Oh Hello, February!

Where did you com from? Between continuing to travel all over the place, hosting some lovely friends, and running my league's very first home team bout, January seems to have passed me by - and with very little knitting done, not to mention any homework whatsoever for my penultimate Masters class.

Two unfinished socks, a stack of books, some tea, and a cat who is about to be an asshole. This sums up my January nicely.

Maybe today I'll peel myself away from the Derby Inbox of Doom and finish something knitting-related while I listen to Brideshead Revisited.

Yep. That sounds like a plan.

Someone is "helping."

.22 Down, 11.78 to Go!

The first knit of 2012 is complete! 

Austermann Step Yarn, 382 yds.

Late Christmas socks for my papa. Standard K3P1 rib with what I think is an Eye of the Partridge heel. My dad isn't really into crazy colors - and these qualify as "crazy colors" to that Federal employee - so I'll  over-dye them a little so the white places are also a shade of tan. I'm quite pleased with how well they matched up! 

Next up is a pair for my stepmother, Lisa. 

Seacoast Handpaints Panda Yarn, "Bee Balm"

This will end up being Thelonius socks. I spent a happy evening last night winding yarn at my coffee table and watching Leverage, then I cleaned out a random basket that was sitting around - how do I end up with random baskets? I never think of myself as a "basket person" (basket CASE, maybe...) and yet they're lying about - and put all my Late Christmas Pre-Knitting (aka yarn) into it. Efficiency! Focus! Late night caffeine! 

In keeping with my streak of not spending weekends at home since August, I'm heading down to San Jose on Friday to see a Tennessee Williams play with some friends and then attend Jasmin's baby shower. Little Genevieve made her debut yesterday at 4pm, adding the definite eventuality of baby-huffing to the enjoyment of seeing good friends and the wool fumes of a well-stocked yarn store!

Tika 2012

2011 was pretty swell. I joined a roller derby league, traveled all over the place visiting old friends and making  new ones, and settled in to my (no longer) new apartment. I knitted not as much as I anticipated (a meager 6-ish miles) but nailed my goal of reading 75 books (29,060 pages!!) and revisited spinning.

Like years before, I didn't finish my crafting goals. This seems to happen to me more often than not; Largely Unrepeatable is full of "I tried this and failed, then I tried THAT and failed, and now I'm doing this with no real hope of success given the time frame! Go me!" In regular conversation, that's often called overstretching oneself or delusions of grandeur, but I feel strongly that goals and challenges aren't always meant to be met, especially if they're truly challenging. They're also a way for me to figure out what is important to me. If you've been around here for awhile, you're probably aware that I'm not very fussed if I can't knit through 11 or 12 miles of yarn in a year, but it was important enough to me to complete the goodreads challenge that I picked up books when I might have occupied myself doing other things. Goals (and the revisiting thereof) give me a chance to focus (and refocus) on what I like and who I want to be. And who knows? Maybe this year is the year I complete the 12-Mile Quest; after all, it's right there in the date.

Becoming part of Sacred City's family of hard, confident, passionate women has helped me to find the steel, confidence and passion I misplaced somewhere along the road. I've thought a lot over the last few days about when I was happiest in 2011, and the answers were fairly simple: I was happiest when I was cheering for my team, listening my niece tell me that "T is for Tika," and laughing so hard I cried - most recently over my own inability to add two coins into 35 cents.* At none of those times was I taking myself too seriously or worried about How Things Appear to Others, and there's a lesson there if I can only grasp it.

So with that in mind, Tika 2012 is about focus.**
I will focus on:

- Reading 100 books 

- Maintaining the relatively healthy agenda I've been following since October (hello waist! Nice to see you again!)

- Working diligently through the sometimes-oppressive amount of yarn and fiber at my fingertips, with the addendum of keeping incoming purchases to a reasonable incoming/outgoing ratio
- Finding employment
- Finishing my Master's degree
- Applying for PhD programs

But above all, I want to focus on:
- Making good and thoughtful choices


That's a lot of gerunds.





*Feel free to remind me of this next time I'm crowing over being Sooooooo Smart.
**Or, if you'd rather join me in my already-oft-repeated 2012 mantra, "pay the fuck attention, T!"

Finished Objects: 2011

1/1 - Green Vanilla Socks - 316 yds.

3/10 - Composition Scarf - 420 yds.

4/10 - Spidey Blanket #2 - 1738 yds.

5/13 - Hera Mountain Shawl - 1760 yds.

6/19 - Blueblood Island Shawl - 705 yds.

7/9 - Chantilly Lace yarn - 220 yds.

8/19 - Moderne Baby Blanket - 1603 yds.

8/24 - Shetland Shorty - 380 yds.

9/1 - Bright Fig Yarn - 716 yds.

9/5 - Be-Bop-a-Lula Yarn - 960 yds

9/10 - LD Experiment #1 - 48 yds

9/17 - Prairie Lady Yarn - 132 yds.

9/29 - Sacred Scarf - 652 yds.

10/6 - High Seas Shawl - 920 yds.

Addendum

1. I got my family tickets to see It's A Wonderful Life at Ye Old Local Movie Theater. Not one of the 6 of us has ever seen it, so perhaps this will be the beginning of a lovely new Christmas tradition. Equally possible: we will be cynical while my brothers and I sip hot buttered rum out of a flask all night. Either way, fun will be had by all!

2. What is WITH the sudden Lord of the Rings Love Fest going on in Blogland? Does JRR bring out the holiday spirit in readers, or did I miss something (besides The Hobbit trailer, which I admit gave me a warmness in my belly)? Tolkein may have been a visionary, but any good editor worth their salt should have picked up on the ridiculosity of naming your two main villains basically the same name, and then repeating that scheme with two main lady-loves. Plus, I don't care how the leaves crackle underfoot while you walk across the entirety of New Zealand. Twice.

Pull your pitchforks out of storage if you must, but in your heart you know you can't always keep Sauron and Saruman straight.

3. I need more bookshelves. Good thing it's the holiday season! Maybe there's an IKEA gift card in my future...

Who DOES That?!?

Every once in awhile, I astonish myself with the scope of my... let's not call it delusion, let's call it ambition. 

Three days ago, or exactly a week until Christmas, I decided to knit my Christmas gifts. I'll pause to let that sink in. 

Now, I'm not quite delusional ambitious enough to think that even I, with my super powers of knitting at an average pace, could finish a hat and 7 pairs of socks - three of them for mens' size 11-13 feet - in a week. On a good day of watching Dr. Who I can crank out one sock for myself! But it's looking like I'm not in any shape to finish the 11-Mile Quest this year. I did work hard and there are several pieces on the needles within a few hours solid work of counting toward the total, but I miscalculated somewhere and I'm really only in the 6-Mile range when I thought I was farther along. Therefore everyone* is getting yarn for Christmas. 

Ambitious!!

Then I will knit furiously and hope to have everyone's gifts finished by a reasonable date in January. I won't lie to you, holidaylettes, there may be a pair of socks that waits to get Kitchenered together until Jan 1. But you won't tell on me, will you?

There is a wrap-up post coming some time next week (maybe. I've at least been thinking about a wrap-up post) and a solid set of goals for 2012, which includes Reading Many Books and Finishing the Quest as well as perhaps Finding a Job: The Horror! and Applying to Grad School.

*with the exception of Sister of the Art, whose box to OH CANADA is in the mail! Send pictures!! 

It Is December.

Polarlings, you may not have noticed, but it is now the end month of 2011. This means many things!

- I have been a year older for six days

- The 11-Mile Quest is coming to a close

- Christmas is coming and, I assume, the goose is getting fat. Deposit your pennies to the left with all your stuff. 

- The goodreads challenge is nearly over and I am on hooks of the tentered variety over whether or not I will complete my challenge there. Although I'm not sure why, since I completed my original challenge in October and then upped the number of books. I wasn't the Juneau Public Library Summer Reading Champion of 1985-89 for nothing, people. 

- One year from today, my darling CoffeeBean will marry her adorable Theater Teacher. There will be copious tears on my part and I'm saying now that someone may just crash their beach wedding in Hawaii unless that someone (me) gets family dispensation to be there legitimately. 

SO! How many weekends have you spent at home since I last gabbled at you? I have spent... zero.

First I went to Tahoe for my friend Sara's birthday, where it snowed and we stayed in a cabin and generally had a delightful time.

Then the next weekend I got on a plane

And ended up in Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, Mexico for two weeks where I did nothing more strenuous than debate about whether to lay at the beach or at the pool, and whether it would be a rum-and-chocolate or tequila-and-lime kind of afternoon.

It is SO HARD being me.

THB and I participated in the lesser-known variant of Settlers of Catan called "Stack Your Pieces As High As Possible While Waiting for your Stepfather to Make His Move"

I win! 

We went to a beautiful restaurant

Where the dudes lit our dessert on fire!

I came back happy and tan. It was awesome.

And then the next weekend I drove to San Luis Obispo to sit literally at the feet of the amazing Abby Franquemont, who is a Master Chinchero Weaver and also a Bad Ass Spinner AND, like yours truly, brown on the inside.

And then this last weekend I flew to Phoenix, AZ for my friend Randy's wedding, of which I have no pictures because even though I packed very carefully for 4 days to make sure I had everything I needed to look stunning, I managed to leave my phone and my camera battery charger on the counter. My remembering skills are NOT SO GOOD at 6:30am, it would seem. However, rest assured that I did, indeed, look stunning and managed to be charming and witty for an entire weekend and also managed not to laugh in the face of a Certain Ex, whose current girlfriend is twenty-three years old. Poor child.

And in all this time, I have finished exactly ONE knitted project:

Ella Rae Lace Merino, 290 yds.

I have started and nearly finished several more, but then I look at my pitiful yardage for the year and think, "I could just finish this after January 1 and have a good head start to NEXT year's 12-Mile Quest.." So now there's a box in my room with several all-but-cast-off projects in it. I am nothing if not resourceful!

And then there's this waiting for me as a carrot for finishing a bright red something for a certain Sister of the Art:

Who knew carrots look so much like brain candy?!?

I'm so close. SO CLOSE.