I've been working more on the Honeycomb vest:



Because it is a roughly sport-weight yarn, knit on size 3 needles, it grows slowly. It is taking a while. I will have to be patient.

I am not a patient person by nature. This surprises people who know me. I can be patient with other people, mainly out of a desire to neither make people angry with me nor hurt people's feelings (as in, students). I can have pretty infinite patience with people (though I will admit there have been times when I've quietly excused myself from a lab or meeting when my id was chewing through its restraints and I feared I was going to say something I would regret, because someone was being intentionally helpless or was throwing up roadblocks to every suggestion or was dominating a meeting with off-topic minutiae).

But I do mutter and stew when I'm forced to stand in line at the post office (especially if Amazon Man is in line ahead of me - he is a little old man who sells lots of used books as an Amazon associate, and if you're unlucky, you wind up in line behind him and his roughly 80 packages, all of which need to be weighed separately and have postage affixed).

And you really don't want to be traveling with me if there are big delays. Especially the sort of big delays where no kind of ETA can be given; one of the most excruciating things for me about traveling is when the train's stopped on the tracks, waiting on "freight traffic" or "waiting for someone to change the signal" and they can't give any idea of when we will be underway again. I should not be bothered by it, but I am.

And I admit a certain frustration with the whole flu-shot-getting process. (They called today. Of course, like an idiot, I gave my home rather than work phone, so they called around noon and left a message. And when I called back, I wound up in an automated-options netherworld until I finally figured out what buttons to push - they did not have a "to talk to someone about scheduling a flu shot" choice. And then I waited about 5 minutes, listening to bad country-pop, while the person in charge of such a thing was tracked down and put on the phone.)

(Incidentally, for those who asked: I think the flu shot permission thing ONLY deals with someone getting them at a pharmacy or a grocery store or some other sort of "non primary medical" place. I've got them at the local county health department in the past and no one required permission for me to get the shot - and the county health departments are where poor folk who can't afford a regular doctor are most likely to go; when I went there to get the shot (it was for convenience's sake) they said there was no charge but donations were welcome if the person felt like they could afford it. So I dropped a sawbuck in the container, figuring I'd pay that (at least) at a doctor's. But this year it seems the pharmacies are the only places with "early" shots. I don't even know when our local County Health is going to have them. And I've gone to DRIVE THROUGH clinics run by a local home-health care provider and all they asked was that I fill out the form stating that yes, I knew there was a very small risk of my having a bad reaction to the shot and I was willing to accept that risk. And verifying that I was not allergic to eggs or pregnant or immune compromised or anything like that. So I assume the rule only applies to "freestanding" places that don't have a "real" doctor or nurse on hand - though my understanding is that pharmacists go through much of the same training. And I have known more than a few pharmacists or pharm techs who were EMTs or paramedics in their "other" lives.)

But anyway. The whole effort of getting the shot makes me not want to do it this way again (except, if the pharmacy tech was right, the rule will be different next year and I won't have to mess with it)

And I'm not good at being patient with myself. I'm getting better - I don't "yell" at myself any more when I'm having a bad day of practicing piano; I'm more prone to chalk it up to being tired or having my attention divided by something else. But I do still get irritated when I don't get things as fast as I feel I should.

So perhaps the knitting does help build up my little store of patience. By reminding me that small increments get the thing done. Because I can see this slowly growing, even if I only add a row or two in a day.