Magical dates

Isn't it amazing how when you promise yourself you will feel someway on a certain date, it works? Well, last Thursday was 3 months from the Bump's due date, which means "third trimester" to me, and all of a sudden I am really, terrifyingly pregnant.

I feel like I have expanded horizontally over the last week and now am having more trouble sleeping. Luckily, I've had two sleep-in days to recover.

The baby stuff has started arriving - I figured the first thing we "needed" was a car seat, lest they not allow us to remove the baby from the hospital. While reading the descriptions of the various possible seat belt configurations and which might or might not work, I gave up. S to the rescue. He got the thing installed and said it was actually not hard. Whew!

Part of this third-trimester-induced terror also had to do with some civic responsibility I was practicing last week - I got called for jury duty. And, not only that, I got selected. And, not only that, but it was a medical malpractice case related to a life-threatening post-delivery situation. So, now, I think I can hear just about anyone's delivery story and not mind - now I know the worst, and the best. Because although the woman lost a lot of blood and went into shock and had to have a hysterectomy and spent her post-partum days in the ICU, everyone pulled together and she lived. So. Hopefully I will get through it too, and hopefully with a little less trauma.

Knitting? Oh, ok. Well, I didn't actually get much knitting done on jury duty. They were quite efficient aboout not having us wait around doing nothing. I didn't knit in the courtroom, because it would have been disrespectful, I think (though the judge was doing some weird cutting and taping in his planner through the trial). I didn't knit in the jury room, because it just caused a lot of questions and I didn't feel like prosteletyzing. And, besides, reading was a good way to keep from saying anything case-related to my fellow jurors.

But I have been cranking on St. Brigid. I now have 4 repeats done on the front or back. I think there are 8 repeats in the pattern for the back? Once I got to 4 though, I crashed. That's some pretty good progress for a few weeks. I started thinking about what my next Aran project would be - I think either Irish Moss (AS Aran Knitting) or Fern (AS Stillwater). Irish Moss is gorgeous, but has twisted stitches on every row...I will have to research doing this without having to purl into the back of the stitch, which is no fun. Next magical date: Feb. 2, where I can stop working on St. Brigid, should I choose, and pick up Aberlemno again. A much more picture-iffic project for the blog.

After celebrating my St. Brigid progress, I switched over to mindless knitting: spent a little time on my Opal sock and on the grey hat to match my gloves. I also had a little more mindful knitting: a lot of time on some swatches for the guild program on Intarsia tomorrow. I was trying to use some of the suggestions in SWAK's booklet on intarsia technique for one swatch (with some level of success, but I think I need more practice), and the other swatch used some intarsia-in-the-round techniques from PGR's article in Fall 03 IK. It took me a bit of time to decide which techniques were appropriate, and I'm not fully satisfied with what I ended up using. But I can present some pros and cons now.

After having been out of the office for a few days, I've got lots piled up, so wish me luck on getting enough sleep and making it through the week! And keep your fingers crossed that either S or I remember the "new" administrator password on the home PC, so we can get the new printer installed. Grr!