a New Year’s gift for you

Because:
1. In some areas New Year’s Day was the traditional gift-giving holiday
but more because
2. I figure it’s the holiday celebrated by the greatest percentage of my various friendslists
but also because
3. It took me a while to decide on a charity that was appropriate for the international nature of you all
and most because
4. I’ve lived a lot of my life online since there was much of an online to live it on, but especially given the peripatetic nature of my last few years I’ve gotten a whole lot of both pleasure and emotional nourishment from both the people I read and the ones who read and comment here.

So in honor of you all, I have just made a donation to Doctors Without Borders / Medecins Sans Frontiers. Happy New Year to all of you and to all of good will.

On the more material front, it was a good but not spectacular Christmas. Gifts were nice and appreciated, and if there’s nothing I’m wildly exulting over it’s because I have all I need and more. That’s worth exulting over right there. (Also, the Kindle and iPod Ted gave me last year continue to be gifts that please me every single day. Hard to top that!) And it’s not over yet – gifts are still to arrive from his parents and from my brother and SIL, so there’s that to look forward to. I want a present from my uncle, who always gave good ones, but I’m going to have to learn to live with that.

The best thing about the holiday was that a couple of doctor’s appointments gave me an excuse to take a sick day Thursday and work from home Monday. Friday, Christmas Day, I had already planned to work from home. So I did get five days to spend with Ted and avoid coming into the office. Even when I’m working, being at home is just so much more comfortable! And getting back the extra hour and a half I normally spend commuting is a huge gift. Also, since he’s been off, Ted did all the planning and shopping and almost all of the cooking for Christmas dinner, a very nice holiday bonus.

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.

My in-laws rock!

Their Christmas box arrived today. In it was a card announcing a donation in our name to a charity we support, and a DVD of a TV show Ted likes (he uses them for erging) and….

two boxes each of Snyder’s pretzels (my favorites, and you can’t get much in the way of pretzels here) and the Williams-Sonoma Peppermint Bark that we both love, that’s only sold at holiday time.

There may have been some chanting at random intervals. (“My in-laws bought me pret-zels! My in-laws bought me pret-zels!) Yes, the present that go me most excited this year cost approximately $4US. Plus shipping. It’s the shipping that does it.

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.

gained weight

No, not me, my passport and my knitting queue. I just got my passport back, because I sent it in to get new pages added. (This is my second passport; I’ve only had this one since late 2005. They’ve been busy years.) I’m bemused to note that the new pages have pictures of buffalo and steam trains and such, complete with various quotes about the country. Who picks those, anyway? They are sort of an odd selection, ranging from rabble-rousing (by 18th century standards, but inspirational still) to a description of railroads as the iron thread holding the nation together (I wonder to what degree that’s still true? Not for passengers, certainly, but it might be for freight.)

I am having sort of a knitting problem right now. What I am currently knitting is a Rogue sweater. I also have Laeticia socks in nice squishy-soft Malabrigo on the needles, and will probably use those instead of the sweater for car knitting next week when Ted goes back to work (and does the driving). What I want to be knitting now, however, is the sweater, and the socks, and a lap blanket (for which I’ve ordered the yarn!) and maybe a little Damson shawl. Also I should knit some blue and white socks because a very nice person gave me some Dutch hand-dyed yarn when I left the Netherlands, and if I get back there without having knitted it up I will feel ungrateful. (Though knitters know that yarn sitting in the stash to be fondled is also appreciated!) And I also want to make some new fingerless gloves, out of the leftover yarn from Ted’s hat. It’s cold at work and my old ones are looking a bit battered.

And I want to have all those things done, so I can snuggle into them while it’s cold here, and then I want to start some new things that won’t be pestering me to get them finished. Yeah, right.

I also want the sweater done so I can wash it and see if it will self-destruct (shrink a lot, grow a lot, pill, look generally yucky) because I am knitting it out of some merlot-colored merino – a mystery brand I found for cheap here and couldn’t find anywhere online. So far it’s holding up well and feels pleasantly substantial to knit with unlike at least one cheap yarn I used that was pilling as I knit it. Obviously the smart thing to do would have been to wash and abuse my swatch (I did make one), but I have 10 skeins of 120 meters each and the pattern calls for 1200m in the size I’m knitting. I didn’t want to isk not being able to unravel the swatch if I needed that yarn. I’ve had bad experiences with a couple of sweaters that grew enormously after they touched water, but one of those was silk-bamboo yarn and the other was optim-treated wool, which destroys its elasticity. As this is plain wool with no weird treatments, I figure it’s a little more trustworthy.

Why can’t I knit five projects at once and make progress on all of them? I need more knititng time, dammit. Also more hands.

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.