Tuesday, December 15, 2015

That Time of the Year

Look!!!

Out in the yard . . .

Is it a bird?

Is it a plane?

It's . . .

SUPERPOOL!!!

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Yes, that's a picture of the cover flying off the pool and flapping around in the wind.  Again.

It's one of the many reasons that I am so over this whole December thing, even if we are barely half-way through.  December is an endless cycle of concerts and games and practices and work deadlines (why did I agree to an accelerated deadline?  WHY????) and I spend most of the month driving and driving and driving and getting nothing done.  It's the kind of month that makes you breath a sigh of relief when one of your kids gets sick because you can finally cross something off your schedule.

I decided yesterday (as I do every year) that I don't like it very much. It makes me kind of cranky.

One of December's casualties is my knitting.  The assault of extracurricular obligations leaves me with no energy, no focus, and scattered snippets of time for projects, although I have become even more expert at packing a few rows into those snippets.  (Did you know that if you sit really close to the stage at the middle school band/chorus concert, you can see well enough in the glow of the stage lights to knit through the whole performance? You just have to look up now and then and watch the kids on stage with great attentiveness so that the people around you don't think you're failing in your parental obligations.) The result all this running around is that I have been atypically monogamous  and abnormally attached to the little stuff.  Recently I've knit 5 pair of fingerless mitts (one of those was really a pair of "tipless gloves," but let's not quibble) and lined two pair of mittens. The fact that I have resorted to lining my mittens speaks volumes about my current knitting mentality. The mittens originally were knit in the winter of 2014 but I chucked them back in the to-do pile because the prospect of lining them was unbearably dull in comparison to all the shawls and sweaters and other shiny new things I could be working on.

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There are bright spots in the month. One of them was watching this goofball don his new suit and hammer away at a bass drum that is bigger than he is.

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He is a full body drummer-- head bobbing, shoulders wiggling-- but he managed to give us the full dance and drum show without ever taking his eyes off the conductor. He thought the beginning band concert was about the best time a guy could have, and he's already looking forward to the next concert, although that's not until May, a month that for me operates an awful lot like December, but with sunshine and flowers to help out.