Procrastination makes the world go round... later

You know how sad I am? I started this post on the 12th. It is now the 21st. Pathetic. Just pitiful.

Egads. I can't believe it's been almost a month since I last updated. Argh.

See, what happened was this:

I've been working on this sock, and I'd left it below the high-child level at some point, and so the kids got hold of it. They managed to mangle up the skein a bit before I could wrest it from their vice-like little fingers. So, in True Blogger Style, I took a few pictures of it. "Ah ha! At last I have content worthy of knit-blogging!" But then when I loaded the pics onto the computer, I realized I had no friggin' clue how to actually enter them into my spiffy blog here.

I was going to ask the hubby, but then he went to GenCon, and then we began re-arranging things in the front room, so that the kids would have access to a larger part of the apartment. Between travel, and recovering from travel, and travelling again, and then colds, it took us a solid three weeks to get it all done. In fact, we just let the kids loose in the newly-expanded child-proofed area tonight. Though we still have weird things all over the rest of the apartment, so I figure it's going to take a bit to get everything back in order.

Have I mentioned we're planning to move in about six weeks? And we don't know where to yet? Yeah. Anyway.

So I never did get the photos of the mangled skein post-able. And by then, well... things were nutty.

And then I finished the Blasted Hat, though not in enough time to get the pictures of it mailed off to my Captain on Browncoats (how on earth have men and women managed to coexist for all these millennia when we can't even manage the simplest communications properly?). And I still haven't mailed the darn thing off yet either, and I really should, seeing as Serenity opens on Sept. 30.

So there's that.

Blasted Hat = complete.

I cast on a new hat, for my friend's daughter, in KnitPicks Shine. Again, it took a couple false starts before I really figured out what I was doing. But things are going well, so we should be ready for the daughter's birthday in a few weeks days.

The socks continue. The KnitPicks sock is about an inch or two away from the toe decreases. The Sockotta sock is... sigh. Okay, so it's a little over midway through the foot. But when I tried it on recently, I realized that it doesn't /quite/ fit. Like, if I wanted it to fit really nicely, what I should do is frog back to the gusset and frog out the last set of decreases from the gusset, giving me a slightly wider sock through the foot. sigh.

I'm so not prepared to do that yet, though. sigh. I'm starting to wonder if I'll ever actually manage to knit up socks that I'm really happy with. Oh well.

And then, in super-extra-knitblog-worthy news, I went to my first Sheep & Wool Festival over the weekend a few weeks ago. Dragged Caz and the kids, and met up with Meg and Jonathan in the afternoon. It was shockingly hot out, particularly for mid-September, but otherwise was quite lovely. Ooh'd and ahh'd over lovely yarns, the boys got scared by a rather assertively baa-ing sheep (I felt bad for the kids - we adults had been laughing at this sheep for a while, because he kept sticking his tongue out most entertainingly whenever he baa'd, and then it turned out the kids were getting freaked out by it), we watched border collies herd sheep and ducks, and Ben took an instant liking to a "livestock herding dog" that we met who, it turned out, was for sale. If the sweet beastie hadn't been $550, we might very well have gotten a new member of the family that day. Heaven knows I could use some help herding the livestock children.

Amusingly enough, it turns out the kids were not as traumatized by the assertively bleating sheep as I'd thought. In fact, now, whenever we come across a picture of a sheep or lamb in one of the many many books the kids has (and pictures of sheep/lambs are remarkably common, I will note), Henry will point at it and say "Baa!" I'm so proud I could just bust.

As it was, I still vaulted past my self-allotted yarn budget, but not by $550. I got two lovely skeins of yarn, one in a blue-purple variegated colorway, and one in a bright green variegated colorway. They're about 560 yds each of worsted weight yarn (roughly 8 oz each), and so I'm plotting garments for the boys. I'd thought sweaters, though I realized once we got home that clearly, I'd snuck off while I wasn't looking and smoked some crack, as they've been too big for 500-yard sweaters for closing on a year now. sigh. So now I'm thinking vests.

I also got a lovely skein of worsted in a gorgeous autumn leaves sort of colorway. And this is where I vaulted over the yarn budget. If I'd just stuck with the other two, it would have been all right, I think, but this third skein is what did it. It's not that it was all that expensive, really - it's just that my budget was pretty small. But I blew it anyway, and got this really amazingly lovely yarn. Like, it was lovely when I bought it, and then I brought it home and was all wowed by it all over again. I love that. I think it's going to become a scarf. The yarn's just too gorgeous not to make something out of it that'll really show it off. And I only got the one skein, and so... yeah. A scarf.

In other news, Jonathan got a drop spindle and some roving, so next time we go down to visit (in the wake of our husbands abandoning us for GenCon, I think Shelby and I are going to visit Meg and Jonathan in Chicago sometime in the next couple months for an all-thrills Weekend Away From The Kids), I'm going to ask for a demonstration and perhaps even a lesson. Perhaps. Though oh I know I shouldn't. The last thing we need around here is little bits of fluff that we're supposed to keep, in addition to all the bits of fluff and dust and crap that somehow we never manage to completely vacuum away.