I am in a snit...a snit fit if you will...over this damn little sweater. I have vowed that it's not going to be the death of me but it's looking more and more like that's what is going to happen. It will hang on my grave stone still on the needles mocking me. Either that or it will spontaneously combust from all the hate that's been knit into it. I will roast marshmallows over that fire. Damn it all to hell.
I think the only time I have been this flummoxed by a pattern was when I was knitting myself a sweater and was totally messed up by the 8th row. I called a dear friend and she talked me down. She had knit the same sweater and was kind enough to listen to my nonsensical ranting about stitch marker placement and then calmly told me what to do so I could continue and not have to toss 8 skeins of yarn in the trash. Seems there were a few mistakes in the pattern. She caught them but I just went nuts. So much for knitting calming my soul.
This time the story is different. I don't know anyone knitting this nasty little 18 month size sweater and Ravelry is not helping me at all. Oh, there are people who have knit this particular sweater but they just say that it was a challenge to knit. I don't call it a challenge...I call it a shit storm of epic proportions.
Add to this the condescending answer I got from the designer of this pattern when I emailed to ask a few questions. I was advised to use 'simple math' to figure it out. Well. I believe I am capable of simple math in that 2 plus 2 equals 4 but dammed if I can figure out how it applies to my problem. I am totally lost in a pattern with too many words and not enough numbers. What in the hell is the stitch count supposed to be? I can count my remaining stitches all I want but it still doesn't answer my original question. Where am I and what should I do next? Should I put a buttonhole where I'm not supposed to just so I can end my torment? Do I keep decreasing even though the pattern says to stop in one section but says to keep on decreasing in another? If I keep following the too many words of the pattern I will end up with only about 20 stitches around the neck and even I know that's not right. I feel like a fool. A rookie knitter who can't make sense of anything. I feel like being mean and nasty right back at the designer who told me to use simple math.
I'm in a big ass snit over this and I'm giving it one more day. One. I'm going to read the damn pattern again to see if, in amongst all the extra words, there is a tiny clue as to what I should do. If that doesn't work I'm going to go all rouge on the thing. Simple math, indeed.
The reason I haven't written a blog post in a while is because I am in my own personal dog days of summer. Oh, I know it isn't August yet but it's hotter than the hinges of hell this July and it has sapped my knitting mojo. That and a particularly icky little sweater I am knitting has made me want to go back to bed and cover up my head until October. I do not like the color light blue anymore and I am starting to detest charts. I am also sick of being sticky. I don't know how people who live in Mississippi do it. Live through the summer and knit, I mean. I am such a crabby pants, I have a bad attitude and might be a tad depressed. This is what February is like for most people but for me it's now. Instead of a light box I need an ice bag on my head.
My stinkin' little sweater project is not helping one bit. I have entered knitted items in both my county fair and state fair for a number of years now and this year I decided to change it up and knit something besides socks and a shawl. I'm pretty good at knitting shawls now after years of practice and patience and I normally love charts. A well written chart with large squares is a delight for me. I can't wait to color in the little boxes of different stitches. I use pink for K2tog and blue for SSK and a variety of different colors for other stitches. I can't help it, I'm nutty for charts and complicated patterns. I had a problem in the beginning differentiating between the opposing slash marks that denoted the K2tog and the SSK. Some form of knitting dyslexia I imagine, so I began color coding them and I enjoy that almost as much as I enjoy casting on for said shawl.
This year I decided to knit a little sweater. A kid sweater. I don't know what I was thinking. I have no little kids around that are the size of an 18 month old but I marched myself down to the yarn store and purchased the yarn anyway. A lovely shade of light blue and fabulous buttons to compliment. I bought the correct amount of yarn and I even knit a gauge swatch. I had paged through book after book and searched Ravelry for days until I thought I had found the perfect pattern. One that I could knit and would enjoy knitting because there was a chart and it was big enough to read without squinting. And....the best part was that it was done by one of my favorite designers. I have knit many of her patterns and have loved every last one of them. I was golden. I had big dreams of winning that purple sweepstakes ribbon with this sweet little sweater and I believe in one of the dreams I had a crown on my head. So much for dreams. This little thing is kicking my ass. I now only want to lay on the couch and sigh.
I can't for the life of me figure out this pattern. I don't know if I'm too hot or I have ceased to be able to comprehend but it's been a wrestling match from the 12th row on upward. I am supposed to decrease in the midst of the charts which means that I have to count stitches backwards on every right side row to see where I am supposed to start the pattern. Every damn right side row. It doesn't help that there are a zillion sizes of this sweater all on the same chart either. Oh, I might be exaggerating the number but it feels like a zillion. There's probably six sizes but throw those six sizes in with all the decreasing and you have a mess of epic proportion. I have to knit on this little bugger in total silence so that I can count without interruption while the heat pulsates around the outside of my house. Some days I think I am not going to let this little blue mess of wool conquer me and some days I want to throw it on the floor and let the cat have his way with it.
It's too late to rip it all out and start over with something new. I would never make it to the fair deadline. Hell. I cast on a sock to knit while this blasted baby sweater lies in a moist heap just so I could cleanse my palate but that's not even doing it for me. I'm teetering on the edge of not wanting to knit anything else ever again. It's serious. I either need a change in the weather, a vacation, or some time in therapy. The knitting doldrums have struck and they've struck hard. It makes me wonder if I should learn to spin.
I should be cleaning my living room but I'm not. I'm fixated on smells today. I might have been a bloodhound in a former life because smells, aromas and odors leave a big impression on me and if something smells good I go stand by it and sniff. Either that or I'm crazy. The jury is out on that.
While grocery shopping the other day I picked up a bag of dishwasher soap pods. They were on sale, a too good to pass up sale, because the company was introducing a new fragrance. The name of the new fragrance is New Zealand Spring. Hm-m-m-m. Just what does New Zealand smell like? I know what rain smells like and the head of a child after he has played out in the sunshine all day but I did not know what New Zealand smelled like. Turns out not so good. It smells like too much perfume on the old gal sitting in front of you in church.
This made me wonder why all these unnatural smells have to be added to anything. Why is the smell of plain old soap not good enough? I would rather have the dishwasher breathe out the aroma of Ivory soap than the stink of New Zealand when it's opened after the drying cycle. I would much rather have my clothes smell like they dried outside on the line than a fake summer breeze. I don't even know what a summer breeze smells like but I know it's not perfume. I want things to smell like they are supposed to. And really...who was in New Zealand in the spring, smelled the air and thought 'this would be a great smell for dishwasher soap'?
When I'm in a store that has a big inventory of candles I like to amuse myself by smelling them all and then seeing if the name of the candle matches in any way to the name it's been given. Yesterday I took a sniff of one called Sand and Sea. No, it did not smell like dead fish. Or hot sand. The lilac one smelled like lilacs but the rose candle nearly knocked me off my feet. All I could think of was gas station restroom. Gak. Midnight Thunderstorm was a joke. I expected to smell heat and wet and dark but all I smelled was feet.
I don't know why companies even bother to try to capture the fabulous smells of nature. Nobody has replicated the smell of fresh cut grass. Or a rain shower after a hot day. Or the fabulousness of sheets hung out on a clothes line. There are a few laundry detergents that claim to smell like sunshine but nothing smells like sunshine except sunshine. And the sun soaked smell of a child's head is the best smell in the world.
As I alluded to in my previous post...it's been hotter than the gates of hell here. Everytime I open the door I feel like I'm entering a blast furnace. I don't know if I even have eyebrows anymore. They might have been singed off while I was checking the mailbox. And speaking of the mail....my god, our poor mail carrier looks as though she's been put through a wringer and is a wrinkled, damp mess. Oh, I shouldn't complain about my sweaty hair and my stinky pits. I could be roofing a house or laying a ribbon of hot tar on a road. How these people do their jobs in weather like this is beyond me.
I'm of Scandinavian descent. I'm not supposed to be this hot. We like the snow and we enjoy our sweaters. This is merciless heat that we, as really fair and thick blooded people, do not enjoy. I believe this is why we immigrated here. We like the cold. We like to wrap up and go out for a walk in the snapping crisp air. We make snow angels. We enjoy snowball fights. We go sliding and cross country skiing. We have good boots. We have lots of scarves and tons of mittens. We love to knit and we don't like sweaty, sticky needles. We are not meant to be this hot.
Even with air conditioning, which is like a gift from heaven, I don't have enough energy to do much. I can't stand the drying cycle on the dishwasher because it makes the kitchen hot. I can't stand to dry my hair after I've washed the sweaty out of it because it makes me even hotter. I feel like I'm immersed in one giant hot flash that won't recede. I am a miserable complainer this time of year and I'm owning it.
I keep trying to think about what summer was like when I was a kid. We didn't have AC, of course, and I believe we only had one fan that sat in the living room. Nobody left a fan on at night and I remember not sleeping very well. I would flip my pillow over and over trying to find a cool spot. I recollect laying on the linoleum floor in front of the fan wearing only my underpants and eating grapes. My sister and I would put on our swim suits and play in the sprinkler but it was even better when the neighbor kids set up their big blowup pool at the end of the swing set slide. Nobody wanted to take that first slide because the metal surface was hot as an iron from sitting in the sun. We didn't figure out to let the hose run on the slide to cool it off first until we were almost too old to all be in the pool and playing on that swing set. Why the parents didn't figure it out I do not know but I imagine they had their own sweaty work to do inside and were just glad we were all outside and not adding to the heat in the house.
Today is better. It's only going to be 87 instead of 102 and there is promise of a lower humidity. I will be able to go outside without groaning and being moist all over in two seconds. I'm thankful for that and I'm going to try as hard as I can not to complain and be the crabby grandma because we have a birthday party picnic to go to followed by a parade and then a rodeo in the evening. I'm going to try real hard to remember that the horses are probably hotter than me and that the blast furnace door eventually closes.
Done and Done. The Master's monkey is off my back and is looking for a box the correct size so that it can be shipped off to it's home in Borneo... er.....Zanesville, Ohio.
The questions have been answered and the report has been written. The hat has been blocked. All page protectors have been neatened and straightened and everything is tidy. It was all done and then yesterday I took a last look to see if I had missed anything. Damn.
I saw so many typos at the last minute that it made me weak in the knees. How I read over and over them the day before is beyond me. I'm going to blame the stinkin' deadly heat wave we have been subjected to this past week. So stinkin' hot that a person, me, almost faints on the way from the front door to the car. So deadly that a bad case of BO strikes as soon as the steamy heat hits my body. So nasty that my hair is wet and sweat is running down my face as I wait for the AC to cool off the car. Stinkin', steamy, roarin' hot. No wonder I couldn't function and my eyes wouldn't work. And no wonder I didn't have a box yet or the will to drive it to the post office. Gasp. And no wonder again that the sock I am knitting is wrong and has to be viciously ripped out. I couldn't read the chart for the sweat dripping off my eyebrows.
I took a nap in my cool bedroom before I went to work editing the damn thing again and retyping pages. When I woke up I felt better and started in. Seriously...I had only alphabetized part of the list of references I had used. I had to retype and print out pages 6, 8, and 14 because I hadn't underlined something. My blocking report was missing a paragraph and there was a giant typo that spellcheck hadn't caught. One of the answers to one of the questions didn't make sense at all. Sigh. I worked on it for a good long time and finally got everything printed out and back where it belonged before I started to sweat again. I checked it over, wiped some sweat off my forehead and checked it again. And then again. It's done. DONE.
I just hope the stench of BO doesn't follow this monkey all the way to Ohio.
I love the flag, apple pie and the 4th of July. I love the fireworks and the orchestra playing the 1812 Overture. I love the parades with marching bands, horses, and lines of proud farmers on their hosed off tractors. I especially love when everybody stands up and takes off their hat at the start of the parade when the flag is carried past by a little line of veterans. It gives me the shivers and almost makes me cry a bit. But I hate that the country is in such political upheaval that I almost can't read the newspaper anymore or watch CNN without getting mad about something. I'm tired of it and it's hot outside.
I'm tired of everything, everything being a hot button issue and then talked about ad nauseam, back and forth, Democrat and Republican, until my ears feel like they are bleeding. I want to hear what the candidates feel on certain issues and what they will do but I'm not sure what I'm hearing is what they really feel or if it's just spun that way. I would like a little resolve to some of the issues and that seems to never happen. Oh, there is the new health care deal, which is excellent, but then there is Romney's big face telling us that the first thing he will do 'if elected' is to get rid of it. Back and forth, back and forth. I feel like we take one step forward and two steps back. The gay marriage, the immigration, the homeless.....I don't have all the answers but I wish someone did. It all gets talked about too much with no resolve. Let them marry, let them come, let them eat. Please.
I guess I should be happy today that my country was actually founded at all. I don't know how long things went back and forth before we became the United States of America and had a beautiful flag to watch flap in the breeze and make us tear up a little. There probably was someone like Rush Limbaugh or Sarah Palin to make everybody nuts but the good thing then was that they weren't on TV all the time flapping their gums and making very little sense. The bad thing was that there was no air conditioning and everyone was just hot wearing all those clothes. Maybe that's how things got resolved. It was too hot and things got done so that they could all go home and dunk their heads in the horse trough.
There is will be no TV on today. I'm not going to read the newpaper. I'm going to hose the sweat off and go enjoy the 4th of July with my family. I am going to salute the flag and enjoy the fireworks. Tomorrow is soon enough to get back to reality.
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