Stress Management

When I retire, my day will go thusly: Get up at 9:00 a.m., make coffee. Mill around and listen to coffee perk, grab a cup and sit down to read email. First, delete all spam, then read six relevant emails I've received since yesterday. Laugh at jokes, move on to Bloglines, laugh some more, commiserate a little, and think how I should be knitting more. Then get up and make brunch, think about shopping or calling a friend, then sit and read for a bit. Mmmmm. By evening, be ready for witty conversation and a glass of wine, and some knitting. On Saturdays, I'll go for a walk in the morning, just as a nod at healthy living. Until then, I have to keep plugging along at my life, which is pretty much exactly opposite from my retirement scenario. I did, however, get some knitting done last night.

And here I will say that everyone has their own method for dealing with stress. I bet, if I sat and thought about how I dealt with the prospect of running out of yarn mid-project, I'd get a pretty good insight into my own stress management. I'm not doing that, though. I might not like it. But with the boot socks for the father-in-law, I had to worry about running out of the cream color, and when I was last at the yarn store, there was only one skein left. I ordered blue yarn there weeks ago, and it's still not in, so I didn't want to have to wait for more yarn. This, by the way, is Lamb's Pride wool, superwash, one grey and one cream. So about a third of the way through the second sock, I couldn't take it anymore, and I put the cream skein in a bag. Then I knitted and knitted and didn't let myself look into the bag to see what I had left. This way, if I ran out, at least I didn't have to experience the stress of watching myself run out. It could be a surprise, and whoops! I'm out. Rats. But no advance stress, see?

But actually, instead of killing stress, I was just living with the hum of nervousness that I'm going to run out, so I knit faster and faster. I didn't put that sock down until - voila! A second sock! And a bit of yarn to spare, thanks very much to the knitting gods. I believe I may even get a small hat out of the leftovers, if I combine the two. Huzzah!


I've also finished a bit of stealth knitting, which took all morning, but - nyah nyah - I'm caught up on my blog reading! Again Huzzah! I know it won't last, but I'm dancing in the kitchen. I finished reading my bloglines list! Yes!