Not the most promising of starts

October 1st. I had all sorts of plans for this day. The Banshees and I were supposed to make a Halloween tree (half the fun is figuring out what it's supposed to look like. The other half is figuring out where in the house to put it.) This, of course, was before the horrendous awful terrible and inconvenient cold virus got me. I mostly orbited the house like an eccentric satellite and said things like, I really do need to get to that. or Man, what I would do if I could sleep for a week. Fortunately there was lots of ready-made food in the house for mate and offspring to feed themselves, because I surely wasn't getting much done.

Okay, I did get a partial crochet square done for MB's Christmas blanket. I was going to do more but I just couldn't find a place that was comfortable that didn't have the entire tribe of Banshees doing something that would either wake me up or get my attention in the thousand and one little ways they've managed to contrive.

A friend offered to get me some lucious sock yarn and I managed to hold on to some sort of iron will (or, considering my proclivities, perhaps nickle-plated will) long enough to choke out no, thank you so VERY much. It wasn't that I don't want it. I want it! I want to bring it home and wind it into little center-pull balls and knit grand and wonderful things with it. However, I reallllllly am trying to knit down the stash. I have some Lorna's Laces Flame from (pause to count on fingertips) seven years ago. If that lovely stuff can kick around my stash this long without being knit into the socks it so richly deserves to be, then I have way too much yarn at my disposal.

Hence, of course, Christmas blankets. Great stash busters and it helps tremendously that I have two of them to knit or crochet by December 25. Crochet is really helpful because it's a yarn pig and it goes so quickly for me. I have about a third to half of the the blanket done in less than a week. And if I hadn't gotten sick I most likely would have had more done today, not to mention killing of the kitchen monster once again. I get sick, this house falls apart. It doesn't have that far to fall, mind you, but I do like keeping it at that teetering brink. I even managed to teach someone how to knit this week -- she's got lots of sheer talent, so it was mostly here, let me show you...er, looks like you've already got it! So I gifted her one of my Red Heart skeins and told her to have lots of fun, and also to ignore her husband who seemed to think that she was going to get a sweater out of it. Jeez, some non-fiber types!