A Good Beginning

Today is the last day of my first grad class, and tomorrow is the last day of my first semester as a grad student! I'm on track to be done with all my projects and provided nothing goes horribly wrong in the next 30 hours I will have accomplished something that I have never even tried to do before: I will have turned in every single assignment for all of my classes for an entire semester. I may have mentioned this before, but my modus operandi for my entire school career has been to figure out the absolute minimum of busy work I could do and still get a decent grade while I bank on my excellent test-taking abilities. But I have had no desire to skip any of my assignments this time around, which might have some root in the fact that this grad program feels more like vocational training than anything else. I can easily see why I need to know how to write a lesson plan, understand multiple intelligences, and learn good classroom management skills; so I'm willing to actually do the work.

And speaking of work, I have some completed knitting!

Citron Shawl
Malabrigo Sock, "Lettuce," 440 yds.

I plowed right through this project. It was an easy knit, I am thoroughly chuffed with the results, I've gotten huge compliments on it, and all I've been able to think about is how much I'd like one in purple, one in black, and possibly one in rust. It's fairly rare that I come across a pattern I want to knit over and over again, and I'm not certain how long my Citron mania will last, but in the mean time I've been giving my lace and sock yarn stashes the hairy eyeball.

I haven't made any more progress on my Salina, but I'm okay with that. This might be a 2-year Sweater, or I might pick up steam on it again later. For the moment, I'm enjoying knitting stuff that a) doesn't have a specific size or b) I know how to make fit already (socks...).

So that's the New Year so far! And now to go diving into the stash. I thought it was organized when I put it all into the big plastic tubs, but it turns out that it was only organized in my HEAD and not in REALITY. There is an excel spreadsheet and a new stash bin numbering system in my future...