Not approved for travel

This week has been very quiet. Branden is in Brazil for work, so I'm puttering around the house by myself and ignoring the glares from our resident felines, who appear to feel that the way I mix their food is inferior to Branden's technique. Really, they don't want me to mix their food at all. They want brand new food every time, even when they don't finish what's in their bowl. It's apparently tantamount to kitty abuse to mix in wet food from the last meal. Somehow, I don't think that food a couple of hours old will kill them, though they appear to think otherwise. They'll be happy when Branden returns on Saturday and rescues them from my disciplinarian self. (Actually, he does the exact same thing, but they're used to getting food from him, so I think I'm held to a higher standard or something...)

I thought that I'd get a lot of crafty things done this week, with all this extra time to myself. I did finish the quilt (which is good, because it's being given away in a little over a week), but I got that done on Saturday. I haven't done much since then. I've been working on the sweater a little bit, but my hands simply won't allow me to knit much this week.

I think it's because I've been writing this week, which means sitting at the keyboard all day. Between typing at work and knitting at home, my hands have started twinging at the slightest provocation, and sometimes without it. So, not much knitting, which is making me crazy, given all of the free time I have on my hands.

I did a little bit of spinning, and a little bit of carding on the seemingly infinite amount of alpaca fleece I have to card, but haven't really gotten into it. I have a book to read, but the other part of sitting at the computer all day is that my eyes are tired by the end of it, since my glasses aren't quite right anymore. So, not too much reading, either.

At first, all of this not being able to do anything was making me crazy. Crazy, crazy, crazy. I am not the sort to sit still, and when I am sitting still, I want my hands to be busy, at least. But, I have caught up on listening to podcasts, and I have been getting to bed early most nights, which has been nice. And, of course, with the whole writing a thesis thing there are lots of things to keep my mind occupied. And, I suppose, enforced breaks are sometimes important. And really, it hasn't been all that bad.

Of course, I just realized this evening what I should have been doing all week. We're leaving on Monday for a week in Pennsylvania. A few days in Philly, and then a couple of days at the wedding. This, of course, means plane flights and travel knitting, and I have absolutely nothing planned to bring.

I know, it probably makes no sense at all to plan to carry a bunch of knitting around with me when I haven't really been able to spend much time knitting lately, but it would just be wrong to travel with no knitting. Air travel is not approved without pointy sticks. Not that I need to explain that to you.

So, between now and Saturday when Branden gets home, I must decide on some projects to bring. I'll bring the sweater, because it's not that big and it's mindless. I'll probably bring the bamboo socks I haven't touched in a week, provided I can pick a stitch pattern. The real reason I haven't even looked at them in a week is that I am now past the toe and need to decide on a stitch pattern. I'm thinking something leafy, but I'll need to spend some time consulting with Walker to be sure.

And that leaves just one more project. Three projects is the right number for me; two can get a little tedious sometimes, and something like socks might run out. Something small, preferably easy, and something that doesn't require too much planning. Hmmm.

I've been so sunk in Alpaca Oblivion that I haven't really thought about other projects lately. It's been really nice to just know that I need to knit. A lot. In circles. And then switch colors, and knit some more. I'm kind of wondering when the creative designer-ish side of my brain will come back and be impatient about mindless knitting, but so far there isn't much sign. Which is great, really, because there's a lot of mindless knitting in this sweater. And really, the nice thing about knitting is that I don't really need to feel designer-ish if I don't want to. There's a project for every mood. Now I just need to go find one that fits...