Jon hit the jackpot

So, you know how it always takes you a week or so to get readjusted after breaks and things? I know it takes me at least a week or two, as I'm a creature of habit, and the shift in schedules from one semester to the other always hits me kind of hard. I've finally fallen into the rhythm of this semester, but it's pretty vicious. This semester is shaping up to fairly light class-wise, but very, very heavy research-wise. I'm working on four projects in various stages of completion, so I usually have to do some combination of administrative work to get through red tape, data analysis in the inexplicably hot and stuffy computer lab, data collection (thankfully, mostly online), and meet with professors and/or undergraduate research assistants. And then do a bunch of reading.

Basically, I have two options to manage this workload, which is apparently a bit larger than the typical first year grad student gets stuck with.

1. Work for several hours every day of the week with no breaks. This has the distinct advantage of allowing me to go to bed at a decent hour every night, but renders any other activities (such as moderate exercise) virtually impossible.
   
2. Work ridiculously hard during the week and do no work at all on the weekends. This requires me to work until 2 or 3 am and get up by 9 at the latest every morning, which means that I'm a mess by Friday. But, it also means I get to sleep all weekend and recharge.

I tried Option 1 for a couple of weeks and crashed and burned. It sounds good in theory, but the constant working meant that I needed more and more downtime, which meant that I was going to bed later and later. The lack of sleep turned out to be a huge drain on me emotionally, as I tended to burst into tears whenever my cats ran away from me.

So, I switched to Option 2. Which worked really well for the last couple of weeks, even if it meant I was a mess on Fridays and spent the weekends catnapping all day instead of hanging out with people. But, now I'm sick. It's not a big deal, just a cold that should pass in a couple of days, but I wonder if taking Option 2 has made me especially susceptible to germs.

Anyway, the bright side of Option 2 is that when I'm not passed out on the couch over the weekend, I'm knitting like a fiend. And this weekend, Jon scored big time! First, witness the Resurrection of the Cosby Socks:
Remember them? I made them waaaaay back in October and then this happened:

Yep, Jon ripped the toe of one of them right on the second or so time he wore them. And I avoided repairing them for, oh, about three months. I'm not sure why....I'm not their biggest fan, to be sure, and I was sure it would be a hassle to pick up all the stitches and reknit the toe, and I was a bit miffed that he took such bad care of them. But, it's cold now, and I felt bad, so I fixed them up good as new.


His voluminous amounts of gratitude then caused the Return of Sick Kitten and Sweatpant Gray yarn:
I made him his hat! Friday I had him go through the Vogue Stitchionary 2: Cables to pick out a bigger, bolder motif that could stand up against the texture of the yarn. He picked the Horseshoe I pattern. I started it yesterday and finished it this morning! I'm quite pleased with the result, in spite of the vomit-colored stripes.
Yarn - 1 skein each of Rowan Harris DK tweed (100% wool, 123 yards) in lewis gray and thatch. Which I still say is a misleading name for that color.
Needles - 40" size 5 addi turbos. I have to say that one reason this iteration of the sick kitten hat went so much better than the last is that I used these needles. The yarn is kind of felted and grippy, which makes it a real pain to use anything other than super-slippery metal needles.
Pattern - My own! It follows below, in case I (or, for that matter, anyone else) want to use it again:

Jon's Horseshoe Cap

This hat is knit from the brim to crown, and is 10" wide and 9" long unstretched.

Notations:

• m1 = make 1 stitch by picking up and knitting/purling through bar between stitch just worked and next stitch
• horseshoe cable pattern
• rounds 1 & 2: k12, p4
• round 3: Work 6st right leaning cable, then immediately work 6st left leaning cable, p4
• rounds 4-8: k12, p4
• stripe pattern:
• rounds 1-6: work in pattern in MC (gray)
• rounds 7-8: work in pattern in CC (vomit)

Pattern:

• CO 84 st in CC, work in 1x1 ribbing for 1 inch or so
• next round: switch to MC, [k4, m1, k4, m1 knitwise, k2, p1, m1 purlwise, p1] repeat to end (105 sts)
• next round: [k12, p2, m1 purlwise, p1] repeat to end (112 st)
• work rounds 3-8 of Horseshoe cable pattern, maintaining stripe pattern
• work Horseshoe cable pattern 4 more times (5 times total)
• when work is 2" shorter than desires, begin crown decreases over next 15 rounds:
  o in MC [k1, k2tog, k9, p4] repeat to end (105 sts)
  o in MC [k8, ssk, k1, p4] repeat to end (98 sts)
  o in MC [cable 5 to the right (hold first 2 sts to back), cable 5 to the left (hold first 3 sts to front), p1, p2tog, p1] repeat to end (91 sts)
  o in MC [k2, k2tog, k6, p3] repeat to end (84 sts)
  o in MC [k4, ssk, k3, p3] repeat to end (77 sts)
  o in MC [k8, p2tog, p1] repeat to end (70 sts)
  o in CC [k2tog, k6, p2], repeat to end (63 sts)
  o in CC [k5, ssk, p2], repeat to end (56 sts)
  o in MC [k1, k2tog, k3, p2] repeat to end (49 sts)
  o in MC [k2, ssk, k1, p2] repeat to end (42 sts)
  o in MC [right leaning twist, left leaning twist, p2tog] repeat to end (35 sts)
  o in MC [k1, k2tog, k1, p1] repeat to end (28 sts)
  o in MC [k1, ssk, p1] repeat to end (21 sts)
  o in MC [k2tog, p1] repeat to end (14 sts)
  o in MC [ssk] repeat to end (7 sts)
• break yarn and draw tightly through last 7 sts
• weave in all ends, attach pom-pom if demanded to by your significant other

Here's a closeup of the cable motif and the crown decreases. I'm really pleased with the way the crown decreases turned out and took a picture of them before I added the pom-pom.

But that not all! I started Jon a pair of peekaboo mittens tonight as well:
It'll be fairly simple. All stockinette, all in the round, and I'll probably substitute an afterthought thumb for ease. I'm using the leftover skein of the alpaca tweed from my totally awesome first sweater ever, but I'm holding two strands together and knitting it on 7's to make it nice and thick (and fast).

Between the hat, socks, and mittens, Jon should be nice and toasty when he drives around all night delivering pizzas. I'm making all this stuff for him in large part because it's gotten soooo cold here. In my phlegmatic, fevered stats, I've spent the night watching the Grease: You're the One that I Want marathon, which has been interrupted three times with weather advisories talking about polar fronts and windchill temperatures hovering around -12 degrees. I guess I just wanted to make sure he didn't lose his ears to frostbite, because, let's face it: ear stumps are not sexy.

Oh, for the love of sweet Moroccan mint tea...

Ok, first I'm really sorry about the delay, but let me tell you, grad school is hard. Not like oh-man-I-wish-I-didn't-have-to-study-for-this-midterm hard, but dear-god-in-heaven-why-can't-I-ever-finish-working-before-2AM hard. And I'm not good at existing on less than nine hours of sleep. So, I've essentially been a zombie for the last week or so. Zombies have no brains. And you can't write a knitting blog without brains, ask anyone.

Now back to the point. Why does my boyfriend pick the least attractive yarn in the store every single time!? Case in point, the local yarn store was having an awesome sale, so I forced Jon to drive me there. As a reward for the chauffering and waiting patiently as I browsed with glee, I let him pick out some yarn for himself. So, he grabs a couple of skeins of Rowan Harris tweed and demands a hat. This is as far as I got with it:
Now, it's clear from his deranged, unfocused grinning that he adores this yarn, but look at it! Look at those terrible colors! Does it remind you of something?
Vomit perhaps? Rowan refers to the colors as 'lewis grey' and 'thatch'. I refer to them as 'hideous sweatpant gray' and 'sick kitten.'

But, there is good news! Have y'all heard about the psychological concept of flow? Now, I try not to delve in to psychology too much since this is a knitting blog, but bear with me. Flow experiences are times when you're doing something you really enjoy and time disappears. We've all had this happen, right? You get really immersed in something and BOOM! It's an hour later.

Well (shockingly enough), I've had flow experiences with knitting. See?
Pretty! I finished up the Bayerische socks a couple of days ago. And I totally flowed right through the second one. I was just knitting and reading the chart and knitting and reading the chart and knitting....until the wee hours of the morning. But they are totally worth it. Check out this closeup:
And this one!
Yarn - Louet Gems Pearl (100% wool, 185 yards) in citrus orange
Pattern - Eunny's Bayerische socks. So much fun to knit, in a weirdly masochistic way.
Needles - 29" size 1 Susan Bates quicksilver circular. The only substantial modification I made to the pattern was going up a needle size, as the pattern is written for a size 6 foot and mine hovers somewhere between an 8 and 9 (but, curiously, not an 8 1/2...feet are strange).

You wanna know what else I have flow experiences with?
Statistics. Seriously. In the last weeks, I've been working on a couple of different projects that are in the data analysis stage. So, I'll head to the computer lab after class and plan to just run a couple of tests, shouldn't take me more than twenty minutes or so.....and realize that an hour and a half has just flown by and I've done maybe a half dozen MANOVAs complete with pairwise contrasts. And it's fun. As if there wasn't enough mounting evidence of my inherent, overwhelming dorkiness out there already.

Back to knitting. I've also started the socks for Tamar, my Other.
They're the Monkey socks from the current issue of Knitty. Since the yarn she picked out is just shy of sportweight and she has biggish feet for a girl, I'm knitting them on size 3's. And as glorious as knitting the Bayerische socks was, I'm enjoying the easy-to-memorize lace pattern and quick progress of the bigger gauge. I'm going to a psychology conference this weekend in Memphis, so I'll have some prime airplane knitting time to knock these little babies out.

I'll leave you with one more thing:
Moroccan mint tea! As many of you know, I studied abroad in Estonia and Morocco as an undergraduate, which fostered a love of tea. I got my taste in black teas from Eastern Europe and mint tea from Morocco. While in North Africa, I drank the mint tea at every meal, several times a day. For me, at least, it was an acquired taste because it's prepared with a truly amazing amount of sugar. Seriously, there's no sense of too sweet with this stuff, just not sweet enough.

I bought the teapot and dried mint and green tea for Jon. Despite the fact that the unmarked package of dried vegetable matter gave me some trouble going through customs, he never used it (bad taste in yarn and tea, that one), and I fell out of the habit of drinking it.

I've started drinking it again, though. Dani, Tamar, and I went to a hookah bar that served it at New Year's, which made me remember how good it was, and then I had it again at a tea party I went to last weekend. Jon also went to said tea party, and it was like he'd died and gone to heaven.