Still knitting on the green shawl. I might finish it this weekend, it depends on external factors.

(Everything in my life right now depends on external factors).

I'm going to talk a little bit about stash storage today. Since I've had an infestation of carpet beetles (and that's what they are; I've found the larvae hiding out in corners), I've been a lot more careful about storing things. Nothing in an open container that sits on the floor.

I've been buying a couple of those sterilite latch-top tubs - the broad shallow ones - every time I'm out at a store that sells them. I had originally, when I first started yarn-buying, using deep Rubbermaid tubs, but I really think the shallow tubs make more sense - you can pretty much see everything that's in them, even from the outside of the tub, and you don't have to disarrange stuff too much when you want to find something. I've got four of the tubs (they're perhaps 2 feet by 3 feet and maybe 8 inches deep) stacked up in my bedroom right now. My eventual plan is to either stack them in my sewing room or in my closet. (I also want to get the underbed storage boxes of winter clothes and extra t-shirts out from under the bed; I have a feeling that was a major carpet-beetle reservoir because it was harder for me to clean under there).

There's something kind of comforting to me about having stash arranged in tubs. It's kind of like, when the weather turns bad, walking into your kitchen and knowing you have enough food to last you, without having to go out to grocery-shop. And there's something nice about being able to more or less see anything. And it was kind of a pleasure to arrange things - to put all the yarn for that vest here, to put the yarn for this scarf there...

(When I was a child I used to regularly recruit my mom to help me move the furniture in my bedroom around. And when I used to get Easter baskets as a child, I actually had more fun ARRANGING the candy in the basket than I did EATING it). There's something soothing about knowing what you have.

Tonight, I'm going to force myself to clean the guest room and maybe put up the excess t-shirts in a set of new snap-top boxes I bought yesterday. And I might dust the venetian blinds (I wish someone would invent self-dusting blinds. I'm not anal obsessive diligent enough to take them down and wash them in a bucket of soapy water every month, as I've seen recommended. [Seriously? Most of those cleaning recommendations I've seen? You would have to be unemployed to have enough time to implement them all. Or wealthy enough to hire "help" to do them.])

Also, a request: If you know someone who does unpaid work - maybe it's someone serving on a university committee, say, or someone heading up a university committee, or someone doing volunteer work, or someone taking on extra duties because they need to be done - thank them. It's very frustrating and very burnout producing to be a committee chair that ONLY hears "I know you set a deadline but can I please weasel this request in at the last minute?" or "No! You can't use that room for your meeting no matter what the department chair told you!" or "Why did you organize them this way? That's not the way I'd do it. I can't understand them the way you organized them, you need to organize them differently next time." ("you need to" - one of my least favorite phrases, ever. Right up there with "Don't get mad, but...")

I don't even know if I'm going to have a quorum for this finking meeting and I've been begging people for the last week to let me know when they're free. I finally chose a time that several people said was okay but I still have not heard back from others.

And I am going to admit to something not very pretty about myself:

I am jealous. Jealous of people like Wendy at WendyKnits, and jealous of the Yarn Harlot, jealous of all of them. Because they're writing books and getting published and getting acclaim and adulation and hearing nice things from people. And here I am, photocopying d----d course-deletion requests and only hearing complaints from people or uninvited advice on how I do it. Or teaching, and never hearing anyone let me know, good or bad, if I'm having an impact. Or doing volunteer work and only hearing about how the other person would have done things differently from how I did them.

I want someone to love ME! I want someone to tell me that what *I* do is cool! Sometimes I think I should have gone into a different line of work - it's hard being someone who likes praise when you're in academia, because most of the time you only hear when you've screwed up, or when you haven't done things 100% exactly perfectly the way the other person would. (I know, I know, "Write a book yourself." But I hardly even have time to PEE these days.)