Wow, Charlotte - 3 to 4 weeks to knit a sample sweater, sometimes in a yarn very different from what was intended?

I could NEVER be a designer. I can't knit a sweater from an existing pattern in 3 to 4 weeks, let alone deal with design issues or questions.

I finished off Hourglass last night. But it's getting a "time out" in blocking. The neck seemed too big and floppy. I'm really hoping aggressive blocking fixes it (or I develop a greater tolerance for it), because I really do not want to rip out all that sewn-down neckline and redo it (And I wouldn't have enough yarn for much of a redo, I have 3/4 of a ball left).

The sleeves also came out a bit long and large. Dangit! I made the 45" size and it fits PERFECTLY in the bust. Just because someone's boobular doesn't mean she has fat WRISTS. (That's one of the things that annoys me about some designers; they seem to think women over a size 36" bustline or 38" hipline or so are giantesses. We're not - most of us just have one or two parts that are noticeably bigger than smaller women. This is also a problem with RTW clothing; I usually have to shorten slacks or dresses, sometimes by several inches.)

So I don't know. I suppose part of it was that I expected it to look on me just like it did on the model. I'm hoping that blocking will make the sleeves take up a little.

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Tired today. I couldn't get up early to exercise: woke at about 4:40 am, thought, "I could sleep for another 20 minutes or I could sleep for another hour and twenty minutes" and opted for the additional hour. I'm hoping that maybe I can break-free and get home early enough to do it this afternoon. (I have my list of things to do today. I should probably just shut up here and get back to my grading.)

This is the sicky time of the year. Even though I love that it's getting cooler, it's not CONSISTENTLY cooler. It's supposed to be like 95* this weekend, and tonight it's supposed to get down into the 40s. Which means that everyone's immune system gets stressed and people get sick. (I hope the cold I had last week immunized me for the fall). But it's also hard to know how to dress, hard for your body to adapt to the bouncing-ball of the temperatures. And everyone's allergies are bad right now.

Thursdays are just a tired day for me. Wednesday are my longest day of teaching (in terms of time spent in classroom and prepping) and I also have the youth group at night. We've got a lot of new people and some of them don't quite know how to behave yet. And I never know how much of the teasing and sort-of name-calling teenaged boys do is permissible and part of being a teenage boy, and how much of it I should try to squelch. I mean, it's not like they're getting into fights (most of the time).

I give a test in the first part of class today. I'm bracing myself for "the usual" to happen: the people who skip class will be there to take the test, and then will hand it in and leave. I don't know why this bothers me so much but it does. I try not to take it as a slap in the face but it's hard not for me to read it as "I'm so bored by you that I'm not even going to bother to stay even though I'm getting an F. I'm not willing to even try to improve." And I realize intellectually that that reflects more on them than on me - but still. It frustrates me. I make the best effort I possibly can to make the information they're learning relevant and interesting and meaningful.I spent a lot of time last time researching what is known about the inheritance of eye and hair color (someone asked) and I spent some time on that. A few people paid attention and took notes but there were some people who just "checked out" the whole time. (And it's always the same people. So it's not that this particular topic isn't interesting to them; it's that apparently nothing in the class is interesting to them*.)

And the whole leaving (or otherwise "checking out" - and I can see that in a few people's eyes) thing just feeds into my deep insecurities that I AM a boring person and that the best I can possibly do with something just isn't good enough.

(*And on another level, that makes me want to scream. I mean, as someone out in the workforce - and in a workforce that I would argue is more interesting and less routine than a lot, still there's enough "routine" that being able to go and learn would be a really welcome thing. You are in college, folks! This is perhaps the last time in your life when you get the chance to just sit in a room and learn about stuff you don't know! This is the last time where you get mulligans [we allow students who fail a class to retake it and have the failing grade "wiped" from their record. And we let them do that for as many times as they have money to pay]. I'd love the opportunity to go and learn about, I don't know, Revolutionary-War-Era American history, or entomology, or Ancient Greek, or something, and have the luxury of time to do it (instead of reading about it in 20 minute increments at night before I fall asleep. I've had several abortive attempts to teach myself a little Latin because I simply do not have enough time when I am awake enough to be attentive to it). But yeah, I know - I've heard it many times: people who become professors are atypical students. But it still frustrates me - youth is wasted on the young; college is often wasted on people who prefer to spend their time, well, wasted...)