scifiknitter

It’s been up and down, but I’m happy to say that 2011 finished with a sharp up-snap, and the yo-yo is in hand, ready to go for another year. On the work front, my agency faced possible defunding that would have put our continued existence into question. In the end, the funder has budgeted flat funding for us in 2012, not even cutting the amount they give us. Yes, there was wild dancing on desktops when that news was announced. Well, maybe not dancing, but morale is up, up, up and everybody is sleeping much better at night. Helping on the morale front is that we have a new boss, and this time it’s a promotion from within of a well-liked and respected colleague. We have problems galore - oops, I’m supposed to call those nasty pimples “challenges” - but we ended the year stronger, not weaker. My job is changing for the better as well. I applied for a couple of positions in the course of the year. One would have taken me out of the agency, and another would have kept me in the agency, but ...

I am relearning why it is very satisfying to knit a basic sock. Round and round in knit stitch means that the sock grows at the knitterly version of breakneck speed. I am knitting this without any pattern other than the recipe I carry in my head. This is also very, very satisfying. I dyed the yarn by painting a sock blank, which consists of 2 strands of sock yarn knit loosely into a rectangle. Once dry, I wound the blank into 2 balls of sock yarn. These should knit into 2 identical socks. Bonus: the dye did not penetrate completely in the peach sections, resulting in a speckled-with-white effect that is quite nice, and something found in some very pricey sock yarns *ahem Opal ahem*.

Late last year I blogged about what was very good news in our household: the passage of a bill creating the North Country Power Authority (NCPA). The story of this project has become the stuff of novels since then, and there is probably not going to be an ending where the hero strides into the sunset, basking in the glory of a quest achieved. If there is such an ending, my husband is very unlikely to be that hero. The complexities of human behavior are so much a part of the story that I am putting aside the urges to label causes, cast blame, point fingers. We’ll stick with irony and bemusement, and lift a glass to the prospect of a new year swept clean of the obsession of trying to save a project. A brief synopsis: We start with the successful passage of the bill enabling the NCPA. There was a team of people who worked to accomplish this, and there was a plan. The NY State legislature would not have enabled a dream; they passed the legislation because it looked like the new entity had...