Happy New Year!

Wow. I don't know where to start. I think I'll start with a comment from a concerned yet anonymous reader.

Hey Paige,

this is anonymous speaking. I like your blog and try to read it often. You haven't updated it in over a month. Did you die? Decide to stop knitting? Lose a finger in a tragic bobsledding accident? Finally figure out how far you can stick a knitting needle up your nose before it starts to tickle your brain? Get bitten by a sparkling werewolf? Srsly...wtf mate? What am I supposed to do if I don't know what you are knitting or what species of animal you are attempting to save?

Dear Anonymous,

I'm really sorry to have worried you with my lack of posting on knitting/life content. I'm still in that funky place between college and real life and haven't figured out when things like knitting, blogging, or training for my mini-marathon are going to happen. There just aren't enough hours in the day right now, yah know?

So no, I wasn't in a bobsledding accident (but I'm sure that I would be should I decide to start bobsledding so I think I will stick to safer activities for the time being) and I wasn't bitten by a werewolf, sparkling or not. I did however, manage to save an animal from the shelter.

This is Madeline Sophie Darling, the Christmas/Graduation cat. I adopted her on December 13th and she's been entertaining me and tearing up all of my knitting projects since then. She has a bit of a heart murmur and is getting over a nasty case of ringworm, but still finds time to be ornery and tear up all my roving. That being said, she's absolutely adorable and I love her to pieces.

As far as knitting goes: same old same old. It's been a while since I was so madly in love with a project that I couldn't put it down, except for the mittens with which I was smitten until I put the first one on today and realised I should have increased substancially after the ribbing...oh well. They have been frogged and will be addressed at a later date.

As usual, I decided to make a couple new year's knitting resolutions, and that I will share with you.

1. Until I'm down to 5 or fewer projects, finish/frog 4, start 1. For the most part this could be fairly easy, as many of the projects sitting around my studio, unfinished, really only need a few hours of work done before they are finished. I actually managed to finish 3 projects on Thursday, a baby blanket, a pair of socks, and a hat for my friend Ben (who has a larger than normal head and has a hard time finding hats that fit him). I decided to frog a hat that I had made for myself out of some splurge yarn, Mountain Colors River Twist, and then make mittens which obviously turned out disasterously wrong. So I dug out a sweater I started this summer on my trip home from Ireland. It's big, it's plain, it's black and it's out of some really rough Donegal tweed and it SUCKS to knit, but it will be the best jacket ever when it's done, and it will also be one less project on the needles.

2. Find a better system of needle management/organization. I have 4 current needle organization systems at the moment, all of which suck. I have at least 10 size 7 circs and I can't tell you where a single one is. This system will commence once project count is down and needles are freed up to be organized.

3. Knit more for charity. This can be anything from 8x8 squares to the Schyuler Blanket Project (comment or email me if you'd like to know more about this project) to Snuggles for animals in shelters to Project Linus blankets. Overall, be a nicer knitter.

4. Yarn diet. Not because I have a stash problem, but because I'd like to move out of my parents' house eventually. All of my other attempts to destash in attempts to control and minimize the stash have failed, and I think I was trying to yarn diet for the wrong reasons. Now that there are bills to pay and taxes to be done, I think the yarn shopping needs to go on hold for a while. Because that's what financially responsible adults do. Or so I hear.

Yeah...that's about it as far as knitting goes. I'm just in a strange place right now as my two seemingly separate lives (school and home) are merging. Part of me still thinks I have to head back to Purdue tomorrow night, even though that's just not true anymore. It's just super weird to be done with school and moving on, especially since Adam is just getting started with school (yes- he's still very much in the picture). Life is strange. But good. There are new challenges at every step, new thrills, new dissapointments, new everything. Now I've just got to figure out how to juggle it all without dropping everything.