Av sted

I'm off to the conference in Lund early tomorrow morning. After a last push today at work I finally have my paper pulled together enough that I can present it on Wednesday without cringing too much. This has been a good project for me, as it has forced me to explore the careers of some writers I knew next to nothing about previously. Actually, my summer cold is so horrible right now, I may very well be delusional about the quality of the paper. I think my standards get a lot lower when my head hurts and I can't swallow.

I'm excited to go to the conference and also to explore southern Sweden a bit on the Thursday day-long excursion. A colleague from work is booked on the same flight tomorrow morning, so I'll have someone to help negotiate the transportation from the Copenhagen airport to Lund. It's always a treat to have a traveling companion for navigating, though I have to admit I am also really looking forward to three nights in a hotel alone. I think every mother of a small child feels that way.

I knit and knit and knit on the Multnomah shawl and didn't seem to be making a dent in the yarn at all. After getting almost to the largest size of the shawl (and having used less than a third of my yarn), I decided to rip it all out and knit a top-down raglan sweater, which had in fact been my original plan. My skein winder got some heavy use, as I wanted to wind up all the yarn in double strands rather than knitting from two balls at a time. Love, love, love that skein winder! I figure if I make it sized for E rather than me I'll have enough yarn to do an entire sweater. So far I really like the way it's knitting up in stockinette stitch:

I'll probably pick up the stitches along the neck and make a 2x2 ribbed turtleneck, but I want to wait until the body and sleeves are done to be sure there's enough yarn. I'll do 2x2 ribbing at the cuffs and bottom edge as well. I still can't decide if it's horribly ugly, or very pretty. KE says it's just in between.