Finally -- Knitting!!!!

It's going to be a bad week for sinuses.

Sunday, despite the recent rain, I had the blow nose see blood happy bunny morning.

Monday morning the athletic nose routine kicked in and I was just thrilled to hear that a Santa Ana is in the offing.

I'm sticking with my story that it isn't a cold, just sinus issues and that's not a fever, it's a flash back to hot flashes -- perception is important.

My nose may be a tad red but it isn't nearly as cute as the one on this "rein-SUV" I got a snap of on the weekend.

I've seen and/or taken pictures of others but this is the least busy (read distracting) image I've been able to catch of these elusive creatures in the wild.

Sinuses or head cold, I tagged out sick from work and spent the bulk of the day in the office/computer room bundled up with tissues at the ready. Since the office/computer room is currently the most organised/civilised bit of the apartment this makes sense.

The fact that it is the most organised/civilised bit of the apartment also speaks volumes about my priorities and so it goes.

On the computer side of the house, it was another day punctuated with lots of blind command line resets of eth1 on the retiring Linux lady which was so not fun.

Happy to find emacs on the new server, I got crazy creative and tried alternately to ssh or rlogin to the old Linux box -- so I could reply to emails.

Well, it took me a while to figure out that even though I gave the new box's IP permissions in the relevant files, I'm coming round to believe that there is a port issue that causes the new box to probe/connect on a port that the old box doesn't want to see activity.

End result is that the old box blocks the new and since the old box is the gateway, new box can't get out to the wider world. It can talk to the other boxes within the network but not to gateway and not to world beyond the gateway -- interesting and annoying and a little much for my struggling with sinus stuff head to process.

On the knitting side of the house -- joy, bliss -- the bundling up and keyboarding was just the stuff to get me to take the strips of fish afghan out of the bag and, where relevant, off or on the needles and back on target.

Cycling back to the original vision, I picked up 180 stitches along the right vertical side of one of the panels. I'm working what's essentially a closed increase 11 stitch repeat of feather & fan/old shale with a bit of welting in the mix.

I've reached the point where I really must decide if I'm going to go off and do a seaweed welt out of a different colour or not.

The best way I can see to make that work would be to pick up from the other side and do a bit of short rowing on the centre bit so I can have "spires" going either way thus making the whole blanket very non-directional but non-directional can also be visually confusing.

I'm dithering because, honestly, I'm commitment-phobic as all get out and it has been a while since I took stock/inventory of how much yarn I have left for this project. I really, really, really don't want to discover that I must find more insert yarn name here to finish it.

The more I stare at the fuzzy photo of the panels pinned in place, the less appeal welts of a different colour hold. With all the different colours and textures going on, I'm thinking that the welt will be enough for this side of the blanket.

Staying with the animal theme, the other picture of the stenciled giraffe is also from the weekend's walkabout.

Pictures of actual knit content and more sidewalk art soon.