A Joyful Epiphany to you!

This is the end of the Christmas revels. Tomorrow we get back to work (all that work you’ve been doing since the 24th doesn’t really count). In order to avoid bad luck, all the greenery and other decorations must be removed today.

Unless you observe Carnival, in which case you started celebrating that last night with a Galette des Rois or local equivalent, and will keep it up till Mardi Gras.

I have one more song for you: “Behold That Star.” This is a very happy song, and lots of fun to sing in groups or by yourself. I was feeling moody yesterday, myself, because of having to deal with a little crisis, but am back to being happy again today. Our external circumstances affect our moods for such a short time that it doesn’t really make sense to allow them to affect us at all. We should be able to say, “I’m going to feel better tomorrow, so I might as well go ahead and feel better today. There is no benefit to being upset.”

That might make us seem like Vulcans or something, though. I guess we should be able to be moody sometimes.

In addition to taking down all the decorations and coping with the current crisis, I took a walk yesterday. This is for the sake of my New Year’s resolution to do 30 minutes of cardio every day 1 instead of 30 minutes three times a week, which was my average last year. I’ve been quite faithful so far.

Unfortunately, the dogs are not good on walks. I wouldn’t mind taking them all if they were. But Fiona, the big dog, practically pulls your arm out of the socket in her desire to run like the wind. Toby insists on stopping to mark every single thing you pass, so that you have to pull him along like a pull toy half the time.

I have not yet taken Spicer for a walk, so I don’t really know how she is at walking, but she is more of a lying around dog than a vigorously moving dog, so I have my doubts about her. She might not be up for the full 30 minutes.

1 In the picture above, you see the dogs taking part in the conversation about which one dog should get to go on a walk. I actually took a series of pictures of them, because they kept moving around, looking at each human in turn, trying to telepathically convey their feelings on the matter.

We could easily tell what they were saying. It was “Take me! Take me!”

In the event, I took Toby, and we quite enjoyed the springlike weather. He was too worn out to chase the ducks by the time we got to the pond, and I just did pull him along like a pull toy as he attempted to lift his leg on every raised area in the landscape, so it was fine for me. I think I will take them in rotation.

The best plan, of course, would be for each human to take one dog and for all of us to go out walking together.12 The sad fact is that no other humans in the house want to walk for 30 minutes. 10 is about their speed. Sigh.

The other thing that I did was to think about what I ought to knit next. I had planned to do a sweater from  Lacy Little Knits, and had bought the yarn and everything. The yarn turned out to be unsuitable for the pattern. I do not have another suitable yarn, and I am not even thinking about buying new yarn to do that pattern with. I have a full-blown stash now, something I never intended. I have always been the kind of knitter who decides on a project, buys the yarn, and makes it. But now I have a bunch of laceweight, all the worsted for Erin, and a bunch of Telemark in various colors.

erin 2Having had to give up the pattern, I then considered what else I could make with the yarn. I have started and frogged several different things. I will doubtless come back to the laceweight yarn in due course, but I will have to find just the right pattern first.

What’s the problem? you are thinking. Since I have a stash, I can just move on to the Telemark and make something nice from it.

Unfortunately, I have not only a stash, but also a WIP. The lovely Erin is still on the needles. How can I move on to another piece of colorwork with Erin unfinished and her fate undecided?

My musings on the problem of finishing Erin are posted on May 25, 2007, if you are wondering why I don’t just finish it. In short, it is a boxy sweater with large horizontal stripes, and I have realized — since starting it back when I didn’t think about things like that — that it will not be a becoming sweater for me, however lovely it may be in and of itself.doc's bag

Also, I had begun the Doctor’s Bag in Telemark some time back. The only color I have enough of to complete the Doctor’s Bag in is navy. It is clear from the small amount that I completed that the lovely texture stitch is completely lost in navy.

The pattern is also irritating to work. I set it aside till I had time to write it out in a more sensible way, but even as I write this, I am realizing that I would be disappointed in it if I finished it in navy. The Doctor’s Bag will have to join the Lacy Little Knits sweater on my list of things I intend docsbagto make someday.

So I was thinking about making a sweater with the Telemark. I was thinking in fact of doing Carpathian Black Roses from the Nordstrikke book. You can see its schematics in the book.

It does not have the fashion issues of Erin. It has its major patterning up near the wearer’s face, and has a bit of shape to it. A main color of navy with the colorwork in grays and rose shades could be very pretty.

However, I would then have two Epic projects on the needles at once, and no Zombie project. And both my Epic projects would be colorwork. This means that, when I got sick of doing colorwork, I would have no other, simpler project to provide respite from it. Nor even some cables or lace to turn to 1because a change is as good as a rest. And nothing simple enough to knit while I read, either, which is pretty essential.

Yes, I actually spent a whole lot of time thinking about this yesterday.

Now, I also have a couple of skeins of fingering weight yarn left over from Ivy, so I decided to try out the Carpathian Roses chart with a sock. Socks are mostly Zombie projects, if you make plain ones. They just have a couple of little flurries of fanciness, with a good amount of plain stuff in between.

Perhaps by the time I finish the pair, I will have made up my mind what to do with Erin, or the laceweight, or the Telemark.