Looking back over the past four months shows us a world of change. We managed to move from California to Scotland, and have had all manner of upheaval simply due to that. T’s work reviewing young adult and children’s books (the books pictured are for the Science-Fiction / Fantasy category of the Cybils Award) combined with her writing combined with my schoolwork and telecommuting project for a company back in California — well, we’ve been kept fairly busy.
In what spare time she has (and when she remembers that she has something other than loom knitting to work on), T’s been working on this ribbon scarf. Since it’s for her own use it’s been languishing in its project bag (thank you once again for the bags, Jackie). It will probably be finished up when we’ve had some vacation time to work on it, as it’s really a great travel project or church project, since it’s on circular needles & isn’t very large. The ribbon yarn doesn’t hold out much hope of warmth, though, which is another reason why this project is just a work in progress rather than a finished piece. Nothing says “Spring” like narrow, colorful ribbon.
More of the “in progress” category of our lives comes from the rearrangement of the furniture here in our flat. It’s such an odd space, this one multi-purpose living room / dining room / kitchen / office … but we think that we’ve finally gotten a handle on how it should be arranged, so as to get the use out of most of the space. (There’s still a great gaping emptiness in the kitchen area, but there’s probably nothing we can do about that. We could turn the dining room table in the other direction again … but we’ll wait on that for a bit, to see how this works out.) It’s just a matter of finally settling in, really, and having the time to do things like rearrange the furniture.
Not that we really have the time … but not having to slog to the University every day has given me an uninterrupted period of time to actually look at things here, and to consider where they should be. We’re still not completely unpacked – our mirrors & pictures are still in their box, wrapped and well padded – but we’ve decided that we’re not going to unpack all the way, here in this flat, because we’re going to leave the city within the next four or five months, no matter what happens. Whether or not I end up staying at Glasgow Uni, we’ll want to move: further out towards the west coast if we stay. While I will still be able to cycle in if I want to, we can spend half as much on rent, or can spend the same amount & have some space to garden, and maybe have some connection to our neighbors. Life here in this flat is just a bit isolated, and disconnected, ‘though the neighbors we have met are nice enough. Wherever we end up for my PhD will mean staying in place for several years, and wherever we live needs to be right.
As far as knitting projects are going for me, the piece I take with me to all classes & meetings & church is this same, poor, bamboo yarn scarf. I started it on the train from California to New York, way back in August, and have been knitting a few inches on it as I can. Most of the time that amounts to only a few hours per week, and some of that time I actually have to stop to concentrate on what’s being said, so it’s not gotten very far at all. It’s a shame, as the yarn is truly lovely – bamboo is very silky, surprisingly, and not rough at all. But this piece will be finished sometime next year, at the current rate of progress!
By contrast, I started this candy cane scarf on the loom sometime during Christmas holiday television watching, and it’s coming right along. It’s not so mind-numbing as other loom projects (we’re definitely learning they don’t have to be), and requires a fair bit of concentration, but it certainly goes quickly! It’s also turning out to be a really very thick double-knitted piece, and will be probably five feet long, if I’m guessing right. It’s quite stiff, probably because of the interchanging of the two colors. It’s also got an interesting little pocket kind of thing along the edge, which I suppose I could address by twining the two yarns at each end before starting back on that row … but I think that, since it’s already begun, and since I don’t want to go back to fix it, it’ll just have an opening on the side. Maybe I’ll run back over it & crochet it closed with a different color or something.
Also started fairly recently – probably around when we realized that the temperatures were hovering just around freezing for days at a time – is this scarf. I started it out on US size 6 (4.25mm) needles and then switched to US 10.5 (7mm) needles when I changed patterns. I’d gone far enough with the paired increase / decrease and determined that it was just taking too long, so I increased at the pattern change, to make it harder to tell that I’d changed needles. It’s going much faster now, and should give a nice warm scarf. I’m holding out for the candy cane scarf, though, for being the thickest and warmest, because this one will only be a single layer. Perhaps it’ll be a spring scarf.
Lastly for our works in progress … it’ll be the new year soon, so it’s time for us to make a concerted effort to get back into the mindset of eating properly. One of the largest adjustments for us in coming to Scotland has been the food. It’s not that we can’t get things, it’s that the things that we want to eat are simply not that common. Take tofu, for instance. In California, we’d simply pop by any grocery store & pick some up when we were running low. Here, picking it up from the corner store or the green grocer’s simply isn’t possible in our area – we must get it from either a specialty Asian market or must order it from a major supermarket. Another difference is that with our vegetable boxes in California we’d always have a good selection of green leafy veggies, even in the dead of winter, but here the boxes have defaulted to mostly root veggies … which invariably consist, dietarily, of not much in the way of fiber and plenty of starch. So, we’re lacking protein while making up for that, calorie-wise, with the addition of carbohydrate. When you figure in that we’ve also been baking for the holidays … well, you get the picture. So, the new year will find us thinking a bit more about what we’re eating, and focusing in on the addition of high-quality protein and green leafies.
As with everything, though, it’s a work in progress.
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The funny thing is that the diabetic food-guide pyramid says that we’re supposed to have 6 servings of “grain,” 9 servings of fruit & veg, and 6 servings of meat & milk. That would really put us at having a majority of protein as compared to carbohydrate, which … is kind of odd, really. Oh, well.
That’s an impressive stack of books!!