It seems so strange to not be writing here. I feel like I hit this dry spell where nothing seemed worth writing about. I guess I can see why people go on hiatus. I've been doing this for six years; it's only natural to occasionally hit a wall, right? Doing Holidailies this past December was harder than I expected, only because I felt as if it was a struggle to get the words out. It's only in the last week that things seem to have shifted. I'm not sure what changed; just that they did, and I suppose I ought not to question it.

So. Life. I am taking part in the Knitting Olympics, because it is just the sort of crazy thing that appeals to me. Plus, I've wanted to make the thing I'm making ever since I saw the book, so this was as good an excuse as any. I'm actually making pretty good progress, considering I only started on Friday. I'm going to three knitting groups each month, and I am taking part in my third hand-knit sock exchange.

This knitting thing that has pretty much taken over my life, by the way, feels good. I've even written up my very first pattern - something that brings in my old nerd tendencies, since it relies heavily on a number of calculations, including the use of the Pythagorean Theorem. And I've got two more patterns - both of which are going to involve a fair bit of math, at least for me to map them out, brewing around in my head that I will eventually bring out in yarn, both of which I think could turn out really amazing, if I can just get through the next two weeks of knitting insanity.

In non-knitting news, life is going along as usual. After 8 months of leaving messages and trying to contact our gardener through phone (before the number was disconnected) and then through his staff, we finally gave up. I still feel a little guilty because he used to be really good and I've been using his services for a very long time, but there is only so far you can go when you are paying someone to do things that they are not doing. We found someone else, and I have had a number of 'wow' moments since the switch. They actually trim the shrubs we asked them to trim. They actually unearthed the stone toad and the gnome from the front yard (shut up, it's a family thing and it has to stay outside if only because we are the only ones of all of Richard's family who have the *guts* to stick the darn thing in the yard for all the world to see, and if we have a stone goose with interchangeable outfits for the seasons for my family, we can also have a silly little gnome for his). They trimmed the flowers in the raised flower bed in the back yard, just like they are supposed to be trimmed, even though I didn't ask them to and was starting to feel guilty that I couldn't even muster the enthusiasm to go out and trim the damn things myself (I really do hate yard work). Every week, when I see everything they have done and how nice our yard looks I am reminded of how bad things had gotten with the other gardener, and how we really did let things go far too long.

Richard picked up every book by Christopher Moore available in the library and we've been working our way through all of them. He also picked up a copy of the Da Vinci Code, since he's currently teaching a Sunday School class on it. I have had no desire to read it, even before the class, but his obvious distaste with the book made me even less willing to devote any time at all to the darn thing. However, the class is half over now and I still haven't read it, so I decided to make it my breakfast reading for the week - something I can pick up, plow through 50 or so pages in the 10 or 15 minutes of breakfast time each morning. And it is good that I am doing this only in short bursts because I think if I had to sit and read this non-stop my eyes would just roll right out of my head from the sheer badness of it all. The clichés, the useless, irrelevant, boring detail, the random 'facts' that are thrown in to bury the entire stupid story in a mountain of…well, lets just say if I'd really wanted to wade in such a huge pile of sh…uh…cat poop, I could just not scoop the litter boxes for a few days and get the same result. But I am determined to finish the damn book, even though I think it is possibly one of the worst accumulations of drivel ever published, just because I cannot let a book this stupid beat me.