Burnt Out

I think I have reached the point of winter when all of my energy is gone after one hour of being awake in the morning.

This is why bears hibernate.

The world is cold, the roads are icy, it's dark when I leave in the morning and when I drive home from work at night. And it just saps all the happy I have keeping myself moving.

To top it all off, the project I'm knitting right now (or my reworked version of this project, has so much ribbing that it could be followed up by an ice-pick lobotomy and I wouldn't care. I might even be relieved.

Thirteen inches of 1x1 ribbing. Jen, that's like on the cuff of your socks. Knit one, purl one, knit one, purl one, question the meaning of your life, knit one...

It's going to take forever to do the front. This better darn look good when it's finished, that's all I have to say. Just because I don't want a cropped sweater showing off what an inactive lifestyle I have doesn't mean I want to find out the last two weeks have gone by with me knitting only to tear out my work at the end. That would push me over the edge, it really would.

So I am dragging myself to work, dragging myself to knit night (which will get harder after the close the chunk of 16 that both Rachael and I use to get to Coffee D'Vine--I'm serious Rachael, from the spot where you dropped your glove to County Road 300-something will be closed indefinitely), dragging myself home from knit night, back to work, back home, to Walmart, to the bank, to the post office, trudging through snow as Darcy bounds around me, urging me to be happy and to play Stick-And-Frisbee or Double-Friz or Rock, although since the rock in question is now in the river, the latter would be a short game to say the least.

Life has lost its shiny glory, and I'll be waiting until summer for it to come back. Annually, I wait for the 80+ degree weather to recharge my Laura batteries and make me peppy again.

Meanwhile, I must try to not be a downer, something I have already failed in doing for this post. Sorry, folks.

But I decided to make life happier. Forcibly.

I am going to do the Knitting Olympics--or the Ravelympics as they are called this year. And I am going to conquer something. I am going to defeat the green Patons Grace.

The Story of the Paton's Grace

One spring morning, Julie (Mom) was skipping happily past the knit store--wait a second--past?

One spring morning, Julie ran into the yarn store as fast as her twisted-sock-feet could carry her, then paused. She saw some lovely cotton yarns, all spring colors and all coordinating so well! She had to have it. But what would she make with it?

Fortunately, Kathy showed Princess Julie some glorious pattern booklets filled with the finest patterns in the land, and soon Empress Supreme Julie was knitting away. Then she discovered that she didn't purchase enough yarn, so she sent out her minions to secure her more.

Then Her Amazing Glorious Julie Divine decided to throw the top and the yarn it came from into a basket and knit something else, because she had just that moment discovered her Hatred for Cotton.

Time passed, Laura began to wonder if her mother would ever finish the tank top, intended for Laura, which was why she cared so much.

More time passed, and The Shining Sparkling One gave Laura, the Pond Scum of Humanity, the green yarn to match her algae-self, and Laura croaked her thanks before hopping back to her swamp to catch flies.

One of those flies was metaphorical, and it was the pattern for the Beaded Cami, which was the last of several attempts at knitting the green Paton's Grace. It failed. Probably because Laura's self-measurements were exact, causing the Beadless-Beaded Cami to come out like a sausage casing, destined for Laura's Sausage-Self to be packed into. Shamed, she crawled under her lily-pad and frogged the whole thing, rewound the yarn into balls, and decided to forget it was there.

Another year passed.

And a little more time.

And then it was now.

And in case you didn't know, Laura is me.

And I have decided to not start any more sentences with "and" for a while. Or with "one"...

I am going to compete against the Paton's Grace and Cotton in general at the 2010 Knitting Olympics, now called the Ravelympics because we're all using Ravelry now instead of various blogs.

My pattern? Uhura found in the Summer 2009 issue of Twist Collective, an online knitting magazine.

I am determined. I will use that Patons, and if when I am done the finished product is as ugly as the sky is blue, I will send it packing, go online, order the exact yarn the sample is knit from on Twist Collective, and knit the whole thing again. It will turn out the happy raspberry color it is in the magazine, and I will have got rid of that Patons once and for all.

This is the time when I have to break and tell you all that there is absolutely nothing wrong with Patons Grace.

This particular batch of Patons Grace, however, is cursed by heavenly forces beyond our mortal control. The failures of projects made with this yarn are legendary.

Like, for example, the original intended project. Mom bought enough skeins for the boat-necked tank she was making me, then she bought two more. But when she got to about my waist, no matter how many hours of uninterrupted knitting she put in, the sweater didn't get any longer. Even when she left it and came back hours later to measure again. Even when she switched measuring tapes.

Me? I checked my gauge four times and had my mother measure me after I had measured myself twice. So unless the pattern for a 36" sweater was actually the pattern for a 30" sweater, something went terribly, inexplicably wrong on my end.

That yarn...is cursed.

But I will break that curse this winter. It will be how I defeat the Winter Blahs. Me and that yarn is going places.

Yes, I know how terrible the grammar in that last sentence is, I'm going for a whole movie thing. Try saying it out loud in kind of a mafia way.

See?

I hope this will beat back my desire to curl up in the fetal position and wait for summer to awaken me. Spring, you see, isn't good enough. If not, it will at least give me something to do when I'm avoiding watching the Olympics...

*Note added at 3:12 p.m.--I just had to go through every post that I've made on this blog and the one I write for the library to fight the evil Spam monster and its progeny. How many ads for naked Miley Cyrus and Cialis do we need? And do the people who want to see Miley also need the Cialis, or to put it in a slightly different way, if we denied these people drugs to combat their dysfunctions, would they still seek out pictures of under aged girls nude?