Lla;jfdsalkfdsjafdsl;jk

*snork!* Huh? Wha? Oh! Hai! How are ya, how's yer cat, how's the weather, how's every little thing?!

What? No! NO! No-no-no-no-no, heh, no. I wasn't asleep on my keyboard or anything! I was just doing this…thing…see, in Welsh, you always put an 'll' before, uh…

OK, fine. I may have dozed off just a smidge. It's been that kind of…hmm. Less than a month, more than a week? Weeth? Meek?

Oh gosh no. It has been no kind of 'meek,' y'all.

Work the last two weeks has been…let's see, what can possibly describe my working life these last couple weeks…ah yes. Here we go: I have been running like a schizophrenic squirrel pounding back highballs of espresso-meth infused Red Bull.

To make a very long and involved story shorter, we're deploying a new process in about a week. It's a pretty big deal; extremely "high visibility" and so forth and so on.

One of those things that has been talked three-quarters to death since April, but then sort of simmered on the back of the stove for a good long while before suddenly erupting into flames two weeks ago.

Because why do things over a matter of, say, six luxurious weeks when you can cram the entire six week lifecycle into only two? Oh, and if you can throw in some Technical Difficulties, the database servers having to be reset, key personnel being on vacation on critical weeks and such, well, you can have yourself a real party.

So I've been pretty much logging in to work as soon as my butt hits the bench on my 4:40 train every morning, and then I work straight on through until it chugs back into town at 5:30.

Awesome.

Speaking of which, the new schedule is working out really well. All obligatory "gosh doesn't commuting suck" kvetching aside, this is turning out to be a really good idea. MegaBank is getting a better deal in terms of how many hours are available for me to work for them, and in terms of how active my brain waves are during said hours. Much as I hate to admit it (don’t know why, actually), I'm one of those "morning" people types.

My ability to process information goes sharply downhill after, I kid you not, noon.

I know. That's pretty lame. But there it is – by 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon, if you don't see me write whatever you're saying down, just assume I will have forgotten all about it by tomorrow morning.

My timesheets are quite a bit better, too. Gone are the 5.5 or 6 hour days – right now, I seldom have a day that doesn't involve overtime. And it feels so much easier, since I'm not trying to log back in from home while the Denizens are pounding around trying to break the house apart with the sheer power of their noise.

It is impressive, their noise.

Speaking of the Denizens, I'm arriving a full hour earlier to grab them from the sitter's house, which makes them happy. And if anything goes wrong along the way, from meetings running just a little over to delayed trains to missed shuttles to more delayed trains, I still get there in time.

The delays would have to be pretty epic for me to miss my deadline these days.

I'd say the only real downsides are that I get a lot less time with the husband, and that I'm really tired, really early in the evening (golly, really? because usually people who have an alarm blaring at them at 3:30 in the morning are so chipper at night!).

Meanwhile in other news…I have some form of knitting-related depression. I've lost interest. It's all just sort of gray. I can't get worked up about anything.

This is because I want to knit a lacy shawl, but do not need one, nor do I have the appropriate yarn easily at hand, and furthermore I intellectually know that a lacy shawl (at least, any of the ones I want to do) (because why do an "easy" lacy shawl when you can choose one with a 600-row, 38-stitch pattern repeat?) is exactly-precisely the wrongest possible thing to choose as a "oh goody, let's sit on a train and knit!" sort of project.

And thus, I am sinking into a knitterly lethargy. I look at Eldest's Lillehammer and think, Meh – too heavy, too wool-y, too hot.

I look at my sock yarn collection and go, Yawn.

I look at every single ball of yarn in my easily-accessible stash and dash off the reasons it, too, just isn't right.

Too bright, too cool, too cotton, too wool, too acrylic, too blue, too orange, too brown, too not appropriate for a lacy shawl…

I don't know why I get like this. I really don't. Most of the time, I'm pretty promiscuous easy-going when it comes to project loyalty. If the sweater is too big, I'll just throw a new sock on the needles; if the sock isn't charming me, I'll grab the sweater again. If this project is too complicated for a "take along" project, I'll just keep it next to the sofa at home for "at home" knitting and take something not-fussy in my mobile kit.

But then…every so often…I just… get my mind set on something that is completely inappropriate for some reason. Something that requires a yarn I don't have, at a time when I'm on a yarn diet. Something wool at a time of year when 97 degrees is a "cool" day.

Something complicated when all I have is train-time available for knitting.

Will I actually do that to myself? Will I make the time to dig through the put-away stash looking for a fingering weight yarn to make one of those excessively fiddly lace shawls I've been daydreaming about for the last two weeks?

I honestly don't know.

Except that yeah, I totally think I will.

Because visions of knitted on borders, cunning cast-ons, and the thought that seriously, it's not THAT hard to keep track of pattern repeats on a moving train (inability to learn from past experience: check!) keep running through my head. And maybe it's a Sign! And if I don't start this project, well, maybe something…awful will happen!

Far be it from me to bring about global economic disaster (or something) by refusing to Knitter it up and take on the overly-fiddly knitting project on the train…that's right, I would never let the world that depends on me down!

Because I'm a giver, people.

That's right.

A giver.