I have PROJECTS!

Since finishing Queen Susan, I've been drifting from small project to small project.  While the weather was warm, there was lots of biking and so the small projects took a few days to get done.  Now the weather is cold, and the small projects are taking me less time to do than to decide on.  Remember, I generally work from a stash of leftovers or hand-me-downs, so picking a project isn't as easy as walking into a store, pointing at something, and buying the necessary materials. 

It gets annoying, never knowing where one's next project is coming from.  On Saturday, I got to the whiney point.  (And settled on making Rikke out of some second-hand yarn which came from Wisconsin.  Hi, friend in Wisconsin!)  I also decided to make another pair of fine-gauge mittens.  And on Sunday, I dropped a note to another knitter to ask if a) she had any knitting that had my name on it, and b) had she seen any gorgeous motifs that would normally take up a whole afghan, which I could use for my mittens?  (Remember ... if it's 20" across in a worsted gauge, it's 5" across in my tiny gauge.  Or if it's 2" across in real life, it's less than a half-inch in my little world.  I could put a hornbook on one of my mittens. Maybe.)

Her reply to my e-mail started a deluge!  I am now happily settled with

1. A Christmas project for my son.  The last skein I needed to get started had been backordered since September.  It came in Monday.
2. Motifs for a mitten pattern (13.5 spi, not 20 ... but still fun!)
3. An article to write
4. A sweater to turn into multiple sizes and write a publishable pattern for (and knit a New and Improved version)
5. Ideas for my second pair of fine-gauge mittens.  

And, never one to let grass grow under my feet, I have written to some yarn companies to ask about samples for 4 and 5.

Ahhhh.  It's good to have knitting.

On the 'this could be a disaster' front, I'm skipping a swatch for #1.  Yes, it's Fair Isle and requires close gradation of yarn colors, and yes I did change yarn companies and every single color -- but there is simply NOT another gray that I can use to shade one spot more, and the other colors will work (I may even drop some, as they're so close I can't tell the 4 apart in the project).  I already know my gauge... we'll see if the project gets relegated to swatch status at some point.  I hope not!  

Now, if I can just get my Kindle to behave without too many problems.  Yesterday, the text-to-speech developed a personality quirk in which the use of the 'pause' button actually meant 'no more text-to-speech until you restart the Kindle.'  That got fixed by a hard reset, which also depopulates the entire thing.  It's doable.  Now the 'go to' application is not working, which means if I'm reading a book that is a compilation of 70 books which are each 300-400 pages long, and I'm in the 275th book, the only way to get to my location (which I wrote down - 324211) is to go One Page At A Time.  It's worth another phone call.  Because I have LOTS Of knitting that will require good books to listen to. 

And I want to know if Harry and Bertie ever found the Golden Sands of the Incas so Harry could get wealthy and marry the gorgeous Miss Prendergast, who had a crotchety guardian.