Hey ya’ll sorry for the long blog silence – not going to really offer any excuse other than life just got away from me during the last few months.
I am hoping that maybe my new toy will help with blogging more frequently as I can now blog from anywhere with an available internet connection. After all these years of thinking that a laptop would be cool, but would be a waste of money since I do have to have a desktop for some of the programs that I use on a daily basis I broke down and bought a netbook. Now a netbook is definitely smaller than a laptop and typing on it will definitely take some getting used to, but especially with the deal I got on it I couldn’t pass it up. Part of the decision to buy was based on the week that I spent at my sister’s – she let me use her computer while I was there, but I didn’t feel comfortable spending a lot of time on it since it was her computer and the amount of catch up I had to do when I got back was horrible. Also I got a really nice Christmas bonus from my job and decided that I would buy myself a really nice present this year instead of spending the money on a lot of little things that would end up as more clutter. Can I just take a moment to say that I love my job and the company that I work for – I work in retail as a normal associate yet I still got a very decent bonus (everyone did who works for this company) and make a very decent wage while still being treated like a person – all of which is so rare in today’s society. I wish I could publicly state who I work for, but I just don’t feel comfortable with naming them so just know that there are still some decent employers out there in the retail industry. By the way here is a link to the netbook that I bought – I just got a better deal that what is listed there since I bought it on Thanksgiving Day – gotta love internet shopping.
I have been doing a lot of knitting, but on a lot of differnt things so no real progress photos to share, but hopefully there will be some in the near future. I have put most everything to the side to do some baby knitting. One of my friends was due to have a baby on February 17th, but she went into premature labor and they couldn’t stop it and she had the baby on October 30th. He is a strong little boy and hasn’t had any major setbacks and is fighting so hard. I had planned on doing some knitting for her, but since she lost her first child at 20 weeks she wanted me to wait to start knitting until she hit 30 weeks so I hadn’t started anything. So I have a baby blanket and 2 Baby Surprise Jackets on the needles and am currently doing trouble shooting on all of them. The one sweater needs to be ripped all the way back as I have realized that somehow I managed to miscount the first increase and have 3 extra stitches on one sleeve. The other sweater is actually back to where I could finish the knitting I believe – I just need to double check that I have the correct number of garter stitch rows before I continue with it. The baby blanket is the one that I am dreading working on since I have to try and fingure out where I am in the repeat I am and I have already tried starting back up with 3 different rows and had to tink them all back as each of the was the wrong row. There is a way that I could work on the blanket easily, but it would involve ripping back all the way to the start of this repeat and that is easily 15 rows, maybe more so I am holding that back as a last ditch solution. Besides those three items I have 2 or 3 pairs of socks on the needles and Christmas knitting (not counting all the other projects that have been put on the back burner until the gift knitting is done). Luckily the Christmas knitting doesn’t have to be done until the end of January as that is when my sister and her family are coming down so that we can all head to Disney World for a week. The gift knitting involves a pair of slippers (of my own design) for my father, a scarf for my brother-in-law, a shawl for my sister, and either a sweater or shawl for my mother (need to find out how much more weight she wants to lose before I decide as I already have to restart the sweater since she has lost too much to wear the original size that I cast on for). I would also like to get the shawl that I cast on for my friend (same one that had the baby) done as well – I put it down because it had me cast on almost 900 stitches and you knit those in a modified feather and fan pattern for the first 12 rows then you decrease down to half that amount (creating a ruffle) then after that you are decreasing 4 stitches every other row so once you get past the ruffle it should start to move a lot faster. I just got discouraged on row 5 or 6 of the ruffle because of how long it is taking to knit each row and sat it down for a while, but I would really like to get it done for her.
Well, I do have to work in the morning and I have been up since like 7 this morning so I am going to let ya’ll go so that I can get some sleep. I will try to post more regularly, but I make no promises.
