My Brain on Post-Thesis Turn-in Day

Last night I turned in my final presentation PowerPoint and presentation outline for my Master's in Teaching. There are still some things to do - I need to finish my Teacher Preparedness Assessment #4, which is the write-up portion of the lesson I video recorded back in June, and I need to actually present my Action Research to the school panel. So I'm not done-done, but I'm done for a day or two and there are no more hard deadlines. Hurrah!

Today I've been tidying my house and thinking about the two wedding shawls I need to finish this fall. When my cousin Perfect Phillip announced his engagement to his adorable now-fiance last month, I decided immediately that the Rosebud Shawl I started last year would be my wedding gift to her; an added bonus to me as a fairly scattered knitter is that the shawl is somewhere around 30% finished right now. However, back at the end of December I went on a massive house-cleaning streak

And Put Everything Away.

The problem with this is that I am an extremely visual person, which is a nice way of saying that I'm pretty much an "out of sight, out of mind" type. So all of those carefully packed boxes under my bed? They're there to keep massive cat-hair bunnies from taking over my room. All those stacks of paper that I tucked away in boxes? As good as recycled. And all those half-finished knitting projects that used to live on my coffee table were tucked away as well - some of them several boxes away from their patterns.

Preach.

So, I spent the last week idly looking for both the Rosebud Shawl - tucked into one of the under-bed boxes - and then looking slightly more frantically for the marked-up pattern. It wasn't in the bag with the shawl where it should have been, it wasn't in the envelope with the original version, it wasn't in the stack of papers in the box in the closet (although there were approximately 50 other patterns tucked between school work and handouts). I dug through more boxes under the bed and discovered a plethora of knitting I'd forgotten, most of it with needles still in and some of it even with a recognizable goal.

I can think of at least 2 more projects that aren't pictured here, but I don't know where they are...

I dug through the decorative basket next to my couch that now holds my knitting-in-progress (instead of the coffee table). After finding a hojillion projects in various states of completion and therefore completely overwhelming myself with the extent of my knitting polygamy (shawls and sweaters and socks, oh my!), I pulled the Rosebud Shawl out of its fabric bag to see if there was any way I'd be able to figure out where I was. And there, tucked neatly into the bottom of the bag, was the pattern.

I'm going to pour a glass of wine and photograph the actually completed knitting I discovered along with the unfinished objects, then spend the rest of the week catching up on The Woman in White and either ripping out or finishing some of this pile.