I think I need to start a new knitting project of some kind.

I find myself being tempted by things on the "store" websites - I would enjoy making one of those felted hedgehogs. And I LOVE the fiddlehead lace scarf that Morehouse is pushing selling. And I'm looking longingly at variegated sockyarns. But I'm pretty determined to keep working on stash. I know I've got a Morehouse scarf kit out of one of their Monet yarns in my stash - I should probably pull that out and start it.

I guess I should do a "WIP rundown" partly as a way of convincing myself I really don't need a new project:

there's the Samus sweater, but heavy wool cardigan just feels unappealing to me to work on now.

there's the Hiawatha shawl, which is stranded in the Doldrums of Too Many Repeats of a Pattern I Know Too Well By Now.

There's the Jaywalker socks.
And the Embossed Leaves socks.
And the Owl socks. And all of those are brown like the dead leaves I'm still raking out of my gardens. And brown like the "waterbugs*" I keep catching and killing as they start their forays towards my nice clean kitchen.

There's the red art-mohair stole, but again - now that it's got warm and sticky (even though they're claiming it's going to get cooler tonight, they also claimed we were going to get rain today and we didn't), it's less appealing to work on.

And there's Ginger, which of those various things is the most appealing to work on.

But still - I want something new. I want the soothing quality of a new color, a new feel of yarn through my fingers. I'm a little frayed this week - it's nearly the end of the semester, everyone in the department (students and faculty) are sort of rubbing against each other like bad pennies, everyone's idiosyncracies are getting on my nerves. I have a Major Youth Event I am responsible for Friday night and if things don't go 100% perfect there will be mass disappointment and the year will end on a sour note...and it's evaluation time. I don't like being evaluated, as I've said before, because I'm very bad at the "take what you can use and discard the rest" - the rude or asinine or pointless or unhelpful comments kind of stick themselves to me and drag my psyche down, and I walk around carrying the burden of my fear of my own suckitude (which waxes and wanes but I never quite get rid of. Some days it's very light but others - like evaluation days - I remember all my past failures and it becomes monumentally heavy).

So what I need is a little distraction. And a sense of new beginnings. And a new project can do that for you. I think also I'm just feeling the general malaise of too much, too long - everything has become familiar, and thus, contemptible.

(*yeah, yeah, they're actually cockroaches. The big damn-ugly American cockroach kind. They're very common outside and they seem to blunder into my house periodically - and they leave behind their nasty little droppings, which look like miniature mouse turds. [seriously, the first time I saw one, I freaked and thought I had mice and started setting traps everywhere.] It's another source of my bad-housekeeping angst: surely people with perfectly clean houses, even old drafty houses, never get "waterbugs"? But I don't know - it's not like there are eighty bazillion of them fleeing from the light - I only ever catch one at a time, and usually it's near the pipe chase or some other not-totally-sealed-off-from-outdoors area. [and now my neurosis about cleaning is in overdrive: I'm thinking, "surely y'all are going to read this and think I'm totally slovenly" But seriously, I'm not. You could almost eat off my kitchen floor these days. But all fear of being thought a slob aside, there are few things less pleasant than opening your front door of an evening to be met by a bug that is seemingly the size of a chihuahua.)