The Next Big Thing

I'm in love with the Giotto socks, and I'm putting them on my prediction list for What's Everyone On The Planet Knitting Now?. Adelle knitted them in the recent club installment from Socks that Rock, and they are gorgeous! See them here. And Ms. Yarnbeans is knitting the Giotto cuff with the Hedera leg, which is really exceedingly pretty.

I have a zillion skeins of sock yarn. I have a zillion and one patterns to knit. And now that I have spare time, I have completely filled it with deadline-knitting. Sockapalooza socks, Harry Potter book/movie socks (well, ONE is done in time for the movie...Dobby socks, anyone?). The Mystery Stole, which isn't technically deadline knitting but I really don't want to fall so far behind that I get discouraged, or worse yet, that I lose interest entirely because I'm four weeks behind and other people have finished and now that I've seen the finished product, the fun is zapped. And then there's the swatches and half-finished things scattered all over the house because I somehow have decided to fancy myself a designer and instructor and now have samples to knit, which is heaps and heaps of fun and I love it, but it always leaves me wondering how many of me I thought there were when I started all these projects at once. (I really should sign Travis up to punch me in the face every time I say, "You know what I think I'll try?") And spinning, let's not forget the spinning. (Well, YOU don't forget the spinning, because clearly I already have.)

AND!! The upstairs A/C unit took a poopie yesterday. Thank God we have central zones for upstairs and downstairs; we were able to sleep in comfort in the downstairs guest room while we let the thing rest overnight. Travis opened it up yesterday and found a huge block of ice inside the handler. Here's a tip: change your air filters. We're pretty sure it was the huge rectangles of filth that used to be filters that were blocking the air flow, so the unit never shut off, then froze over and seized up. All we had to do was replace the filters, shut the thing off and let the ice thaw. But here's the thing; it's Florida, it's July, it's like 103 degrees outside with about fourteenhundredeleven percent humidity, and the wool is upstairs. I didn't mind being boiling hot, and I could just move downstairs when it got too bad; but a trunk full of gorgeous handpainted roving braids that each look like they've had a bad perm was not something I was looking forward to. So Travis went up into the attic (didn't I mention the air handler is in the attic?) and sat there in sweltering stagnant heat, sweating bullets and inhaling insulation, with a hairdryer pointed at the ice, trying to melt it faster so we could get the A/C back up and running at least for the afternoon to save the wool.

My hero. For real. I mean, I don't know that I myself could have spent 30 minutes blow-drying a block of ice to save my roving. (For the record, yes, when he crawled back down, weighing probably a good four pounds less than he did when he went up there, he did look an awful lot like he hated me and my stupid stupid wool.)

We let the A/C rest overnight, since it was less oppressively hot and the wool would probably survive, and it seemed to be running okay when we tested it this morning. We *think* everything is okay, and the wool should be fine. We'll see when we get home, since I accidentally forgot to raise the thermostat before leaving and it'll probably be running all day. Hee...oops. (Not that it should surprise anyone. I break stuff. It's kind of my thing.)