Squares, sidewalk art and Book-off buy for a buddy

What little knitting has been happening here of late is in the Knit a Square, Make a Toy variety.

I got turned onto the whole idea from my guild whose members will, by the time of this blog post, have collectively made a bunch and delivered them to Polinsky Children's as the culmination of the year's focused altruism/charity give back effort.

I clarify that whole focused effort because I know that plenty of guild members as individuals and/or in concert in groups do lots and lots of charitable knitting but the guild major gig is for Polinsky.

My tie into this is my own current charity gig. My thinking is that even the beginning knitting ladies in waiting (aka the high-risk mommas to be) at Sharp Mary Birch can knit a bunch of squares and put them together to be something more than a bunch o squares.

The photo at top left is a set of squares that will, in the fullness of time, become a somewhat less fully fashioned plush knitted duck than Dylan's duck from Fiona McTague's Knitted Toys and recent blog postings.

The fullness of time is, of course, expanding. My get another set done and document how the first transforms into a duck has gone to shite as other stuff has jumped queue but it will happen.

I finished knitting this lot and snapped the snap back in late November and I'm sorry to say that I'm still a couple of beak bits short of a duck to show and a duck to show in process documented.

Also from late November and the break in muck out mode, is the snap of the urban stencil sidewalk art that I took on the 29th.

On the knitting front, I've had this "great" idea that I should do bias knit garter rectangles to connect the fishy Jen/Tony baby blanket panels and I've even staged all the bits into a project bag. Sadly, I've only been toting the bag about and not making any progress that remotely resembles knitting.

Cash flow worries notwithstanding, I managed a recent Book-Off detour. No great knitting titles jumped off the shelves but some fun critter crochet titles reminded me of my co-worker Jessica so I just had to dig down and pick up these two titles.

There were four contenders for my limited buying power but since budget was tight only these two truly stood out. Jess won't see either until she's back from a mixed work/vacation Oz trip but she knows that some crochet critter projects are awaiting her return.

What she doesn't know is just how amazingly cute the kat book is and how much pressure I'm going to put on her to crochet me a cat from that book, She's software engineer and a crocheter so I think she can handle it.

On Wednesday night I automatically closed up the computer room before crawling into bed. When I woke up it struck me that that was one of the adaptive behaviours I've fallen into to accommodate and protect both Kali and electronics from her unpredictable seizures and general shakier existence.

I'm sure plenty more of the "oh I don't have to do that" moments and the companion "now I don't need to worry about that" thoughts will continue to become clear and also give some strange mix of relief and guilt in the coming days and weeks.

The computer room now has the desk installed and the new and old servers paralleled so I can slowly but surely shift configs and control from old to new. I also broke down and retired some shelving units that are currently cached in the STASH room.

I also raided the STASH room for an underused table that may just be an interim solution for dividing the Linux and PC segments of the network into discrete but functional work groups. I'm sorry to say that I had to stack out and pack out into the living/staging room knitting related publications that the STASH room really had no room at the inn for.

I'd love to report that that pack out and stack out has resulted n a rework/reorg of bookcases but so far it is just a still stacked story. I think physical tired has merged with emotionally tired but I'm going to need to turn that around soon.