restarting a project

 It was a long day today. I got six of the samples sorted (I have 24 more to do, though) and by the end I was just really tired and sick of doing it, but I powered through. It's unlikely I will be able to do any tomorrow - there's an exam to give and grade, and a student is supposed to be coming in to redeem an incomplete, and then I have the second Budget Committee (this is for church) meeting in the afternoon.

Also, midday got a little sad news: the chemistry teacher (Ms Fiedler) at my prep school passed away. I admit I had not thought of her in a long time (and apparently she was in a nursing home; she was in her late 80s), but it's another person from my past who's gone.

She was a good teacher; I was a bit ahead of my college classmates in my chemistry knowledge despite only having had "basic" and not AP chemistry.

When I got home, I mowed the lawn and trimmed back some of the shrubs. That second part is harder now because the city no longer will pick up cut brush (once upon a time they would do it once a month) and you have to take it somewhere to drop it off. AND you're not supposed to put it in your rollcart. I have a pile at the back of my backyard where i'm going to have to hire someone to haul it off. I probably just have to come up off the money nnd hire a landscaper to cut and remove it all; I don't have time and stamina.

And then another piece of hard-sad news: the local news recounted a story of a man arrested for animal cruelty, and they described fairly graphically what he did (it involved a cat dying as a result of his cruelty) and I admit that hit me badly and made me sad. 

The world is a hard place and has a lot of people who choose evil in it.

The project I restarted? I had been thinking again about the Moon Moth sweater - a two-color sweater with a colorwork moth on the front, and phases of the moon on the sleeves. I had started it a while back (it is sort of an oyster color with a dark purplish blue as the contrast color). I only got the first seventy rounds done on the body - all knit plain - and then got distracted by other things. I kept thinking I needed to get back to it but sometimes inertia is hard to break. But tonight I managed to dig it out and because of how I had stuffed it in a bag, a few stitches had dropped and i had to fix that FIRST.

I still have a couple rounds to go before I get to start the colorwork...but it does feel kind of good to work on a big project again, and maybe I can force myself to make more time for it this summer, since I don't have teaching to think about.