I have been tireder than usual lately. Is it residual COVID fatigue, do you figure? I was testing positive until the beginning of July. I am usually fine these days. Yesterday, though, I ran in the morning, graded essay questions for hours, and climbed in the afternoon. At dinnertime I was beyond toast. I was, like, an 80s zwieback cracker -- so dry and crispy you might have broken a tooth on me. (If you had sneaked into my dining room and taken a bite of me. This is a weird metaphor. I seem to let the weird metaphors flow freely when I write speedy late-night posts.) It was not the first time in recent weeks that I had felt tired enough at dinner that it seemed like it might be a good idea to lay my face down in my empty dinner plate and rest there, with my hair sopping up the pooled watermelon juice and Tajín.
My hair is always wild enough in August that it does not need any watermelon juice enhancements. Today I was scowling at the computer, trying to finish up the last of the grading (done! hallelujah! red pens and spreadsheets, bless the Lord, she said in 21st-century homage to Dan. 3), when Pete said, "What made you decide to do that with your hair, Mom?" I muttered something about wanting it off my neck while continuing to scowl at the screen, and it was only later that the penny dropped: something decidedly odd must have been happening in the hairward direction for Pete to ask that question.
My kids never say that my hair looks weird, even when I ask them to. I will say, "Can I go out in public looking like this?" and my kids (and husband) will say, "Sure, looks fine to me," no matter how large the fuzzy halo may be. Long ago I shared a sweet story about small Pete, and he is still pretty much the same kid. On the one hand, I'm glad my kids aren't fussy about my appearance. On the other, sometimes a person sincerely wants to know whether she needs to put down the rebellion sprouting from her head before she goes to Target.
So this is the context in which I asked Pete about his morning comment. It had been hours since the exchange happened, but right away he was laughing helplessly at the memory. "It looked like an upside-down mushroom cloud on top of your head," he said.
But you know, in August in this godforsaken climate I feel that is a small price to pay for getting it off my neck.
I was just looking at a picture of hot-weather hair (does that link work for you if you're not on Ravelry? seems like it ought to but sometimes Rav is persnickety about who can view which pages on their site), thinking about knitting gauge. Remember that stole I started enthusiastically last week? I found myself with an increasingly emphatic sinking feeling as I knitted along. I've made a lot of fingering-weight shawls on size 6 needles, but this one was just not working out. The stitches looked too big and sloppy. This happened to me once before, with the shawl in that linked picture, and that's still the first thing I see when I look at it. Better to frog early than spend ten years saying, "If only I'd used a smaller needle." So! Into the frog pond it went. I have started over on size 4s. I will report back.
It's probably the yarn, right? Silk is inelastic, and alpaca is the Great Deceiver when it comes to gauge.
After a long stretch of feeling bleh about knitting, my enthusiasm is returning.
Actually that's true of more things than knitting: a long stretch of feeling bleh, followed by the tentative return of some enthusiasm. Let's hope it sticks. I like enthusiasm a lot more than feeling bleh.
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