I finished the knitting on kiddo’s modified, crew-necked, long-sleeved Professor Meow pullover last night at the library, where I was chilling for 1.5 hours while kiddo had fun at the T(w)een Comics Club meeting. The library is my happy place – I love spaces where I can just exist without needing to buy anything, and especially places that are full of books and information and learning and people who value those things like I do. And extra bonus: knitting at the library means I don’t have to try to keep the cats from attacking the yarn and/or cable needles, which has become a HUGE problem recently.
This handsome fella has already chewed through 2 different cable needles – they’re Chiaogoo ones, so the steel cable held up just fine, but the nylon wrapping is so chewed up and spiky now that they’re unusable, and just snag the yarn no matter what I do. I thankfully had backups of the relevant sizes, but ooof, that’s gonna get expensive if I end up having to replace more needles.
Anyhow, I finished the knitting with plenty of time to spare, so I started working on embroidering the face. The nose, mouth, and whiskers turned out just how I envisioned them – I did the nose in duplicate stitch, and the whiskers and mouth in backstitch.
I then attempted to add eyes with duplicate stitch, but I’m not very happy with my first attempt (too blocky), so I plan to rip it out and try something different.
I might use backstitch just to get a little more control over the round shaping; perhaps I can do concentric rings of backstitch and leave the center(ish) un-stitched for the pupil?
Outside of the cat sweater, things are going well in my life so far this year. I started another round of 100 days of practice (my 8th!) and I’m slowly-but-surely gaining more ability to coordinate both hands on piano and read bass clef, too. I’m really enjoying the music we’re playing at chamber orchestra this session, especially the Dvořák (I’ve always loved Dvořák!). Both bell choir and ukulele orchestra are active right now at church, and kiddo and I are in both groups – it makes me feel so happy and whole to be part of all of these intergenerational music communities!
My classes are also going well, especially my new “Writing about and with Artificial Intelligence” class. Seriously, I feel like I hit the jackpot in terms of my students – they’re so engaged and they ask such great questions and share such great insights and our discussions (both in person and online) are just on fire. I love it. Not gonna lie, preparing and teaching a new class, especially on a topic that changes as quickly as this one does, is a LOT of work, but seeing my students grapple with tough questions and guiding them towards thoughtful and critical approaches to AI feels like such a privilege to me.
What’s weird is that things in my life feel like they’re going so well, but things in the wider world are so obviously not. And I’m not used to that feeling, because the last time the world felt like SUCH a trashfire, I was also depressed and dealing with a lot of challenges in my life, so my mood matched the moment. The dissonance is so disorienting.
What’s also odd is that I am feeling this content in my life while also currently dealing with worse fatigue than I’ve experienced in a while. I’m just…exhausted all the time. And on some level, that’s hardly a surprise, I’ve been doing a lot this past year, and I’m not as young as I once was. But it’s an exhaustion that I haven’t really shaken since the experience with COVID 11 months ago. So things are going really well and yet I’m sitting here wondering whether I can sustain this, and in particular, wondering to what extent in-person academic conferences can be a part of my life moving forward, and how limiting it will be if they aren’t. I’ve already decided not to attend the 4C’s conference in person in Spokane in April (I’ll pre-record my piece for my panel’s presentation) due to a combination of concerns about fatigue and also timing (too close to the eclipse, and also end-of-semester-crush time). But there’s also the Applied Linguistics conference in Houston in March where I’m supposed to be part of a colloquium on AI as it relates to language learning and the writing classroom, and I’m really not sure whether I have that in me, especially if I also want to be able to travel up to Wisconsin to visit my family this summer, which we haven’t done since 2019. Long-distance travel has always taken a lot out of me, and it’s one thing to be exhausted and needing to rest if I’m surrounded by family, and a whole different thing to be that way alone in a city where I have to take taxis and manage hotel rooms and whatnot.
Anyway, I’ve got recommendation letters to finish writing and classes to finish prepping, so I’d best get off this here knitting blog and get back to working. Expect an update with a truly finished cat sweater soon, though!
whit::knits 