Thoughts on sanity...and an FO

I've hinted a couple times recently that I've been struggling since returning from the last Canada caribou trip. I've been dealing with quite a bit in both the professional and personal arena. One result of some of these things has been a general disillusionment of my profession which turned into complete lack of motivation to want to work on anything despite many deadlines staring me in the face...and me being pretty much a mental train wreck the past few weeks. In addition, I was stress eating and I just couldn't come up with the energy to exercise so physically felt just as poorly as I did emotionally. All this culminated in a pretty severe meltdown about a week and half ago that was tipped off by an emotional confrontation with my adviser. After some alcohol was consumed to calm the nerves a bit, I talked to J about taking a couple days off away from here. We had a meeting in Portland mid-week and so decided to drive another couple hours, find a place on the coast, and just go and completely relax. Catch up on sleep, knit and read, walk the beach, drink some wine, and eat some good food...anything that just helped both of us relax, regain some focus, and organize our thoughts again.

I can't say that everything is better and that life will return to normal after a couple days off. But I can say that I feel a bit better and somewhat ready to face what's on my desk and in my inbox. I realized that I have to stop focusing on all those negative things that I simply can't control. Instead I just need to focus all my energies on my own work, my own research (which I love) and making it as good as I can. Simply sentence to write--difficult for me to accomplish because I tend to let everything get to me. But I've got to figure out how to do it because frankly, living a life with these constant high levels of stress and emotion is not a healthy way to live. Taking those days off and really understanding what the last 4 weeks has done to me physically and mentally really was needed.

Okay, how about something a little more upbeat? First, I brought my film camera out of retirement and had a blast burning a couple roles of film at the coast. Once that's developed, I'll share some more coast pictures (if any turned out!). Second, before I left, I did manage to finally make Marc a finished object.
I'll let you head to Ravelry for the specs on this if interested, but just some notes about this knit for me. I started this sweater almost 2 years ago. I started it more for the process and the learning experience than for the desire to actually knit this particular sweater. The yarn choice I made went with this line of reasoning--simply affordable. I just wanted to start a sweater...one that wasn't expensive, wasn't complicated, but would teach me the basics of sweater knitting. I actually knit everything but the sleeves fairly quickly and then stalled. Not because of the sleeves, but because 1) in the meantime I worked on some projects that gave me enough confidence to start other, more complicated patterns that I liked more and 2) I could see that there were some problems in the construction and in my size choice and gauge. Enthusiasm went out of the project.

But finally I decided that I needed to either make the decision to finish it or rip it out and move on. So I finished it up. A friend in town helped me work through the shoulder seams and I finished up the rest of the seaming last weekend. I'm pleased with it in the sense that it served it's purpose. It taught me some do's and do not's about sweater construction, and about sizing and gauge and it was part of the confidence building process to move to more complicated, stylish garments.

The only modification I made was that the sweater is supposed to be cropped. Now I did knit it as if it would be cropped, but in the end, my body image issues resulted in knitting at least one size too big if not two. Which in turn made my version too wide for that to look even remotely decent. While I could have ripped the whole thing out and knit the correct size, I knew I wouldn't ever put it back on the needles again. So instead I blocked the crap out of it lengthwise to bring the width in and add length overall. I also blocked the sleeves to be longer than wrist-length because I was turning the whole thing into what it really wanted to be...an oversized, wear around the house all day comfy sweater.

In the end, I do like the sweater. It's not perfect but I really like the colors and it's comfortable and warm. And honestly, it is sort of my style. :)

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Now playing: No Time to Sleep by Tina Dico