Quiet Time needed, with knitting.

After a week’s absence, I finally picked up Mermaid again Thursday evening.  Unfortunately I did not do so during my normal Thursday Sanity Saving Session (knitting group) but in the short lived quiet at home.  Short-lived because DH came home early, always welcome of course, and conversation and later television encroached.  These are not necessarily bad things but they were not welcome last night, as I gradually kept reducing the volume on the TV until it was barely above a whisper and grew visibly paler and more strained each time I was forced to engage in conversation.

It seems I have been plagued by my annual (or is it semi-annual now) sinus infection, and my head feels like a pulsating bomb about to explode at any time.  Any motion or sound can make my head feel like it is about to implode.  Even the pressure of thought (does the brain swell when thinking?  Is is jut the electrical impulses generated by the rapid-firing of those neurons?) makes me feel like we have begun the final countdown.

Needless to say I did not drive to Hopewell, although the driving itself might not have bothered me had all the other drivers stayed off the road and the deer decided to stay deep in the woods.  I did not think this was a likely possibility.

Mermaid was a relatively easy knit at this point, simple, soothing, no pressure, no decisions, several hours of knitting on small needles before I reach the next area of shaping or decision making.

I did pick up the new Interweave Knits, which arrived yesterday, and looked briefly through its pages.  I didn’t have even the mental stamina for serious consideration of knits although I was particularly entranced with these two:

Eunny Jang’s Venezia is really lovely with a sophisticated choice of colors and lovely shaping.  Even the thought of knitting 8 1/2 stitches to the inch on size 0 needles (or smaller given my loose-woman reputation with the knitting needles) doesn’t turn me off.  I seem to be slowly working my way that direction.  But looking at the pattern and thinking about the potential for alternate colorways and the math involved in altering the shaping and patternmade my already explosive pound even more, to the point that I felt nuclear disaster may have been imminent and I had to stop.  I think this will not be something I knit right away.  I am still dreaming of quicker-to-knit projects for the short term at least.

Veronik Avery’s Enid Cardigan is also quite lovely and this might be a little higher on my list, primarily because it requires less math with the combination of alterations for length and dealing with the resulting affect of those alterations on pattern and design.  I do really like the wide neckline sliding toward the shoulders and think this is both classic and modern.  I have a yarn that I can envision in this sweater but have a sneaking suspicion it may be DK rather than the sport weight used here.  Still this may prove to be a simple enough conversion.  More research is needed.

But now I have been thinking too much this morning, even though my head is better.  There has been too much effort spent finalizing hotels and Thanksgiving travel plans (Kansas) as well as preparing and booking a trip to Arizona and Southern California in February, along with various other Friday morning distractions.  Time to find a quiet hole and knit.