It's been an odd day

Today was a day that kindled equal amounts of dread and delight. I am grateful that some of the delight came in the midst of the dread, in the form of ridiculously endearing well-wishes from the person whose well-wishes mean the most.

PS Notice my reply in the bottom right hand corner. I is not so eloquent.

And just in case you were wondering, I did do good. And then I came home.*

Other delights of the day:

1) A Scr*bble board that I would like to suggest is the finest I’ve ever seen. There was only one instance of cheating, and really, if you could share an “i” with the arranger of the above message so he could spell “niece,” “dice,” and “id” at the same time and shamelessly defeat you at Scr*bble, wouldn’t you do it too?

2) Socks that made me feel immensely clever. After seeing Grumperina‘s post this summer about using leftover sock yarns I knew it would be easy and fun to do the same. So one evening in October I sorted sock yarns, and didn’t even need to refer to her directions the concept is so ridiculously simple. This is my first pair, of many. So easy! So fun! You should try it!

Yarns: Patons Kroy and Regia Silk (from Grandma socks) and Knitpicks Gloss (from my Thermal)

Toe ups, so I could just knit until I ran out of one yarn, then another. Then I quit.

3) Some real snow! In November! And then I put on this sweater I made last year and realized I never showed it to you guys, pardonez-moi! It’s Patons SWS, designed after I made that baby poncho sweater thing for my friend. As I was knitting that sweater I realized that the shape would be cool in a fitted sweater: add some waist shaping and a funnel neck and BOOM! a sweater with no babies required. What it does require is the Pythagorean theorem, or at least I convinced myself that it did in order to arrive at the proper amount of stitches to divide for body and sleeves. You can use the width of the stripes to get a closer look at my top-down construction, if you wish: notice how the sleeves suddenly switch to wide stripes after I divided. I love this sweater (even if neither of the s’s in SWS stands for soft) and its angled sleeves.

*Ok, the all-dread and partially delightful part, because one of my dearest friends and readers (Hello, Madame Librarian!) sent me an email just today asking about it. Today, friends, I took that small leap for me-kind and became a Ph.D. candidate. It only required a month of writing and a nerve-wracking oral defense, but I did it. I’ve been up and down about it all day, because of course you nearly always want to have done better than you actually did, but right now I think I’ve settled on being happy that I did it. About 3/4 of the credit goes to DH, who has picked up the slack around these parts for a long time. So I didn’t tell you all during the event, but preparing, executing, and panicking (I love that there is a “k” in that word. Makes it much more anxious) about this exam have been largely responsible for keeping me away from this warm and fuzzy blog world. Now I will have to blame my dissertation instead!