Blue sky, open door, new beginning

This hasn't been an easy week. Although the sky is blue, the days are cold and nights are colder. The apartment feels empty and lonely, but the sensation gets a little less strange everyday. My back's been hurting because I slipped and fell down the stairs on Wednesday while I was rushing to answer the phone (stupid telemarketer), and I haven't quite been feeling like myself. At the same time, I seem to be suspended in some strange academic limbo where time passes but I never feel closer to my goal. Something has to change.

I didn't knit for most of the week, but on Friday knitting made an appearance when Dan and I were trapped in our apartment all day with the door open. The property management has been trying to "clean up" our apartment complex (which is sometimes a good thing) and part of this process is repainting all the buildings. Why they choose November through January for this project, we'll never know, but Friday was the day they painted all the front doors on our building. We got a note about a week in advance explaining that we would have to leave the door open for about 6 hours (it turned out to be more like 7) while the painters applied two coats and left sufficient drying time after each. Friday happens to be the only day when neither Dan or I work, so we were both free to guard our apartment while the door was open all day. We cooked. We watched movies. We got cold. So we wore knits.


Dan took this picture to document the experience. You can see the open door in the background, me all bundled up, and Dan demonstrating the softness of the scarf I made for him. To be honest, I wear it more than he does because he says that it doesn't get cold enough here in CA for him to need a scarf. Friday was the exception.

At the end of the day we had a pretty, brick red door. The sad part is, after all of that trouble, the door got a big scratch out of the paint by the next morning. I'm afraid I accidentally brushed my bag against the paint that night when I was coming home from an evening visit to the coffee shop. The paint was dry to the touch but apparently not yet hardened. Oh well. I'll call the office Monday morning to see if they can do a touch up.

Yesterday at knitting group I finally finished the last scarf in my trio of scarves destined for Eastern Europe. I originally thought I would have sent those by now, but life doesn't always go the way you expect.

It's time for a new project, a new start.