Wednesday, November 04, 2009

Planning the Rest of the Year

I managed to get 7 hats and one scarf ready for the Ships Project. Os will ship them out today. (Today is the best day for him to go to the post office this week).
My pal Teri hopped on board, and spread the word to dozens of others.

I have another commitment due before December 15th. I have pounds of Land's End cotton/wool blend yarn to knit up into a blanket and maybe a sweater or two for Warm Woolies. The problem is after knitting on it for 30 minutes today, my hands are shot. The inflexibility of the yarn combined with the large needle size makes my carpal tunnel flare badly.
I have been able to knit on other projects without the flare happening at all, or not until after more than an hour, so it has to be the yarn and tight gauge causing my problems. There is a chance someone else on the Warm Woolies list will want the yarn to keep knitting. I'll check. If not, I will need to ship it off to Warm Woolies headquarters and hope they have local volunteers to use it.

I had my yearly check up recently, and the good news is nothing has gotten worse. There are no problems to solve, so my health level now is pretty much the best I can hope for. It better than it was last year. My new pain meds take care of the worst 50% of the pain, without making me too woozy, so that is a very good thing. I will work with what I have to go forward.

My pattern business has received some opportunities, and I need to learn how to create schematics and charts with Inkscape, as well as polish at least three more patterns.

I can't study or write patterns when Oscar is home. When I am focused on that kind of thing, I become unknowingly rude to anyone else in the house. Until I get the studio set up to work in, or Oscar gets his study set up for him to work in, we do things we both like to do on his days off.
We are making progress on that front, but of course we will still want to spend time together.

The best days to work on my pattern business are when Oscar is at work, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. My focus is better in the mornings, so soon after he leaves for work, I get dug in and can usually get 4 hours difficult work done before my brain starts to fuzz out. If I am sick, or have traveled the day before, that changes. On good days, I can have lunch and get maybe another 2 hours of medium hard brain stuff done, then the evenings I can spend knitting simply.


I want to knit for holiday gifts, too, but I need to put our financial needs first, and work on taking advantage of the opportunities for Otterwise.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I love the honesty about your behavior when Oscar is home and you're trying to design. :)

AlisonH said...

I love how you look out for each other.