Legal Disclaimer

@ Linda: Welcome to Chez Ravelled! No, I am not a lawyer; I don’t even play one on television! My sister is a retired paralegal in remission. I took 1.5 paralegal classes at a community college 21 years ago, but Dad was dying, and the children’s father was in chiropractic school, and Firstborn was a newly-minted teenager, and I was about to become pregnant with LittleBit. If they had given me one of those tests where you tally up points for every stressful experience in the year then-past, I would have been Dead Mom Walking! I decided that an extra $10K a year over what an ordinary secretary would make [back then], was not enough money to put up with lawyers. Obviously, I knew no lawyers like the ones I work with now.

I am an admin [goo goo ga choo!]; technically half a step up from receptionist, but not quite cool enough to be a legal secretary, though two of my secretaries are handing over their lesser duties as fast as we can manage it. The office manager asked for a progress report yesterday; the secretary she asked has told her I can take anything she throws at me, and I told her more, please! I transcribe dictation for two attorneys and am about ready to take on a third dictator [grin] and file the electronic (scanned) mail for four lawyers, not just two.

I aim to be so good at what I do, and so indispensable where I am, that the office manager cannot in good conscience put me back on switchboard for longer than strictly necessary to bring the current receptionist up to speed. [She is smart, and she is good, and people like her, but I don’t think she will ever be quite as fast as I am blessed to be.] I think when the OM rotates me back to switchboard, there is going to be a hue and cry from three of the legal secretaries, who collectively serve four attorneys. And I am hoping there will be additional pressure from the managing attorney to keep me off switchboard.

I want the receptionist to prosper; she is my friend. And I love the freedom I now have to move about the office, after working switchboard for 9-plus years. I would like to see her in my current position, and me as a full-fledged legal secretary, and somebody young and ambitious and exquisitely patient at the switchboard.

OK, on to the knitting news you came for. I think if I were starting this sweater over, I would do a provisional cast-on, just below the underarm on the sleeves, and work the raglan decreases and curved fronts just as the pattern is written. And then I would unzip those sleeve stitches and knit down to the cuffs.

I like the shaping of the front, very much. Kate Gilbert is brilliant. The increases are cleverly staggered [as is this knitter, from time to time], so what you get is a lovely smooth arc and not a series of pie wedges.

I think it might be fun to design a Fair Isle front, with pie wedges. I have one of those wedge-shaped rulers for doing funky strip-pieced quilts, and it might be fun to figure out how often you would have to increase or decrease to approximate that same slope for each segment of a virtual circle. Alice Starmore duking it out with Ms. Ravelled, as it were.

Maybe I just need to eat some chocolate and go lie down until the insanity passes.

It’s Friday, and payday [I love it that they pay me to show up at the office and like what I do and relish my coworkers], and there is dinner with Brother Sushi tonight. I put four more rows on the Sunrise Circle Jacket after waking this morning, which means that I should be leaving now, but the tub is only filling, and my hair is yet unfoofed. I do believe I will be driving in.