Well, so much for the “post every day” portion of Holidailies..! But I’ve being moaning, whining, whimpering, sniffling, coughing, hacking, struggling-to-breathe with the worst cold that any human has ever been forced to endure. Seriously. I’m not being overly dramatic.

Okay, maybe a little. But, writing or being creative has been very low on my want-to-do list, and thus I’ve been saving my creativity for those markets that were, y’know, paying me. Sorry! I’ll do my best in the next few days to make it up to y’all. :-)

Anyway, I did manage to accomplish a fair amount of knitting. I’m definitely firmly in the “novice” category of knitter, though I’ve been around knitting most of my life. (My mother has been knitting for close to 70 years, and can knit ANYTHING.) However, it wasn’t until a couple of months ago that I decided to try it out as a hobby–the type of hobby that could be done when I couldn’t be writing (e.g. watching TV with the family, on car trips, that sort of thing.) And, I’ve become an instant addict. It’s exactly the kind of brain-refresh that I need after pounding away at the prose.

So, I started out with several minor little projects, then I moved on to stuff that required me to actually count and pay attention to rows and stitches and stuff. My latest project is an attempt to become comfortable with cabling and twists and other strange stuff like that.

Poncho in progress

It’s a bit hard to see the pattern, but it’s basically a k4 p4 ribbing, with baby cable on rows 4 and 8 and a real cable on row 12. (Sorry, still learning the pattern lingo. I hope that made sense to the real knitters among my readers..[g]) It’s going to be a poncho when it’s done. (I hope!) I probably should have done it on smaller needles, but, then again, I do live in south Louisiana, so I’ll probably have more use for something that isn’t super heavy.

I think that next I’ll try something that requires working on circular needles or something else that will most likely confuse the ever living shit out of me.

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In other news, Christmas was as successful as one could hope for. The husband and I gave each other modest gifts and saved the majority of the gifting for The Kid. We managed to not go nuts in that department either, yet she seemed quite satisfied with her haul. I tried to take her to see Princess and the Frog today (which she’s already seen, but was willing to see again since I have yet to see it) however, through a comedy of errors, we were late to the 1pm show, and when we returned later to get tickets for the 3:45 show we were dismayed to find that it (and damn near every other show there) was sold out. Sooo, we went to Best Buy, bought Lego Star Wars for The Kid’s DS, and went home. She played with it for about an hour, then fell asleep on the couch. Woke up an hour later whining that she was tired and hungry. I helped her with the latter issue, after which she fell asleep again in the recliner, where she still remains at this time. (I’m kinda afraid that if I try and put her to bed, I’ll wake her. I prefer to let sleeping five-year-olds lie.)

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In other other news, big congrats to Rachel Aaron and her husband on the birth of Nathan. You can read about her (extremely scary yet with happy ending!) experience with regards to that over at The Magic District.