There Was a February

I started this blog post on February 5 --with the ever optimistic: 

Apparently when you have multiple back to back national do-not-look-away-from-the-screen events and also a new semester to launch, blogging or really much writing at all goes by the wayside. 

This week, I've been chatting with coworkers and friends who all are consistently wondering where February went. We know it happened. There was a LOT of snow -- here in Chicago we got two storms with 18 inches of snow each in something like 10 days. The freezing and power issues in Texas have been horrific to watch from afar.

And I haven't been knitting. I get up, I do as much work as I can throughout the day, I try at the end of the day to bash my email into submission again, and then I go to bed.  

There's knitting nearby -- I've been looking at the same honey cowl every day. It sits next to me on my desk and doesn't get worked on.  

There's a baby blanket sitting next to my seat on the couch in the living room. There's a sock in a bag that hasn't come out of my purse from when we went and picked up Korean food. It's just... not happening.  AudioGirl and I were trying to remember when last I consistently didn't knit for 2+ weeks. We're both pretty sure I still lived in New York then. 

It's not that I don't want to knit but I end up at the end of the day just staring blankly, working on a digital puzzle (real puzzle and two cats? Oh no...) But as I talk to my girlfriends -- texting again or maybe a phone call because none of us can handle yet another Zoom call -- its where we all are. Exhausted, trying to figure out how we do this for another day -- or another six months, and trying to hold each other up for just a little bit longer.  At nearly the one year mark, with vaccines slowly trickling out, none of us are quite sure what is next but we're very tired of what is now. 

So does it worry me that I'm not knitting? A bit. I have rather a large collection of yarn if the answer to "when do you knit" were to become "once in a while." And I'm optimistic that I'll get back to it. I wound up six skeins of yarn last night in anticipation of that.  The yarn wound in January is being abandoned because I'm going to knit a blue and heavily beaded Nim Teasdale lace shawl that will make me look like a sparkly dragon. 

But if things seem quiet, it's because the cat is sleeping on my knitting and I, well, I'm going to try and go to bed early.