and hello again!

Wow, I sort of suck at blogging recently. It’s been a bit of a hectic past few weeks. So, here, in bullet-point form, is what I’ve been up to:

• Finishing up the work for my last incomplete from last year (I’ve not heard back from the professor yet, though, so it’s entirely possible that I’m not actually finished!)
• Having a bunch of stressful meetings with doctors and advisors and having to decide whether I can keep being a full-time graduate student (we decided “yes”, at least for now)
• Watching all of the DNC on CSPAN, which was awesome
• Swimming, since it’s the only form of exercise my doctor will allow me to do now
• Hosting my in-laws for a visit over Labor Day weekend
• Starting fall semester, in which I am focusing on getting caught back up to my cohort, research-wise, and TA-ing a stats lab for the first time
• Coming down with a really nasty case of sinusitis and tonsilitis, for which I am on heavy-duty antibiotics that are totally destroying my guts
• Realizing that I read way too many blogs to possibly keep up with them
• Auditioning for, and making it into, the Symphony Orchestra at my university

Well, that catches me up to yesterday! Thursdays are the day where I can work from home until 7:30pm, when I go into campus to TA a lab until 9pm, so I’m taking advantage of that to write up a post. Anyway, I haven’t made a ton of progress on anything, knitting-wise. The socks I started on our trip to Ohio have moved to my office, where they are my designated “I need a break from thinking” project. I’ve not touched my husband’s sweater in a couple of weeks, which is no good if I’m planning to actually finish it by his birthday! I have, however, made a bit of progress on my Icarus shawl:

I’m halfway through Chart 2, or, as I’ve been calling it, “the fancy lace section”. The first part of the shawl is all just columns of eyelets, so it’s sort of exciting to reach the section where things change up a bit. The only problem is…well, I’m sure you’re probably all aware of this already, but the thing about triangular shawls is that the number of stitches in a row grows, and grows, and grows…and so you’re knitting along, feeling like you’re making great progress, and suddenly it starts taking 15 minutes to knit across a row, and it just gets frustrating. Well, I’m almost to that point. The excitement of changing charts will hopefully be enough to keep me going. That, and my desire to have a pretty green shawl.

I’ll close with one more picture of Icarus, a close-up (or at least, as close to a close-up as I can achieve with the camera I currently have) of the new lace section:

I’ll try not to neglect the blog so much in the future!