. But this dress…this is adorable. Sadly, however, it also runs crazy small. I’m a 12 in dresses, maybe a 14 if it’s cut weird. I ordered a 12 and had to send it back. I got a 14 and had to send it back. It only comes in sizes up to 16, so that’s what I finally ordered, even though the dress itself is only a couple of inches wider than my old high school graduation dress, which is a 10. So it’s really a 12 masquerading as a 16, which meant I needed to lose five pounds to zipper it.

I tried it on again last week. I knew I’d lost some weight just by watching what I ate a bit, and I was right – the dress zippered. But there was still a problem. See how the description of the dress says, “Room to breathe”? Well, I couldn’t! I can get into the dress, but I can’t sit, dance, eat, sneeze, or exahale. These are all desirable functions to be able to perform at a wedding. Especially that last one. In a fit of desperation, frenzy, and an intense desire NOT to be the token fat girl in the wedding party, I registered for Planet Fitness this morning. And then I drove to the gym this afternoon and worked my ass off. I’m hoping that if I work hard over the next two weeks, I’ll be able to breathe while I’m performing my bridesmaidly duties. After the wedding, I’m hoping that if I work really hard, I’ll look damn cute in my vacation pictures from Disney in December!

In other news, I haven’t reached a definite decision on the Aeolian yarn, mostly because I’ve still not washed the first skeins. I’ll get there. I’m leaning towards just spinning the second batt and seeing what I get. Worst comes to worst, I’ll just order some KP lace yarn for Aeolian and use the handspun for some other lace project. I’m trying not to be too bitter about the whole thing because the merino was a joy to spin, and the yarn is really pretty, if not exactly what I wanted/needed for the shawl. It was a learning experience, and I have learned that beads and I should retreat to separate corners forever. ;) Still, if you have thoughts on the last entry, please, comment! I wanna hear them!

This should be a good week. On deck: Scott’s coming Wednesday, dinner out on Thursday, school field trip to the zoo on Friday, and also on Friday, Half Blood Prince in IMAX!

Mirrored from winged orange.