Seeking North

I really wanted to make a blanket for my friends' new baby Anna, but time was of the essence if I was to send it with my friends who were headed to visit them in London (a five-hour drive away -- this was going to save me a lot of gas or a lot of postage). So I bought some thick, quick-knit, fuzzy, soft baby yarn in a variegated pastel colour pattern and I started to crochet like mad. But I made two fairly major errors: (1) I used an inappropriately small crochet hook, and (2) I didn't crochet into the turning stitch. Turns out you have to do that, or your piece gets less and less wide as you go.

Because of these errors, I found that I was crocheting a wedge.

Here is a photo of me and my unintentionally wedge-shaped baby blanket:

Crochet fail.

I was committed, though, so I decided to keep on rocking. I figured I could maybe crochet along the sides or something to make it rectangular when I was finished. However, it turns out I'm not really skilled enough to do that. Knowing that the couple to whom I was sending this project had a sense of humour and were more likely to be touched that I had tried to make their baby something than horrified at the bizarrely shaped result, I solved the problem the only way I could think of: I crocheted some (faintly lopsided) sleeves at the narrow end and called it a "dress-shaped baby blanket." It's a theme. Yeah?

Baby blanket #2! A mixed success.

Okay, so my baby blanket is trucking right along, as you can see.

Crochet Baby Blanket

Okay, so my first attempt at making a amigurumi crochet zombie doll turned out to be a wee bit ambitious, seeing as I was pretty hopeless at keeping my stitches even remotely even (see photo of Thing, below). So I decided to start with something both easier and less twisted: a baby blanket for Matt's cousin Donna and her husband Lauren, who are expecting their first child in December. (I'd like this to be a surprise, but I'm pretty sure Donna and Lauren don't know I have a blog and would be far too busy with home renos to read it if they did). My need for immediate gratification will be satisfied by making the blanket out of granny squares that I crochet together at the end. Good plan, yes? Well, I watched several very helpful YouTube granny square tutorials, but even the most helpful couldn't help me: all I was making was a big loopy mess.
Then I found out that local (relatively speaking -- you have to drive there from here, which makes it pretty much the moon for Kingston) yarn store WoolTyme has drop-in knitting classes. I emailed, and yes, they do help crocheters. So I biked the 45 minutes out to Gardiners Road and Maureen at WoolTyme showed me exactly what I was doing wrong. It turned out to be just about everything, but since I hadn't been doing it very long, it didn't take me very long to correct it. Now I can make squares with reckless abandon! And I am!

My very first granny squares!

Crocheting monocoloured granny squares is kinda boring, so I'm planning to use the solid ones around the border and make some coloured ones for the middle. Here's my (albeit rough) plan:

Future Baby Blanket

Last Thursday sometime after midnight, I was gripped by the urge to learn to crochet. Not because I have a particularly strong interest in the fabric arts, nor because I have a burning desire to create a pair of fingerless gloves or a charming yarn poncho, but because I discovered amigurumi. Amigurumi are cute little Japanese-inspired dolls that can take many delightful anthropomorphic forms from wee frogs...

Amigurumi Frog by ~selkie on Deviantart

...to Nintendo characters...

Link amigurumi from geekcentralstation on Blogspot

...and anything in between. In fact -- and this is where my interest was truly sparked -- there is a sub-genre of amigurumi, the "creepy cute" doll world, where crochet websites abound offering free patterns to make amigurumi zombies, ninjas, Vikings, ghouls, and all manner of other crazy creepy cute little buggers.

So I dashed out to the library the next morning to find some basic crochet books and then to Michael's to get myself some yarn and some crochet hooks. Matt and I were off to a friend's cottage with Sister and Brother-in-Law, so I figured there would be time to sort out this thing over the course of the weekend.

Unsurprisingly, I discovered that this shit be harder than it looks.

It's really hard to learn how to do something so tiny from a book. My sister had given crocheting a go once and tried to help me, but by the end of the weekend, I could still only make a line.

Seriously, this is as far as I got.

I looked at Step Two in both the books I had over and over, trying to make my Line into a Thing, but with no experienced crocheters or Interwebs to consult, I had to give up for the weekend. Very disappointing.

The minute I got home, however, I was cruising YouTube for crochet tutorials. Did you know that people have created whole channels dedicated to teaching people to crochet? It's astonishing! I mean, I knew you could learn to play the ukelele through the wonders of the internet (and I am!), but you can learn to crochet everything from flowers (bleh) to shrunken heads (hells yes!) on YouTube.

So, now I am crocheting a Thing.

A Thing!

I don't know what it is, because all I can really do so far is make rows attached to each other. However, this is inarguably a Thing, rather than a Line, so that is quite an improvement. It can't be too many steps from a Thing to a shrunken head, right?

In July, I got a pretty major speeding ticket while racing home from a friend's cottage in Haliburton. You know how it is when you're driving on empty back roads by yourself, music turned up, windows town, summer breeze ... and it's an indisputable fact that I have a wee bit of a lead foot, particularly when I'm driving by myself. So, some flashing lights and sirens later, I'm faced with a man in uniform who lets me know that I was going 115 km in an 80 km zone. Now, that's damn fast, even for me. I was surprised, but sort of not surprised at all. The officer knocked the ticket down to 110, but that's still a four-demerit-point, two-hundred-dollar ticket. So I went to the Belleville courthouse a month later to plea bargain, and managed to get it down to 105 km. I was out about the same amount of cash, once you factor in the trip to Belleville, but at least I only have three demerits on my license. However, that's enough to affect my insurance, and I can't get any more demerit points this year without an enormous hit to my insurance costs.

This has had the provincial government's desired effect on me.

I have slowed down.

I have stopped regarding speed limits as enemies to be respected only when there's a chance there'll be a cop around. I've changed my policy of "you can always drive fast as long as the guy in front of you is going the same speed or faster, because he'll be the one to get a ticket." I set my cruise control a good ten to twenty clicks lower than I used to.

Here's the weird thing about all this: I love it!

Driving is so much less stressful when you're not racing to get there as quickly as possible. Cruising along in the middle or right lane of a highway and passing people only when necessary is much more comfortable than trying to get ahead of everybody on the road.

I bet you know where this is going, right? Well, you wouldn't be wrong. I'm slowing down things in the rest of my life, as well. I'm turning down a lot of social invitations that involve going to Toronto; I'm trying to work harder, not longer, on weekdays so that I can spend my weekends relaxing, and I'm making more time for the things I love to do. On Friday, I sent Matt out with the boys and had a date with a warm bath, a good book, and a glass of red wine. I spent the rest of the weekend with Matt, and we had a wonderful time. We went to the Wolfe Island Corn Maze on Saturday with a group of family medicine residents, and on Sunday we went hiking with a couple of friends and the dog. I had worked hard all week, and I decided to enjoy the weekend work-free and guilt-free. And other than a few "I-should-be-working" twinges here and there, I did!

Life goes by fast enough without my helping it along. It's time to slow down. And not only to avoid possible future license suspensions.

We went for lunch today with the physician recruitment agent for Kingston. Aside from getting a free lunch, which is one of our favourite things, we also were interested in learning about incentive opportunities for doctors considering staying in Kingston. Turns out we could get a big ole chunk of money, but we would have to stay for five years after Matt finishes residency -- so 2016, or 2017 if he does a third year in emerg. I've been loving Kingston so far, but I've never committed to stay in one place for that long. How do I know if this is where I want to live?

My friend Andrea, who is a nurse, just moved to Inuvik in the Northwest Territories for a year. I'm kind of jealous of her exciting adventure. I am not, however, jealous of the fact that where she is, it SNOWED today.

Her blog is at http://andreaininuvik.vox.com/ if you're interested in following her adventures.

Matt and I moved to Kingston in May, but I don't really feel like we've been living here. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the main one is that we haven't been living here, not really. Two days after moving in we were off to England, Spain and Morocco. Upon our return, life was topsy-turvy for me with trips to Toronto, Calgary, more Toronto, Halifax, Lunenburg, and Toronto again. My sister got married, so I had programs to design and table numbers to decorate. I went to two big photo shoots, and found myself buried under a pile of photos to edit. I've barely been home long enough to do laundry and repack. I love to travel, but this has been just ridiculous. This is my first weekend at home in six weeks, and I think perhaps the first week I will have spent in Kingston since we moved back here. Never have I felt such a strong desire to chain myself to my house and never leave again.
But now that I am back and life is calming back down, I feel like I can call my days my own again. I'm celebrating this new beginning with some new goals.
(1) I need to make some money because oh my God are we ever poor. I really need to get my website launched and get some cash rolling in. Commence Project Make Money.
(2) I've fallen off the fitness wagon pretty hard since finishing my half-marathon. To combat my widening waistline. I've started being more active over at SparkPeople, a website for weight-loss and health advice. It's a pretty neat site that offers lots of tracking tools, workout suggestions, and an active community. I used to pay for the WeightWatchers page, but this one is way better and free to boot. If you think I'm shilling for these people, I should point out that I don't get anything if people join; I just think it's cool and that people should give it a try. I've started teaching my ridiculous dog Cato to be my running partner, and she's doing pretty well at it, thus far, as long as she doesn't see any squirrels. Or other dogs. Or anything else too interesting. Commence Project Get Fit.
(3) I need to meet some people in Kingston. Our neighbours, Amy and Nick, had some friends over last night and invited us to drop by, and hanging out there made me realize that I need some friends. Commence Project Make Friends. Step 1: find a sport or club in Kingston to join. Must think on this.

Do you ever feel like time is speeding past you, like your life is a runaway car and even though you put down your feet like Fred Flintstone in his prehistoric dinocar to try to slow it down, it just keeps on zipping onward?

On May 10, 2009, I accomplished a goal I set for myself eight months ago. I ran in the Forest City McFarland Rowlands Half-Marathon and finished with a time of 2:11:44.6. This was a huge accomplishment for me; I didn't used to be able to run around the block and now I've run for over two hours at a good clip without stopping once. I'm really proud of myself and also grateful to my friends Katie, Christina, and Andrea, who all helped and encouraged me -- I could never have done this without them. Thanks for helping me with my first-ever athletic goal ... if I can do this, I can do anything!

CatRunning