resolutions – Enchilada Sunrise

A decade of blogging

I very nearly forgot altogether, but yesterday was my “blogoversary”. The tenth anniversary of starting this blog, in fact.

It doesn’t feel like ten years, but then there have been some years where I’ve barely blogged at all, or at least times when I’ve been mostly using Livejournal or similar platforms instead. As I think I’ve said in previous anniversary posts, this blog has gone through a few changes in terms of its back-end platform – Blogger, Movable Type, and now WordPress – over the last decade. I feel pretty settled now, though. And at least I’m managing to post more, if not regularly.

Perhaps with this new blogging year, I should make that a mini-resolution: to pick a day and blog regularly once a week. After all, if I can blog every day for a month, I can do once a week at the least. In fact, since it’s Friday today, why not have Friday as my must-post day. If I can’t think of anything else to say, at least I could do a weekly round up. Preferably it’ll kick start me (again) into posting more frequently than that. Right then, I’m going to go off and stop talking about posting, and actually make a start on posting something with Real Content. Good night.

P is for Projects

I had a sudden bout of startitis today (the urge to cast on new knitting projects) but I’ve managed to restrain myself! Why did I do that? Well, for the last… oh, good while, I’ve been resolved to finish the projects I currently have on the needles before I start anything new. I’ve got a lot of things that have been meandering along for a long time – I have started and completed other projects in the mean time, but I haven’t finished these others. So I’m making an effort to do that now.

The thing that’s helped me the most with doing that is that I decided to pick a “WIP of the Week” every Friday, and concentrate on that project for the next seven days. I’m not forbidding myself from knitting on my other WIPs if I feel like it, but I’ll be focussing on the one that I’ve picked and hopefully be doing the most work on that. I haven’t kept that up completely all the time, but it’s certainly helped before so I’m going to try it again.

When I first started it, it worked like a dream – I finished my first three picks very quickly that way. At the moment, I have two – the Menace jumper, which is a UFO (I count something as a UFO rather than a WIP if it’s been hibernating and not worked on for ages) and now only needs seaming, and the Clapotis scarf which is somewhat more portable. By the end of this week, I intend to have finished the straight portion of the scarf, and made a start on the jumper seaming. Although if I haven’t managed that, it doesn’t matter – I’m not aiming to finish the projects within each week, just to get as much work done on them as possible.

So, the current WIP(s) of the Week will be at the top of the “Currently” section of my sidebar. Below them are my Ravelry-powered progress bars for my In Progress and Hibernating projects. The hibernating ones are greyed out and italicised (and if you want to know how I got it to do that, drop me a line – it involved some code wrangling that I’d be happy to share with anyone interested). The links go to the Ravelry project pages, so I’m afraid if you’re not a member you won’t be able to get in unless I remember to set them as ‘open’. Or at least I think that’s how it works. Although if you’re not a member and are a knitting/crochet/spinning fan, I’d definitely recommend you go and sign up – it’s a fabulous site :-)

Anyway, I thought I’d do a round-up (with pictures) of my current lot of WIPs and UFOs. And project details for those I haven’t mentioned on here before.

Continue reading “P is for Projects”

A is for Ambition

I’ve decided that a good way to keep myself going with the daily posting is to do the meme / exercise that I’ve seen on some other blogs, and do a letter of the alphabet each day. Obviously that leaves four days, so I’ll do a week of alphabet then a day of either something random, or doubling up on a letter. I’ll decide that part when I get there!

So, A is for “Ambition”. Which can be broken down into both short and long term goals:

Maintaining the daily blogging through this month, and also doing IComLeavWe at the end of the month.
Possibly do 750words.com (depending on time).
Sort out the photo album on this thing!
New site design (also for here).
Finish at least one knitting project – try sewing up the Menace jumper, for example. And keep working on the Clapotis.
Make some blog posts updating my knitting progress – what I’ve been doing over the last few months as well as what I’m doing now, since I haven’t posted for so long.
Write up the patterns I’ve designed. Finally!

“Ambition” also works pretty well for the NaBloPoMo prompt for today – I may or may not do these every day, it depends what appeals to me. But the one for today is:

When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up?

I wanted to be a teacher. Boring, I know! Specifically, I think I wanted to be an English teacher, because I loved reading and writing. On slightly more mature reflection, I decided that the idea of dealing with a classroom full of teenagers was an appalling one, so I changed my mind to librarian. Needless to say, I’m in neither profession now, although I have done some one-to-one music tuition and enjoyed that.

Bloggy Resolutions

This is a bit of a strange time to be doing this, since I’m about to import the whole blog to a new system, and who knows what will happen… but I’ve decided to make those blog resolutions that I was thinking about back when I tried the BloPoMo thingy. Assuming all goes well (and right now, it looks like it should!), a NewNew Blog should be the perfect time to start a NewNew blogging habit to go with it. Especially since the new setup makes things like importing from my photo album, and crossposting to LJ, all the easier.
So, this is what I resolve. I will:

Re-start / resume Project 365, which faltered in about August last year… then picked up again for a bit, but ultimately didn’t make it the whole year. I’ve started taking the photos as of yesterday. Like I said above, the new blog (WP with the Coppermine Integration plugin) will make inserting photos from the gallery quicker and easier, so I should be able to keep up with the whole thing without a whole load of fiddly copy-pasting and so on.
Be more structured in my posting in general – start doing the Friday Five again, for example, so that I know that I have specific things to be posting about, rather than a big blank space to fill with randomness. Not that randomness is bad… I just want more of a mixture of, er, stuff.
Therefore, try to be posting 2 – 3 times a week:
1. A weekly Project 365 update.
2. The Friday Five, or some other meme or similar that makes me think a bit.
3. And most importantly, knitting / spinning / other stuff content. All the stuff I usually post, but more regularly, and with photos more often, and … things. Hopefully some things about the course I’m starting soon on Bipolar. We’ll see how it goes.

I think all that’s do-able and should be fun. I have to get the new website version up and running first, of course, but I pretty much have all the background stuff for that done now. It’s just a matter of importing the content from the old site version and making any edits that I want… and there are bound to be lots of those since I haven’t done any actual updates on this site in forever. The thing that will probably take the longest will be importing the several hundred entries from this blog – I’ve actually already done the old-old one (“So Far So Good”) and that went well enough. I’m trying to decide what to do about redirecting the old pages to the new ones… it’s going to be fiddly so I think I might not bother on the most part. This is hardly a big-name website, after all. My own internal links can be done gradually and I can set up some redirections for pages I know have outside links, like my Knitting Patterns category. If I find I get a lot of hits looking for anything in particular, I can sort it out then. I think that’s the most stress-free way of going about it.

Oh, hi, Happy New Year!

And…. oops! I completely gave in to the Dreaded Lurgy, and failed to keep up with my BloPoMo challenge. D’oh! I did make 22 entries (23 including this one) though, so that’s ¾ of it achieved at least. Yep, let’s look on the positive side of things! Also on the positive, I’m pretty much over said Dreaded Lurgy and can now speak (and breathe) again. Well, I think that’s a good thing ;-)

I didn’t do much for New Year – mainly I was huddling indoors keeping warm! But that’s fine, I didn’t have any big plans that I had to cancel through feeling grotty, so I was quite happy with watching the Hootenanny and drinking hot chocolate.

I haven’t done much knitting since Christmas, either. I’ve done a bit on the second sock for the fifth Pentathlon pair, but I didn’t get them finished (obviously) by the 31st December deadline so I’ve slacked off on those again. And I’ve cast on for E’s second mitten now that I’m no longer coughing all the time. But that’s pretty much it! I have had some post-knitting-gratification, however: I’ve found out that both the hat that I made for little H, and the fingerless mitts I made for my brother are getting lots of use and are very much appreciated and liked. Wheee :-D

Anyway. Since this is now the Twelfth Day of Christmas, even though I didn’t manage to finish the challenge, I now declare my BloPoMo officially over! I am going to make a new blogging resolution, though: to blog, um, more often. I think I should probably be more specific about that, but I shall have a think about what’s reasonable and likely for me to maintain. I could say three times a week, or I could pick specific days of the week with the option to swap if I had something specific to say. Not sure which would work best. Hmm. What to do, what to do?

Crimble Prep!

Hah, only the second day of my resolution, and I nearly forgot to post. Well done, me. And now of course I can’t think of anything to post about, even though I had lots of ideas for things to write about yesterday. Typical!

Maybe I’ll talk about crimble prep… of which I have done absolute none so far, other than writing that list of the people I’m going to get presents for. Therefore, I have Things To Do:

Write christmas card list (e-cards and tangible ones)
Buy cards and stamps (tomorrow).
Write and send out cards of both types.
Work out budget for presents (tomorrow when Mum comes over).
Go present shopping – both online (asap) and IRL (w/ Mum tomorrow, prob also later this week).
Put up tree and decorate.
Knit like there’s no tomorrow (I’m not doing many knitted presents this year, but there are a couple I want to get done).

I think that’s about it… or everything urgent, anyway. Obviously there will need to be present wrapping in there as well. Eventually. Probably on Christmas Eve….

At least this year, I do have a budget to spend on presents. Or a more comfortable one than last year – since Mum has been acting as a sort of overseer to make sure I don’t have any more mania-fueled spending sprees, my finances aren’t so strained. Hooray! In fact, what my budget for Christmas will be is something she’ll help me work out, and knowing that I have agreed amounts for spending really helps me keep to those limits. Yes, I could decide on my own how much to spend, but I’d be bound to go way over the top. If there’s someone else I have to account for that to, it keeps me from going too crazy. There you go, that’s your thrilling life-with-bipolar fact of the day. I can theoretically work out budgets and accounts and whatever with no problem, but practically speaking it all goes out the window as soon as I see something SHINY! And oh yes, that so counts pretty pretty sock yarn. Or any other kind of yarn. Or DVDs, or books, or…. ;-) So since I’m twice as bad with that when buying for others rather than myself, a Christmas budget agreed with Mum is definitely needed to keep me within reasonable limits.

And do you know, because of that I’m rather looking forward to doing the Christmas shopping. :-) It feels so much safer this way… kind of like rock climbing while knowing that you have a harness on and someone belaying you at the bottom. It used to be much more like falling off a very high cliff (possibly while drunk) – complete with the horrible dropping sensation in my stomach! Not that I’ve ever fallen off a cliff, but you know what I mean.

Anyway, I’m not sure why I got onto that, but maybe I’ll write some more about manic spending and so on another time. It’s one of the more common things that happens with bipolar. But now I’m tired and this post is long enough, so I think I’ll be off to bed. Thar be shopping to be done tomorrow, after all!

Still around!

Since I haven’t posted in a million years (or four months, which is the same thing in internet-time), I thought I’d mention that I am still here! Alive and kicking, and all that. Mostly accidentally kicking the cat, actually, but if he will sit under the computer desk, what does he expect? Aaaaanyway….

I think what I need to try and do is get back into the swing of regular posting. Even though it’s been years since I’ve actually been doing that. But I want to try it, so I’m going to do a sort of NaBloPoMo of my own… only starting today and running until 6th January. Which is the Twelfth Day of Christmas, and even though it’s a coincidence that it works out like that, it feels kind of appropriate. So even though I’m not doing a calendar month of posting, I will be posting for a month up to the end of the Christmas season proper. :-) A festive BloPoMo!

So, that’s my end-of-year resolution! Now, I have to go and write my list of people I’m buying presents for and sending cards to. Do you think I’m running a little late? Well, let’s hope not! Which reminds me…

If you’d like a Christmas / holiday / whateveryouwannacallit e-card, drop me a comment including your email address (which won’t be published on the site) and one will be winging its way to you soon! If you’re in the UK and my budget allows, I might email you for your snail mail address so I can send a ‘real’ card out… let me know if you’d be up for one of those too. :-)

Where was I?

Both figuratively / mentally and literally…. um…. yes. My train of everything is well and truly lost! Let’s try and get back on track, shall we? This is probably going to be a massively long post, I warn you now! There’s also going to be a fair bit about mental health stuff, so feel free to skim :-)

So, starting from when I vanished back in December… well, for the three weeks leading up to Christmas I was pretty much knitting constantly. So much so that I cramped up my shoulder and ended up with an ouch-y left index finger joint! But eek, I had to get the Christmas knitting done!!! Well, as I already mentioned, I didn’t quite succeed, but I did get Mum’s Fetchings done, and I had a scarf finished that I gave her as well. Also within that time, I went to visit C for the weekend, and having been manic not too long beforehand, I think I ‘overworked’ myself, because once I got home again, I when I wasn’t knitting, I was sleeping. Zzzz!

Then, this site was down from 17th – 26th-ish December because of a server crash. It took the hosting company a while to be able to recreate the accounts and then restore the files. The flat files were about 6 weeks old but the databases were all up to date, so I’ve been able to easily restore the things that were still missing (photos, mainly). So that’s all good. Of course, during that time I had a million posts I wanted to make, and now I don’t remember what they were about ;-)

After Christmas, I crashed like a …. crashed out thing for a good ten days. Everyone tends to, I think, but annoyingly I can’t do anything by halves, so I hit a depressive slump with it: didn’t get up or eat or anything really. I slept, or I read – I got through about 15 books, actually. But mostly I slept. Luckily, I’d arranged with Clara, Ally & co. for them to come over for New Year’s. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have done anything for that… and if I’d been up to phoning them to cancel, I probably would have. But as it happened, Clara rang me and just asked me what time they should turn up. I don’t think she knew I was down, but that really is the best way to deal with me when I’m like that. Don’t leave me room to get out of things! So I pulled myself together, tidied up, and sorted out some nibbles and the like. We had a good time – just a chilled out evening, chatting and playing with little M. :-) After that, I was still down for a few more days, but I started to pull up again at the weekend after C helped me with a plan to get me firing on all cylinders again. Hooray!

Since then, I’ve posted my resolutions, which I’m doing OK with in general, and I’ve started Project 365. Mentally, I’ve cycled into a more manic phase, but overall I’ve been mostly within ‘normal’ parameters. I’ve also done something that I’d been sort of putting off for some time – I’ve gone and registered with the drop-in centre down the road. I think I was resisting it because part of me felt that only people with a “real disability” needed to go to somewhere like that. Or perhaps with a more severe disability than I like to perceive myself having, I don’t know. Ah, denial! I thought I was over you, but no! Anyway, it’s a really nice place, and I can go there as often as I want or need, to use whatever facilities I want to. Mainly, I think it’ll be useful for me to have somewhere to pop in when I know that I’m starting to slide one way or another and need to just be around other people to ground myself, and also it’s good to know that the support and advice services are there if I need them. And I have to admit that it’s a huge plus that it’s literally a minute’s walk (or less) from my front door. They do food too, very reasonably, so if I can’t cook, I can eat there. And I got to chat with three other people with bipolar while I was there, and it’s just kind of nice to have that face to face contact with others in the same boat. So yes. I’m going to keep that up.

Hmm, I think that kind of covers it. I’ve been working away on my WIPs, but I’ll talk more about that in a different post (with progress pics, whee). Oh, and I seem to have my sleeping pattern back to normal, so it’s back to the gym and everything this week as well. I missed Knit & Natter the Saturday before last, but my friend M is coming over tomorrow, and I’m planning to go this coming weekend. Now all I have to do is stick to the plan, but also not overdo it!

It was. Only. A dream!

Sitting on the bus this afternoon, I suddenly remembered a dream I’d had last night. In which my skeins of sock yarn were just so irresistibly yummy that I just had to chew on them*. Nom nom nom! Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarn!!! This is the point where I should probably be saying “I think I’ve finally cracked”. Only, whoops, too late! ;-)

* They weren’t bad tasting, either. Not that I ate them. That would be a waste! Just stuffed them in my mouth and gently chomped down a couple of times. Erm. Hi there subconscious. Something you want to tell me?

ANYWAY! Hi, Happy New Year. Here I am! I’ve been pretty zonked since Christmas, and I was rushed off my feet before that (plus my webserver was down for over a week, grr), but I’ll elaborate on what I actually got up to in the other post that I’m writing. This is going to be a looking forwards post. Well, and a ‘currently’ one as well, I guess.

So, let’s have some resolutions for 2008. I have general ones, and knitting-related ones as well:

General resolutions:

Get back into a regular day-to-day routine and maintain my sleep hygiene regime
Remember to take my meds (I’ve been doing well with this for some time, but it never hurts to reinforce it!)
Related to #1, go to the gym / gym classes regularly and often.
Eat proper!
Get back to work, but take it slowly and don’t overdo it!
Keep a cap on my spending and improve my money situation overall.
Have a thorough clear-out of the flat and charity-shop or eBay anything I don’t want or need.
Be a more reliable and prompt correspondent! I’m pants at replying to emails and comments, and I really want to get on top of that. Feel free to help me out by prodding me if I should be mailing you and haven’t. I’m not ignoring you, I’m just a bit rubbish!

Several of which can really be summed up as “Look after myself”, but since detailed lists help me plan, that’s what we’ve got. :-)

Knitting Resolutions:

Two words: Yarn Diet. This is strongly related to #6 above, since I can’t now afford to buy any more yarn – woe! But I’m not exactly yarnless, so I’m not going to repine. I haven’t decided on my exact goal for this yet, but I want to join the Stashalong thingy. Piglottie has said she’s not going to buy any yarn in 2008 at all. I’d like to say the same, but maybe I’ll start with a 6 month commitment and then revise / renew it from there! I feel that I should leave myself some wiggle-room just in case, and there’s still sockclub. So. I’ll post more about it when I’ve figured out how I want to work it.
Knit from my stash. You know, since I’m not going to be buying anything new. But even if I was, I have a ginormous stash that needs some serious busting, and what’s more, it’s yarn I really want to knit with! I have plans!
Those two UFOs that have been needing sewing up for the last couple of years? FINISH THEM! Damnit. At least one, if not both, by the end of February.
Never have more than 8 WIPs on the needles. Preferably less, to leave room for ‘OMG must start that right now’ syndrome.
In the short term, finish all my current WIPs by the end of March (Hedaras, Damson Gloves, Ruby Scarf, Clapotis, Fireworks socks, Chevron Scarf, WFS, Spring Sprung scarf, and SAHWWJ Cardi) with a possible waiver on the cardi because I’m happy enough for that to be a relatively long-term no-rush project.
Do some more stash clearing / yarn selling. Which sort of counts as stash busting, but not exactly. Also advertise those knitting books and magazines.
Get out the knitting machine and make up some stuff to sell. Like HP scarves and so on. I’ve got the yarn, after all. Stashbusting! Yay!
Spend more time on my Ravelry groups, and keep up with my blogroll links. And comment more! Oh, on the podcasts I listen to, as well. Par-ti-ci-pate. *nod*

I’ve also been thinking about joining Project 365. Or maybe I’ll do the weekly variant that some people on Ravelry are doing. I’ll probably end up with a stack of photos of the cat. And yarn. No change there, then!

Okeydokey, this post is long enough. I’ll yatter about my current WIPs (with photos) more tomorrow or some time soon. Time for bed! :-)