1. A paper (on China Miéville and Neil Gaiman and alternate Londons). Actually, I finished it and sent it off on Monday, so that's one out of my hair.
2. The final, finicky updates to this thrice-dratted book. They're due mid-month, which gives me about a week to finish them. I'm pretty much there except for the last chapter, which is going to take more major work and a bunch of movie-watching. However, this means that the last month or so has entailed me arriving home after work, sitting down at the computer and editing like a fiend until I go to bed. Typing is not compatible with knitting.
3. A major SCA event, for which I am head cook, and at which is being performed a play I have been directing for the last month.
4. The annotation of another three chapters of a Masters thesis one of my students is about to submit.
5. Moving into my new office.
Most of these things come to a grand crescendo this weekend, after which I shall collapse, panting, a mere shell of my former self, and go and buy yarn. The thing that I possibly hate most about 9-5 work is that it precludes wandering around to all the cool yarn shops. I still haven't acquired the mohair boucle I have been promising myself for ever. Not this weekend, but possibly next.
However, yarn nirvana may be in sight. Years ago, when my family still lived in poor old Zimbabwe, my dad (who is an animal scientist by trade) was involved in a project doing commercial embryo transfer with pedigree angora goats. He ended up with a small herd of said goats (who are, I have to say, completely silly animals - their little brains are more sheep-like than goatlike, lacking most of the almost feline bloody-minded independence of your true goat. Yes, I like goats) and an interest in a related project in hand-dyed angora yarn. He phoned last night and intimated that he'd sent a small gift to assist my knitting endeavours, on account of how he just happens to have several hundred skeins of pure kid mohair yarn stashed away somewhere. In various colours. Well, well, well. I shall acquire said cadeau forthwith and share its joys with my fellow knitters.
Finally, two questions.
1. Is it, in fact, normal to get halfway through a project and decide that you hate it and would never wear it anyway? I am disenchanted with the Swiss Cheese scarf. Apart from its tendency to quantum variation and the fact that I've reached the end of the wool I acquired and it's only half the length it should be, I made it too wide, in the wrong colour and wrong weight. I think I need to try it from scratch on smaller needles with lighter wool. Is this, perchance, a normal phase of knitter development, or do I just lack gumption?
2. Every now and then I open my stash drawer and fondle the dark blue banana fibre. What could I possibly make with it? I'm inclining to a thin scarfy sort of thing on really large needles - if so, what sort of stitches?
