Back to normalcy?

I hope. Anyway: before the derails (plural) of the past week, I was going to post photos of the two pairs of socks I finished over break.

The first pair had been on the needles for over a year - I started them over LAST Christmas and then sort of lost interest midway through the foot of the first sock. But I decided to finally finish them. They are the Vintage Fairy Lights sock pattern.



If those look like they have a different speckle density, they do. It's a Madeline Tosh yarn, and apparently this was a known problem with their speckle yarns. (I had a similar issue with another speckle yarn I had). I'm....slightly? put out by it.





Yeah.

The feature of the pattern - the "fairy lights" - are tiny bobbles you make on the upper leg; the rest of the sock is just ribbing.




It's a little easier to see the bobbles when the socks are stretched over a leg.

I might do this one again some time; I think I have some other dyers' speckle yarns that might work (and might have an even speckle density). I think another nice option would be to use a solid or mottled-in-one-color yarn that had that stellina stuff in it so they had sparkle.

The second pair was the (free) Vanilla Latte Socks. I used an Opal yarn for these, in bright colors but with blue dominant. It also has the sparkly stuff in it so there is a little glitter to the socks:



This is a machine-printed yarn, so it's pretty easy to make them matching.



I had started these over spring break last year but then got distracted by other projects. It does feel good to finish things. I would definitely use this pattern again, it is good for striping or patterning yarns because it's just a fairly simple broken rib.

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Still working on the Super Sekrit Project but once that's done, I might focus on adding more to the crocheted blanket, I don't know. Or, I have a couple other socks-on-the-needles I should finish.

Though I admit I also want to just start another pair of simple socks. I have a couple balls of Opal I've acquired in recent months and sometimes it's just nice to work with a yarn that is predictably good and will do the self-patterning thing.

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 I also ordered myself a little treat from the "Pokémon Center" website. This is Flaaffy:



I am surprised how rapidly she came. I was expecting it to take weeks and weeks, it was just a couple days. I guess the shop is actually located in the US....

Flaaffy is roughly based on a sheep (most Pokémon are based on actual animals, extant or extinct, though I guess a few are based on plants or on objects). I don't know much about the franchise (I very occasionally watch the cartoon that runs on Disney XD - I think it is the one set in "Alola," which is Pokémon-world for Hawaii. I just like the creatures. They are cute and sort of cuddly and are that kind of nice-fantasy-animal I like.

Apparently Flaaffy is an "electric type" (The creatures....well, I've heard it described as "cartoon cockfighting" and I don't like that, so I think of it more as "they are practicing a martial art and they don't REALLY get hurt, and it's more a game/competition thing than real fights") and her main attack is with static electricity, which amuses me....because of course wool can generate static electricity (though not as much, I've found, than some synthetic fabrics do).

I'm also considering buying myself some small other treat once this thing is all over (depending on if I have to have the more-invasive testing or not, it will either be a "yay, you weren't sick after all" treat or a "you had to do some medical testing that wasn't fun but you did it" treat). Not sure what yet but I am considering, if I can break away the Saturday after my checkup (which has been moved up to the 31st, now), I will maybe go to Whitesboro for yarn? Or go antiquing somewhere and out to lunch. I'm not totally sure yet.

(Because yeah, I'm at least 99% sure now that what happened was within the realm of normal variation and it just scared me because it was so unexpected. So I don't think I am actually unwell in any way, though of course that will be confirmed for sure once the bloodwork is back. But....I think I'd feel sicker if something were genuinely wrong? And I feel better right now than I have in a while, partly because I've gotten back to the normal amount of time of working out I usually do).