Me at 1 a.m.:

Picture courtesy of an Italian website I can't understand enough even to cite properly, but I found it via a Google of insomnia images. Please just note that I didn't draw it and I'm not taking credit for it.

I am bouncing off the walls this weekend. I am looking forward to work on Tuesday, I need structure and normalcy. Left to my own devices I skitter around too much. My brain has to adjust to a world where I'm not on call 24/7 like an EMT in hell. I miss my husband, but I have been missing him for months now, since the brain mets took away the man I knew, so that's not really it - it's more the adjustment to NOT having his condition as the main source of stress in my life. I swear, I can actually FEEL my brain jumping around like a frantic rat in the middle of the night, trying to find something else to fret over. There really isn't anything to worry about right now, but I won't feel secure and settled until the insurance check is in hand, bills are paid, the refi of the house (long delayed) is in process, and I can figure out how much money I will have to live on/play on. Logically, I know I should be just fine, I have a perfectly decent job, but logic ain't what wakes you up in the middle of the night. I know it's mostly paranoia born of two years in hell, but I can't stop waiting for the next bad news to strike yet. It's going to take 30 days before I unwind; by then I'll have sorted out the finances and figured out where I stand. Then I'll stop freaking out and this blog will be much less Lifetime Channel.


On the knitting front, I used that Softball cotton to cast on a second Sitcom Chic - now I'm not quite sure if I should have used a size 7 needle. It looks fine at an 8, though I think I'm a tad above gauge - am I the only one whose gauge swatches are not always true of the actual garment? I just don't get that, but there you have it. I'm thinking that if I go down to a 7 I might lose a lot of the pebbly-ness of the texture, so I think I will carry on with the 8. I am making mine in a medium, so if it's an inch too big because of the gauge difference that will not be a terrible thing. I love that yarn so much I was tempted to search for more, and I found it on cones at CottonClouds. I also realized that I have 2 of Bonne Marie's designs on needles and two more in the wings, which puts her way ahead of the rest of the designer pack in my knitting world. I have more projects on line, waiting to be knitted, than I even want to contemplate. It makes it easy to go on a yarn fast - enough's enough here. Now that I am not going to be spending hours a day sitting in a hospital, nursing home, or here on the couch, my knitting time is going to be reduced. I'm planning to attend the Knitter's Review retreat in November, and by then I hope to have made a dent in the stash to the point where I can buy more yarn. I still want to make a shawl or two, but after swatching the stash choices, I concluded that I really need something drapey-er, which I do not own, and I need new bifocals even more urgently. I'm a year overdue for an eye exam, and boy do I know it. I can get by with off the rack reading glasses over my contacts for most things, but I want some nice new progressive bifocals in my latest prescription before I invest the time and effort in lace. You young things will find out what I mean soon enough. I didn't need reading glasses for real until the past year, and I'm now 45, but when you need 'em, you really need 'em, and there is no doing without.