About Me

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Ten years into widowhood, after one year of incredible happiness and nearly 14 years of single blessedness. Retired, and mostly enjoying it. Still knitting. [Zen]tangling.again after a brief hiatus.

Saturday, October 27, 2012

I love math! (80% of my kids are shuddering.)

When I got home from work last night, I looked at the amount of variegated yarn left; it began as 100g or 320 yards. The new skeins are 150g or 400 yards, just that much more plump than the preceding generation of Jitterbug. I fired up a spreadsheet while dinner cooked, and I played with numbers. When I had something that looked plausible -- how much I have used vs. what proportion would be necessary for the short rows that will soon be my pleasure to knit -- I weighed the dwindling ball. I needed to have used no more than 45%. I had used 55%.

So when I went to bed last night, I had decided there would be tinking, and I was pretty sure that I knew just how much would be necessary, which would turn Color Affection into more of a scarf than a shawlette, unless I chose to put a wider solid red border on it.

But after sleeping on it, I have decided to finish out this middle section with the variegated yarn; I think I will have just enough and maybe enough to start the third section as written. And then I will decide if I want to do the rest of the third section alternating the pale pink solid with the dark red solid, or just the dark red solid. It’s not a decision I need to make right away.

I’m home from our ward disaster preparedness activity. Which, thankfully, was not a disaster. The premise was that North Texas had had a 500-year ice storm, power was out, houses were damaged, etc. I woke up this morning, realized that I needed to be at church in an hour and a half because I had a part to play as a member of the Primary presidency (!), muttered a few childbirth words because we need to get a new inside fridge today, and there are pomegranates to slay, but I went and did my duty and even managed to have fun, especially when we were sitting in the gym, eating cold sandwiches and bags of potato chips and bottles of water, and a piece of fruit, and I got to talk with grown-ups.

(I spent my stint of service reading stories to small kids, using a flashlight, because I am not a crawl around on the floor kind of grandmother. I am a sit quietly in a chair and read books to you sort of grandma. I discovered some new favorite books that need to end up at the Bitties’ house, and rediscovered some old favorites from when my kids were little.)

More work is about to ensue. OlderTwin helped us haul off the spare boat trailer for scrap and has found us a new fridge which we can get on Monday, huzzah! So Trucker and Beloved and I are going to tackle the boxes in the dining room, and I am ridiculously hopeful that by the time Trucker leaves on Monday night, we will be able to use the dining room as a dining room, and on to the next project. Which, please Heaven, will be my closet?