new sweater begun

 But just  barely. I had to cast on for it twice; the first time I was doing the cabled cast on and I got it tangled up and ripped it out and just redid with the long-tail I usually use. You just have to carefully estimate how much yarn you need for that (the cable cast on you make going TOWARDS the ball, the long-tail uses two strands, one unwound from the ball, so you have to have that one long enough for all the stitches you need).

but it worked out, and I'm on ribbing round 4 of 18 (over 240-some stitches)

Knit Picks' Gloss dk in sort of an eggshell/very pale taupe color. The sweater is knitted in the round up to the armholes so those 240 some stitches are the entire body

Shortly before the armholes, you add in the second color and just do some dots (not QUITE a "lice" pattern) before you start working the big moth.

For this one, I chose a color called Blackberry, which is a very dark purple:

***

I'm also thinking of the old "What a week, hey?" "Lemon, it's Wednesday" (or however it goes) meme because....welp, a lot happened between Friday and now. And it does seem to have brought out some bad takes; on social media I'm seeing lots of reposts of people whose opinions should not matter opining on childless women, and miss me with that.

I mean, yeah: intellectually I know I should not care, but emotionally it bugs me to know I'm hated by people I don't even know simply because (for reasons not entirely under my control) I wound up on a different path than the "approved" one and I'm going to have to steel myself for more takes like "but THOSE WOMEN don't have an investment in the future!" and similar. (Someone was saying childless women shouldn't get to vote. Well, we still have to live under the same leadership whether we have kids or not!)

But yeah. It's been a stressful couple of weeks and it's still going. 

I guess it never really does let up and things don't ever really get better, it's just, if you're lucky you find things to "cover up" the things that are bad and make life seem a little better. But as alone as I am a lot of the time that's hard. 

But yeah. You'd THINK my childhood as an unpopular kid would totally inure me to rejection and people saying hateful things, but sometimes I think it made me MORE sensitive to it, like it burned out my ability to tolerate it. 

Anyway. As alone as I am there can be days where I don't hear a positive word from another person and so the bad interactions, the hateful things I overhear said - not aimed *directly* at me, but still, hateful things - they get extremely heavy and hard to bear and I wonder how one manages. I know having a family is a challenge and hard some times but I also imagine how coming home to someone who might occasionally say they loved me would make a lot of difference. 

I also admit I tend to internalize the "you don't matter" claims some make, and that makes things harder.