Mental Health Day

Kraig and I took a mental health day today. This is something that my mom let my brothers and me do when we were in school (mostly high school) when our workloads or extracurricular life got overwhelming and we just needed a day to catch up or unwind. Neither Kraig nor I had to go into work today, and since we've been running non-stop since the beginning of January (probably longer for Kraig), we went out for dinner last night, split a bottle of wine, and slept late today.

Then I sat down with the interwebs and taught myself how to purl. (It's a stitch used in knitting.) Actually, if you go to your closet and find a sweater, chances are that large parts of it are knit with a purl stitch. It's the one that looks like rows and rows of nested v's. I'm getting pretty obsessed with this knitting stuff. It's really nice to have a hobby where I can decide when and where I'm going to do it, and have something physical to show for a half-hour's work. It's also pretty mindless if you're working on easy stuff (which I am for the moment). I have a few projects in mind to do, and hopefully by xmas time, I'll be good enough to make people their gifts! Let me know if there's something you'd like and I'll try to figure it out by then :p

Holly is a big fan of my knitting. She likes to sit next to me and keep an eye on the working end of the yarn (the part that gets jerked around as I loop it around the knitting needles). I had a scrap piece of yarn that got turned into a cat toy earlier today. The only down-side for the cats is that my hands are busy while I'm knitting, so they don't actually get petted.

On a related cat note, I recently got a carpet remnant to put down on the floor in my office just to add a bit of softness, and it is already coated in cat hair. I'm going to have to vacuum in here twice a week just to keep it from looking completely disreputable. Le sigh.