Forget the apple, hand me some candy

The weekend got away from me. It was fall yard cleanup weekend at Chez Rox, so no writing on Saturday and Sunday. This here's a post about Friday's results.

Here are the completed Bella mittens, a holiday gift for a Twilight-loving friend of mine. I had Nina pose with my snack of choice, which is not an apple. (Although, really, this is not my snack of choice. My snack of choice is chocolate, but I did not want to reveal to my kids where I had it hidden.)



These mittens will keep my friend Chris far warmer than Edward Cullen ever could.


Also accomplished: I exceeded Friday's1667 word goal. Actual word count: 1809.

The housework goals are never fully realized, even when I'm not doing NaNo, but I did manage to terrorize the dog with the giant sucking wand and horrifying wetness spreader. Laundry is still piled up in the laundry room. Oh, well.

I have found a better procrastination activity than housework, one which involves writing (although, sadly, does not count toward my NaNo word goal). I went through my Ask a Knitter column list of questions, and wrote a bunch of them on green post its (a glance across the room tells me there there are 11 green post its on the wall at the moment). So when I take a break from the novel, I work on answering one of those questions and try to figure out how much knitting and picture taking the answer is going to involve. What's sad is there are a ton of other questions in my Ravelry inbox, that haven't even made it to the post it stage yet. I fear that by the time I answer some of them, the knitters who asked the questions will have moved on to crochet or quilting out of disgust.

I just looked at how many words I wrote while procrastinating. More than I wrote for NaNo. It's a lot easier to write stuff that you know is true than it is to make up stuff you know isn't true.

Thursday I couldn't find my camera battery charger, which I felt sure must have been buried on the end table next to my chair, amongst the various PDFs of knitting patterns, mysterious notes I have written to myself that say things like "p2, X, p2, dec \" with an arrow pointing to a line drawing a 5-year-old could be proud of and many, many miniature candy wrappers. I wish I could say I sorted through all the papers and filed them appropriately, but really what I did was move them all to the card table I set up across the room as a sort of photo studio. (The card table has not improved my photos, but it has improved my ability to stack more papers.) What I found under the end table made my heart swell:



Little Bo Peep has found her sheep. My Lantern Moon Black Sheep measuring tape, that is. I thought I had left it on the plane in Milwaukee.

Meanwhile, the battery charger was located in my laptop case.

Today's writing goal: 2500 words (to help make up for none this weekend). Also, one question from my Ask a Knitter pile.

Today's knitting goal: I am this close to having my Manon cardigan complete. I sewed up the seams and put in the set-in sleeves this weekend. I need to do the decorative stitching to hide the jog in the ribs at the seams, and then wash it. I'm teaching tomorrow night and I would love to wear it to class. I also made the garter stitch strip for my third Quincy hat, and will try to at least do the graft some time today.

Also, there are still many leaves on the front lawn, even though we raked and bagged 35 30-gallon bags full of leaves, so that will be today's active procrastination activity. I have to do something to get myself off my butt. It's going numb.