I have a love-hate relationship with Daylight Savings Time.

I love it when I'm used to it, but the transition is hell. I'm not a good sleeper at my best, and DST means My Best Hour of Sleep now arrives as the alarm clock is ringing. This is painful.

I spent the day in a mandatory seminar and it wasn't a bad seminar at all, except for the fact that it covered material Boss and I used to teach when we worked for the Big Homebuilder That Must Not Be Named back in the mid-90s. Holy Deja Vu, Batman - I started thinking what the presenter was going to say about thirty seconds before she said it. At one point she didn't say what I thought she'd say so I flipped through the Powerpoint handout - whew, she said it six slides later. In exactly the words I was thinking. Seriously.

I'm not saying this woman "stole" our material because I'm confident that this is a case of Veteran Homebuilding Minds Think Alike and speak the same jargon, just that it really was silly for me to sit through an all day seminar looking at Powerpoint slides that sometimes used the same damn graphics we'd put in the same slides years ago. It was uncanny, though I'm confident it was entirely coincidental. She was from a different part of the country and had great war stories, and I would love to have coffee with her and tell her some of mine, but it was a wasted day, if nostalgic, and I couldn't even sit there and knit.

It was amusing to think that the training we'd devised would have been good enough to go national, because this woman came up with the same stuff and delivers it nationally, but ultimately it's just frustrating. The BHTMNBN never truly appreciated what we did, and today they are probably paying this woman or someone like her big bucks to deliver the training we used to do as part of our job.

Another meeting tomorrow, and possibly one right after that. This is shaping up to be the week in which no work was done.

I'm working on the Seychelles shawl. It's an interesting pattern, nearly mindless, not really lace at all. It's a bit frustrating because it's so jumbly and loopy I can't tell if this is how it is "supposed to look," but I've decided that I like the way it looks. I actually think it will look its best with only modest blocking, because too much blocking will take away the texture it has in its unblocked state, and I like the texture. It's a scrunchy, messy stitch, pretty and casual. It bears only a passing resemblance to the "close up stitch pattern" on their page, which caused me to think I must be screwing it up, but even I couldn't screw up something this easy. The model on their page doesn't really look like that "close up" either. So I'm happy with it, particularly the mindless ease of it. I'm not much for counting stitches these days, counting rows can be challenging enough.