Knit Sisters

I’d like to claim that my time with Rogue has all been a joy, a lark, a summer fling, but I’m afraid there is a darker side. See this?

And this?

And, from the other side, this?

Hard won, hard won. What I never mentioned before when I was proudly showing you all those photos of the emergent hood (and brazenly fishing for compliments) was that when you finish with the two sides of the hood, you must graft them together at the top. Since this is a cable pattern, that means grafting in both stockinette and purl and alternating between the two over stitch combinations of two, three, four, and five.

I’ve grafted before, I thought. No problem. What I failed to appreciate was that I had never before grafted a combination of both knit and purl stitches with aran weight wool in 98 degree heat and 85 percent humidity.

So what?, I thought. I’ve got the chops. And with a little help from Montse Stanley, of Knitter’s Handbook fame, I can do this thing. Now you must understand that I love Montse Stanley. I love her not only for giving me instructions for eleventeen million cast-ons and cast-offs, but for help with beading and seams and…the list goes on. But there is this side to Montse, a Calvinist side, an uncompromising side, a side that has no truck with the kind of person who would call knitting “just” a craft or who might (great seething intake of breath here) suggest a quick, half-*ssed fix for a mistake.

Here’s Montse on errors (emphasis, by the way, as in the original):
“DON’T LIE TO YOURSELF. You will know the mistake is there and you may even feel compelled to point it out to others. It is better to face the truth and correct the mistake, no matter how painful.”

On a lapse in tension:
“Stitches that are uneven are NOT a charming sign of a handmade item. THEY ARE A SIGN OF POOR CRAFTSMANSHIP.”

Every time I try to rationalize some cockamamie solution (one that does not involve frogging, you see) to some awful knitting mistake I’ve made, I can hear her words ringing in my head: “…poor craftsmanship, poor craftsmanship, POOR CRAFTSMANSHIP…”

Okay, Montse, okay! I’ll do it right. Just leave me in peace. Just…get out of my head!

Montse was pretty much her old reliable self on the question of grafting—how it must be invisible, how you must not pull it too tight or leave it too loose—but after half an hour of struggling to understand her grafting instructions, I was not my old reliable self. I was sweating, I was angry, my yarn was knotting up, I was splitting stitches with my tapestry needle, and the graft was looking like a “sign of poor craftsmanship.” Actually, it looked worse than that. It looked like the work of malicious wild tree elves on crack.

I may have said something along the lines of, “The devil take Montse Stanley and the friggin’ high horse she rode in on! Oh, and you know what, Montse? I would never feel compelled to ‘point out a mistake to others.’ You know why? Because I’m not crazy. I’m not an obsessive compulsive like you. I’m not…” But then I realized with a thud that I am both obsessive compulsive and slightly crazy.

Just like Montse! My heroine!

Anyway, I let it sit overnight while I tried to decide if I ever wanted to knit again, let alone do this graft. The next day, I tried again with another set of instructions (sorry for the betrayal, Montse, but it just wasn’t working out between us…) and things went much better. I used the instructions for Kitchener stitch in Simple Socks by Priscilla Gibson-Roberts, which for whatever reason was much more intuitively obvious to me. For the purl grafting, well, I just kind of had to feel the magic.

After all that,

“Is my head still here or has it exploded?”

Rogue, the Vest Years:

Now the only thing that stands between me and an FO are those sleeves. More on that Friday…

Well, my dear husband returns home today, and I must say that I will be very glad to have him back.  Despite the fact that I practically pushed him out the door myself, I missed him quite a bit.  (It’s hard to get to sleep in that big bed all by yourself.  That’s all I have to say.)

After reading Ellen’s post about dating, it made me feel a little bit better about the fact that I scarcely dated at all before I got married to Rob.  I was 20 years old when we married–that’s pretty young.  I mean, if I had a 20-year old daughter right now, I would be horrified if she told me that she was getting married.  But, to give my 20-year-old self her due, I did make a good choice.  Not that our marriage has always been easy, but here we are, 15 years later, still together.

Yes, but, I hear you say, how does this relate to your knitting and spinning?  Well, the salient point is that he still has the digital camera, so this post is likely to be somewhat photo-poor.

And how did I spend my lonely weekend? 

1.  Working on “Sarah’s Simple Summer Sweater” pattern.  This has turned out to be a challenging enterprise.  It reminds me of when I used to do recipe testing and editing:  you have to think in a very logical, step-by-step kind of way.  That’s not the way I usually think, so it’s a stretch for my li’l ol’ brain.  But fun.

2.  Spinning on the handpainted rovings.  (See Friday’s post for picture.)  I have one of them all spun, and am now working on the other one.

3.  Playing around with this:

 

This is some handspun superwash that I just went a little crazy with when I was spinning.  By that I mean that I just spun it up, without any kind of plan.  I bought the roving here, in the same big box that the roving that became Ellen’s handspun sock yarn was in.  (Again, see Friday’s post for pix.)  There was red, and then there was some light blue.  In a nutty moment, I combed the red and blue together, spun it up, and turned out the yarn you see above.  It’s sort of a worsted/heavy-worsted weight, and I’ve already knitted this up once, a few weeks ago, into a scarf which I promptly ripped out.  The needles I used were too small, there wasn’t quite enough yarn, it was a little too wide, blah, blah, blah.

So, I picked it up again this weekend and tried out a few little things.  Tried out 4 different stitch patterns, to be exact.  And what does the yarn look like now?  Well, it looks like two tidy balls of yarn.  (I would take a picture, but, you see, I don’t have the camera.)  This yarn has yet to tell me what it wants to be; I want it to be a scarf, but it’s not cooperating.  Upon consideration, I think what it’s telling me is that it wants to be gifted to someone else.  (This is a backhanded way of being generous–make this uncooperative yarn someone else’s problem–so there.)

4.  Knitting on this and then ripping it out:

 

I decided that if I want to do this stitch pattern in a full-scale stole (which I think I do), I really don’t want to burn out on it by using it for a scarf.

5.  Hanging out with Harvey.

6.  Watching, for approximately the 20th time,  The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

7.  Knitting intermittently on this:

I haven’t decided if this is going to be for Rob or not.  If it’s not, then I’m going to put a beaded fringe on either end.  If it is, then no beaded fringe, ’cause beaded fringe doesn’t seem very manly.  Opinions, anyone?  (Once I cut the fringe, there’s really no going back.)

See ya’ll Thursday, when new photos will be forthcoming!

Since you brought it up, Sarah, yes, plans are in the works for the lovely handspun sock yarn you gave me. I am considering Lorinda’s interesting suggestion about a Fibonacci sequence and also taking inspiration from Sensational Knitted Socks, a book my sister and I both heartily endorse. Stayed tuned…

Wedding plans consumed part of our weekend, which is not unusual these days. As I’m sure anyone who has had a wedding knows, these are events which, though joyous, are both time consuming and expensive.

Wedding gown with chapel train: $950
Elbow length veil purchased in a fit of enthusiasm and cheerful hypocrisy: $149.99
Initial deposit on wedding site: $400
Deposit on reception site: $1000
Finding the right man:

Priceless

Never having to date again: Also priceless

Because now that I’ve kind of settled into the reality of being engaged, I’ve realized in a deep and full and gleeful way that I never have to go on any more dates. I don’t have to do Match.com ever again. I don’t have to suffer the various insults and disappointments that—ladies, let’s be frank—men will deal out if you spend any time dating.

Except for a very wrong “starter” marriage that lasted barely three years, I was single and dating until I was 35 years old. There were times when I was involved with someone for six months, or a year, or a year and a half, but there were also many, many moons during which I was dating. Hard core, soul-sucking dating.

Let me be clear: there were many wonderful things about being a single woman living, for most of those years, in NYC. I loved having my own space, time to read and think, time to train my dog, the companionship of wonderful friends, the whole big, energetic, uncompromising city to explore on my own terms. But I did not love dating.

The experience of being single well into your adulthood is one for which our culture does not prepare you well. As the years wear on without finding your mate, you find yourself sometimes hopeful, sometimes in despair, sometimes indifferent, but always walking a tightrope. On one side is your big, rich, terrific life with friends, and work, and knitting, and a beloved dog, and a marvelous sister and parents. On the other (if you are a person who would prefer ideally to be part of a couple) is a big yawning gap where your mate is supposed to be. Sometimes you barely notice the gap. Sometimes you put a significant amount of energy into filling that gap. Maybe finally you decide that the gap will always be there so you may as well jump down off the rope and into your big, rich life and just forget all about what life might be like if you weren’t on your own.

But the rope is still there. The longing for a soulmate does not disappear even when you turn your head away from it.

No one likes to talk about this because we’re told that we have to be happy in ourselves before we can be with someone else, that we need to be self-sufficient, and these things are to a great degree true. But the reality is that very few people are prepared to go through life alone and do it completely happily. And I am here to tell you that even the single person who has, like I did, a terrific, busy life and is mostly cheerful and upbeat and optimistic has moments of complete despair during which she thinks she is going to be alone forever. It isn’t pretty, but it is real.

It’s a little crazy-making, this living in the full, present reality of your life alone, but also keeping your ear to the ground and a finger in the wind for signs of your mate. Even if you do yoga, that’s a tough pose to hold. It takes a lot of energy.

And sometimes the men you meet really don’t help.

One thing my years of dating gave me was a treasure-trove of stories. How about the guy from Match.com who, thirty minutes into our first and only phone conversation, said, “So…you look really cute and athletic in your photos on your profile. Exactly how much do your weigh?”

In retrospect, the correct response would have been, “You seemed reasonably intelligent in your profile. Exactly what is your IQ?”

Or the guy who, after three dates, announced at the end of dinner that he didn’t think that we wanted “the same things in life.” I said, “Oh, yes, well, since you barely know me, what would those be?”

He responded, “Well, when I’m involved with a woman I want her to be mostly focused on me, on my interests, and on what I want to do. I don’t think you are that kind of woman.”

Fair enough. He saved me a lot of time right there. Now, interestingly, he had spent a goodly amount of time during our second date telling me about “the nightmare” he had just lived through with his previous “crazy” girlfriend, with whom he had shared an apartment. He said she was so clingy that in order to break up with her, he had to sneak out of their apartment with only those personal effects that he could fit into a suitcase while she was at work and move into the YMCA until she lost his trail.

You gets what you pays for, Mr. Center-of-the-Universe.

And the stories go on and on. While you are going through all this—all this enervating meeting and spending time with men who do not treasure you, do not value who you are, and do not find you attractive—people offer advice and commentary in an attempt to be helpful: “You have to look for a husband like it is a second job.” “You are too picky.” “You’ll never find anyone because you are too romantic. You have to be more realistic.” “Have you tried online dating?”

The frustrating thing is, there isn’t any formula for how I got from 35 and alone with no likely prospects for a husband to 38 and happily engaged to a man so perfect for me that I could hardly have done better if I had invented him myself. None. I could tell you how it happened, but all I would be telling you is how I lived my life and how my luck finally turned. Not exactly generalizable. I can tell you this, though: in spite of all that well-meant advice, I didn’t find him by lowering my standards, becoming less romantic, or by looking for him “like a second job.”

For some of us, finding the right person requires a longer journey than for others. We just have to take all we can from the travelling and trust our instincts.

No matter where we are in our lives though, knitting, books, friends, family, and dogs make everything just a little bit better, a little bit more vivid. Here’s Rogue with her growing hood, cosying up to Sensational Knitted Socks:

From the side:

And her close-up:

On Wednesday, expect a little discussion of Rogue’s sleeves…and the challenge they pose.

Rob left early this morning to spend a long weekend in St. Louis with his brother, taking the digital camera with him, so I haven’t had a chance to assemble the organized and erudite post that I usually do.  So, for my Friday offering this week, I offer the following assortment of tidbits. 

I’m making somewhat slow progress spinning on the handpainted rovings.  (And if you’re thinking that this looks remarkably like a photo I may have posted before…well, you’re right.)

 

I’m getting a little bored with this, truth to tell, and other fibers are calling my name.  Maybe this llama fiber next:

Or this wool:

Still plugging away on that brown cotton swatch.

 

Hey, Ellen, remember that handspun superwash sock yarn I sent you a while back?

Got any plans for it?  I’m expecting something really, really great.  No pressure.

Harvey and I, having passed our first tae kwon do test last Saturday, are going to the belt awarding ceremony tonight, and we have to take “covered dish,” so that we can have “pah-tay,” as Master Yu so fetchingly puts it.  I’m thinking chocolate cake.  But, I need to get moving on that, whatever food item it turns out to be. 

And what am I going to do with myself this weekend without my dearly beloved husband?  Yes, you guessed it:  PAH-TAY!

It was excitement galore here Chez Mad Dog when an ill-advised groundhog bumbled into our backyard only to be greeted by Shelley, who was deployed on a routine perimeter check.

From my home office, I heard an unusual cacophony of barking and scuffling. But by the time I burst onto the scene, the groundhog was, alas, not long for this world. Shelley has what dog people somewhat euphemistically call a “strong prey drive.” In practice, what this meant was that “the non-violent solution” to the groundhog’s breach of our borders was, ahem, not pursued. I was about to witness my sweet little pup, the companion of all my days, pick up this rather defenseless little creature and give it a violent shake. I heard a squeak. I heard a crunch. There was more shaking. Nature, red in tooth and claw!

Being of delicate sensibility, I averted my eyes. And the groundhog passed on to his hoggy reward.

Someone was rather pleased with herself:

“Look, Ma, I just self-actualized as a large predator!”

When I lived in Berkeley, I used to see a lot of cars with these bumper stickers that read, “Dogs are just little people in fur coats!” As I stood over this freshly-killed groundhog corpse that my dog had proudly deposited under my back porch, I found myself wondering if those people actually had dealings with any real dogs. Because, really, nothing could be further from the truth. And I had the dead groundhog to prove it.

(At least I hope that nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve just had a horrifying vision of little people in fur coats invading my yard in order to shake the bejeezus out of groundhogs.)

Rather than being little people in fur coats, dogs are really just wolves with manners.

Nonetheless, I was kind of feeling like a bad mother, the kind who doesn’t effectively teach her little charge about proper conflict resolution and how to be welcoming and share your cookies when a stranger comes into your yard and so forth, until my friend David told me that his dauschund not only killed a groundhog, but also ate it. I perked up. At least there were no dietary indiscretions Chez Mad Dog!

Still, we had to settle down after all the excitement. Shelley fell fast asleep, exhausted by her murderous efforts to keep the backyard safe from hog incursion:

I knitted more of Rogue’s hood:

A little better detail:

And as I thought back over the day’s events, I began to wonder what happens if a groundhog pops out and, instead of seeing his shadow, is summarily dispatched by his local canis familiaris? Will we have six more weeks of summer? Opinions?

Mad, bad, and dangerous to know:

P.S. I just learned that Woolcott has bamboo sock yarn. Can you say bankruptcy anyone?

Despite my stated and published objective of working on a new sweater design, what I have actually done over the past few days is this:

 

 

Yes, indeed, that is not one but two new scarves I have started.  The first is out of Classic Elite “Imagine,” 53% cotton, 47% rayon; I purchased a somewhat meager 4 skeins of this yarn at (now brace yourselves) Tuesday Morning.  Since I have been looking through the stash a bit (see Monday’s post), I re-discovered this yarn and thought it would be nifty to just make a little something out of it.  And what better kind of little something than a scarf?  See how it’s making those stripes?  Cool, huh?  Well, I thought so, and so did this man (shown here with our son, Harvey):

 

Who happens to be my husband of 15 years, Rob.  The thing about Rob that you must understand is that, though he has the deepest respect for my knitting, he doesn’t really get it.  That is, he doesn’t truly appreciate the more knitterly aspects of the craft.  A complicated and beautiful lace pattern gets this response:  “Neat.”  A complicated stranded project:  “Neat.”  A large lace shawl that I have devoted hours and hours of my life to:  “Neat.”  This scarf, which I have spent about 2 hours on and relies completely on the yarn for its effect:  “Wow!  That’s cool!  Is that for me?”  Huh.

So, maybe it will be for him.  Who can fathom the masculine mind?

The other little project up there is out of some handspun fingering/laceweight wool that I spun up earlier this year.  I’ve had my eye on this stitch pattern for a while:

 

This is from a German stitch dictionary entitled Omas Strickgeheimnisse which I purchased from Schoolhouse Press, and it comes with a handy-dandy cheat sheet/translation which allows one to actually recreate the stitch patterns.  (They are all charted, so it’s not that hard.)  I have a germ of an idea that this pattern would look good as a large stole/shawl, so I decided to try it out as a scarf first and see what I thought.  So far I like it, although it’s really too early to tell.

And, I’ve been hanging out under the piano with Hugo, ’cause it’s hot here.

This weekend Alex and I hung out in one of our favorite coffee shops (mainly to take advantage of their fabulous meat-locker-level air conditioning and only secondarily to consume some joe), a great spot for working on Rogue, who is growing a hood:

Detail:

And they were playing some reggae. I love reggae, used to listen to it all the time in college, but this time I was listening a little more closely to the lyrics and I noticed that a number of the lines seemed, um, how should we say? Written after smoking a little too much ganja, mon? In spite of my well-known love for and fascination with Bob Marley, I still have to ask what Bob was thinking when he wrote Rat Race, and included the ridiculous line, “Rasta don’t work for no CIA”?

Bob. My friend. Tell us something we don’t know.

Were Bob and his fellow rastamen frequently grilled about being in cahoots with the CIA? I gotta say, it just doesn’t seem likely. In fact, I’ll bet my whole stash that the following exchange NEVER TOOK PLACE:

Man (or mon) on street: So, Bob, as a prominent rastamon and international reggae star who spends most of his time rolling spliffs, relaxing on the beach, impregnating various women, growing his dreadlocks, and singing dreamy ganga-inspired songs about “one love” and other elusive concepts, I’m betting that you make some extra greenbacks on the side doing contract work for the CIA.

Bob: No mon.

Mon: Aw, c’mon. Just admit it.

Bob: No mon.

Mon: I don’t believe you.

Bob: No, mon, rasta don’t work for no CIA.

Rightio. Bob Marley is dead, so we’ll never know for sure, but…yeah, last I checked, the CIA, bumbling though it is, was still not soliciting help from guys who smoke pot every day.

Hey, wait just a minute! Maybe. They. Are. That would explain so much.

Now I don’t want to single out Bob for abuse here because we also heard Peter Tosh’s paean to marijuana, Legalize It, winner of The American Lung Association’s Setbacks and Misinformation Award for this stunner of a line: “It’s good for asthma.”

With this kind of firm grip on medical science, it is not entirely surprising that Peter Tosh is dead too. He was allegedly murdered, but I think we may have stumbled on a likelier, if less exciting, explanation for his demise. RIP, Peter, but maybe in your next life, think about enrolling in a basic health class.

Shelley, meanwhile, spent her weekend mornings attempting to rouse her pack members from their slumbers:

“Can you see what I’m up against here? Hopeless, I tell you, hopeless.”

“Dear Lord, what will it take to inspire this slug-a-bed to rise up and face the day?”

“Perhaps like in the fairy tales, a little kiss will do the trick.”

“My work here is done. I will take this sock as recompense.”

First of all, I would like to thank everyone who left comments, emailed me, or posted to the AK list about my simple summer sweater.  The response has been overwhelming, and I am truly touched.  I am now planning to write up the pattern in a range of sizes (to fit a 38″ bust through a 62″ bust) and post it on the site as a free pattern.  I am hoping to get this accomplished in the next couple of weeks.  This will be my first foray into pattern-writing for others, and I’m pretty excited about that.  A chance to stretch my wings a little and learn something new.

In the meantime, the stash, which has become an almost living entity, must be dealt with somehow.

 

 

 

 

Let me just say that my stash, while large, was not so alarmingly large until I became a spinner.  Those of you who are thinking of learning to spin, take note.  When you are a spinner, somehow large bags of fiber take up residence.  It’s such a good deal, you see–you can get pounds and pounds of raw fleece for stunningly small sums of money.  (Remember the raw mohair?  Enough said.)  In fact, sometimes people are willing to give you raw fiber for free.  Well!  I can’t turn down free fiber!

And then, of course, I didn’t just stop buying yarn, either.  Those boxes in the corners up there?  Yarn.  The clear bins?  Yarn.  Sacks on the floor?  Yarn.

In any case, what it boils down to is that something must be done.  Now, if you’re thinking that what must be done is to give some of these riches away, you’re obviously still an amateur.  No, no, no.  What must be done is to organize.  I have a plan which involves large Ziploc bags and hours of happy time spent with my fiber.  And I still have several weeks of summer left in which to accomplish said plan.  I’ll keep you posted.

And now, something tidy to end with today.  My current socks in progress:

 

These are a cabled pattern from Sensational Knitted Socks, by Charlene Schurch, which was given to me by my own dear sister and is a great sock book and definitely worth owning.  (Or giving to a knitting friend or relative, as the case may be.)

 

If you’ve just popped over from Ample Knitters, you can see my sister Sarah’s lovely finished summer sweater in the previous post. A lot of us would like to have the pattern in a range of sizes available on the blog (that includes me), so if you feel the same way, leave a comment now, y’hear?

Yesterday was a very special day because my friend Tope (pronounced “toe-pay,” and a very manageable abbreviation of her lovely full name “Temitope,” which apparently means “she-who-was-born-to-knit-lace”) began working part time at our LYS Woolcott and Company. Legend has it that Paul Revere stopped off there during his famous ride to pick up some nice lace-weight mohair and a retractable tape measure shaped like a sheep, but this may be apocryphal. Today it is under new and very fine management in the person of Sean, who writes a store-related blog right here. And people, the man knows what he is doing! Master knitter. No question.

He made points with me when he offered sympathy and help when I came to the end of my beloved Bianca, only to make the bitter discovery that I had only enough yarn to make 3/4 length sleeves.

Here’s a little close-up:

In spite of the fact that far worse fates had befallen knitters, Sean helped me find another ball to lengthen those sleeves. There’s a special place in heaven for men like Sean.

Since it was Tope’s first day, I toddled on down there to see how she was doing…and perhaps coincidentally to check on a ball of Trekking XXL and a skein of cobweb-weight silk/yak blend that looked like they needed a good home, but naturally these were only secondary considerations. Naturally. I can report that Tope is doing a great job already and will certainly be a major, major asset to the store.

But I also learned a shocking fact: you can work at Woolcott for store credit and Tope is considering this option.

Tope is playing a dangerous game.

And yet I find myself wondering if Woolcott might need another part time employee. I’ve decided to spend most of the weekend standing outside the shop wearing a sandwich board that reads “Will work for yarn.” Meanwhile, that ball of Trekking XXL followed me all the way over to Tealuxe,

and once you give them iced tea and a little snack, there’s no getting rid of them.

A brief visit from my friend Emily, Miss A., and her junior sister made it a doubly special day. Having stopped off about half-way through a car trip to points north, Emily and the littlest one were a tad road-worn:

But Miss A. was eager to show off “The Gap”:

She is in ongoing negotiations with the Tooth Fairy for fair and just compensation for the temporary loss of her front teeth.

I finished the simple summer sweater on Tuesday.  Here I am modelling it:

 

And here is a detail of the neckline edging:

 

Although this edging may look like crochet, it is not.  I’ll just be upfront right here and now and say that I avoid crochet whenever possible.  I don’t like it.  There, I’ve said it, and to heck with the consequences!  (I could go on, but I think we’ll just stop this topic right here.  Things might be said that I would later regret.)

I’m pretty pleased with this sweater.  It turned out almost exactly the way I was envisioning it (a rarity), and it fits very well, I think.  I designed this with negative ease, which was a bit scary for me, but I committed myself to trusting in the measurements, and all worked out in the end.  There are a couple of things I would change, one of them being the way the top-down sleeves are constructed, since I think they ended up just a bit too full.  I am thinking of actually writing this up as a pattern (with other sizes, too!) and offering it as a free pattern on the blog.  Anyone interested in that?

And now, on to other things.  My next project, is, as yet, just an emergent swatch:

 

and a rough sketch:

 

This yarn is Filatura Di Crosa Millefili Fine, 100% mercerized cotton, that I purchased from Elann some time ago.  In fact, this yarn has already had one life as a sweater that I wore many times and enjoyed, although it never fit quite the way I had wanted, or was as flattering as I feel it could have been.  So, a couple of months ago, I ripped the whole thing out, washed the yarn, and have had a few ideas simmering on the back burner for it.

Right now, as you can see from the sketch, I’m seeing this as a fitted, short-sleeved cardigan sweater, although not one that would have something else worn underneath.  The v-neck I would like to be deep enough to be a little sexy, but not so deep that undue cleavage is shown.  But, I’m still pondering the details.

(Upon reading over this post, I realize that I have made it sound as though I have only one project going at a time.  I would like to stress that this is not true.  In fact, I am one of those weak-minded persons who cannot resist casting on with whatever new or rediscovered yarn crooks its little finger at me.  Right off the top of my head I can think of three other projects I have going, and those are just the ones in the top layer.  It is also not uncommon for me to get 2/3 or even 3/4 of the way through something, only to decide that I no longer like it or it’s not worth the candle and rip the whole durn thing out.)