My Reward

Knitting is a huge stress release for me. When I sit down I can just work on something for hours and let all my cares melt away. This is both good and bad. It’s good because we all need some way to decompress after a long, hard day. However, it’s bad because I tend to shirk other duties. And I have been very stressed lately. This means….

1. The apartment is in desperate need of a good cleaning. I’m not the world’s most tidy person. But this is getting out of hand. But thinking about cleaning makes me stressed. So I knit more. Bad.
2. I need to pack for a trip. Never mind the fact that I haven’t unpacked from the last one.
3. In order to pack I need to do laundry.
4. To be less stressed I should probably sleep more. However, when I stay up until midnight knitting on socks and sweaters or browsing Ravelry one more time this doesn’t help. Yellow sock number 2. Started last night.
5. I need to be learning some Romanian. I’m going on a trip to Moldova this summer. I would like to be able to say, “Hello,” and “Where is the bathroom?” before I step off the plane in Chisinau.
6. I’m not getting any exercise or eating anything remotely healthy. I’m not a big health nut in the first place but after Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, a trip to Savannah, and a Super Bowl party I should at least be thinking about getting off the couch once in a blue moon.
7. But knitting is so much fun! And peaceful! And…and…:::sigh::: ok, I need a plan.

I’m going to get things back on track. I just have to do like I do at work and develop a schedule. Luckily I already have half of one done. Last year about this same time (probably for the same reasons since life is cyclical after all) I developed a chore plan where I clean one room a day, do one load of laundry, and then a little something else (take out the trash, run the dishwasher, get groceries, etc.). This is a good plan. It will only need a very little tweaking to put into place. Phase 2 of the plan is to walk at least one mile a day outside of what I normally do. This is very do-able. It takes like 15 minutes and I like the outdoors. When it gets warm enough I’m really looking forward to borrowing Jenn’s bike and going after work to the park to ride around. Phase 3 involves actually working a little on my Romanian at night instead of watching crappy TV so much. The real key to all this, however, is that knitting will be my reward for doing these things every day. After my walk and my chores I can watch a few TV programs I really like and knit and then I can learn some Romanian and knit some more (I like multi-tasking). But if those things aren’t done first, the knitting will wait. I just have to be strong and stick to this plan.

Since writing this post this morning I would like to point out that I have (mostly) packed for my trip, went to dinner, took a nap, and done a load of laundry. Not coincidentally, only half a row of knitting was finished.
Penelope naps on a knitting book. She has no plans for change.