Surviving the worst of summer – 2022 Edition

Good morning and happy Saturday! Yes, I know it has been a while since my last blog entry and there are very good reasons for that.

Telecommuting might be biggest reason. For 2020 and most of 2021, my craft room doubled as my office. At the end of each workday it would turn back into my craft room, but since I had already spent most of my day in that space with my work laptop open in front of me, I did little else in there. Once it was determined and communicated to us that telecommuting, even on a partial basis, was going to be permanent going forward, I decided it was time to make a permanent work space that was NOT part of my craft space, and I took over the guest room to do it. The guest room also houses our game collection, movie collection, and Michael’s toy collection, and replacing the bed with a desk has made this room feel and function really nicely.

So…what if we have guests who need a place to sleep? I will convert my craft room to accommodate them and it will be a lot less hassle on the rare occasion we have guests than converting it into an office and back on a daily basis. It feels much nicer in here now too, and I have done some further reorganization and decluttering. I even sat down at my spinning wheel to ply some singles that had been spun prior to my hiatus.

Long before making that change, I had decided that I needed to spend a LOT less time with a screen of any sort in front of me outside of my work day. Rather than fill the time with more knitting, spinning, or weaving, I spent more time with my husband and our dogs, friends and family, and doing some new things, including tackling some things around the house that I have been procrastinating about.

Those house and yard projects are probably the second biggest reason. They never actually end for us (or anyone, really) but the progress we have made in just the last year has been huge. The back yard has completely transformed since 2020 when we basically wiped the slate clean after taking down the swimming pool and we now have an outdoor space that we love to spend time in. Inside the house I have finally conquered the clutter in the basement, renting a dumpster for most of it, and re-homing some things with other people. There is still plenty to do but I can actually do that now because the 20 years of accumulated clutter is now gone!

All of that involved a lot of physical work on my part and I was glad to do it because it was a huge cost saver. But any physical work comes at a cost when you have a chronic pain condition, so there was also a lot of down time, and by that I mean completely down. This hot weather is no help either. Even under ideal conditions when my pain level is low, extreme summer heat incapacitates me.

The combined effects of all those things has impacted my productivity as a knitter, spinner, and weaver. In the last year since I finished the Sundry scarf. I have knit one pair of gloves that I started shortly after last year’s fall knitting retreat. That’s it for finished knitting projects. Those gloves were my only show and tell project at the spring retreat. Outside of sampling some fiber on a few spindles, I have done no significant amount of spinning since 2020, and I can recall a couple of unsuccessful attempts at weaving something during the same time too so there has been little to nothing going on for my own projects to write about. Although now that it’s too hot to work on house and yard projects, I have started a new knitting project. And not just because I need a show and tell item for the fall retreat.

That’s all for this morning. I am off to tend to my daily watering duties outside, then sit for a while with my coffee and my knitting. Stay cool bud stay hydrated and have a great weekend!