Come Together

Today was the Manchester New Hampshire Making Strides Breast Cancer Walk.  Good news, I raise $390 dollars!  Good news, our team raised about $3,400 or so! Bad or indifferent news, I only walked about three miles. But I did it in a little under an hour, and my back is not completely messed up.  I'm having some minor aches on my sciatica side, which is why I decided to skip the five miles.  However, I think if I'd tried to do it four months ago without the gym visits, I'm not sure I'd have made it three miles without my back being completely wrecked.  So that's good news too I guess! But I still hate the gym.

So, onto our regularly scheduled news segments.  So far, I have six visits into the gym this month even though I hate it and I missed five potential workout days due to a cold.  I'm trying to get a lot of time in because I will be also missing four potential workout days since I'm going to Stitches East.  And I'm not working out during Stitches.  It will be all knitting all the time.

In knitting news, I have one more class to get ready for before I leave for Stitches East on Thursday night.  I've been working on it this weekend and I should finish up tonight.  I've also done the research necessary with my food allergies, so now I just have to get breakfast stuff, and emergency safe food if the student banquet doesn't have anything I can eat.  I've been working on the  Absinthe from Knitty.com and I've gained a little.  I've just started the cable bits so you can't see anything yet.

I've also started a Bird's Nest Smoke Ring in Jade Sapphire Cashmere/Silk 2 ply.  Seriously, this yarn is just luscious to work with.  I want to roll in it. It's just crazy soft.  It's a cable lace pattern which is interesting to work, so I've gained quite a bit in a short time.  It's funnel shaped, but it's done using progressive needle changes so that there's no increasing or math.  Cool.


In spinning news, I started spinning some camel fiber that I bought as a sample a hundred years ago.  I appear to be allergic to it but it's only about an ounce.  I'm spinning it at a ridiculous ratio of about 40:1 on my lendrum very, very fast flyer, so it's going to take a bit.  I'm considering finding my dust masks so I can just finish it up and give it away.

In writing news, because of Stitches and the homework for Stitches, I've been hell bent on finishing the writing quota left over from September (660 words) and October's goal (8,000 words).  On Friday night, I finished, with a 174 word credit towards November.  My writing group will be happy to hear that I don't intend to touch the thing again for at least a week and half.

So that's the news.  Stay tuned for further updates from the woman obsessed with her Purple Calendar of Doom.