What a week. It began with a midterm exam in art history, for which I studied in between freelance jobs and my school job. Once the test was behind me, I started outlining my English paper. Wednesday I had to devote entirely to a proofreading job. The poor characters in this sorry text have only three gestures between them: furrowing their brows in concern, dropping their jaws, and running frustrated hands [sic] through their hair. The author is also laboring under the delusion that “glimpse” is an intransitive verb synonymous with “glance”. Proofreading this manuscript felt like touching up the gingerbread work on a bicycle shed.

So when I woke up Thursday feeling like a hangover victim, I was mildly intrigued at this empirical evidence that bad prose has lasting physical consequences. Alas, further study will be necessary to settle that hypothesis: it turned out I was getting a cold. I took the bus into town for my afternoon class, but the professor to whom the English paper is due failed to appear for the second class in a row. Peevish at this waste of energy and proofreading time, I trundled home and just managed to get the manuscript to the post office on time. I spent the evening writing an article for the school newsletter.

Friday I dragged myself out of bed and in to school, feeling as though I ought to have a company of dwarves named Sneezy, Snotty, Slimy, Drippy, Teary, Throbby, and Mucus to sing my theme song: Sniffle While You Work. By the time the last of the parents had inched through traffic to collect their children, I was fit for an evening of nothing but nursing my box of Kleenex and my mug of tea and watching Anne of Green Gables. This was bad for my English paper, but good for the Fishtrap Aran. I’ve made up the ground I lost in ripping plus another half a chart repetition.

Today I felt better enough to accompany my cousins to a performance of The Witches, by Roald Dahl. It was a delightful adaptation of the book, with some wonderful acting. It was pretty scary for kids, but deliciously so for six-year-old Sam, who loves that sort of thing. The best part was listening to him comforting his slightly younger cousin Adrian, pointing out that the Formula 86 Delayed-Action Mouse-Maker was only food coloring.

I also felt better enough to put some more thought into the yarn I’ll be dyeing tomorrow. Option B, the blue sweater, has the lead in the polls over Option A, the orangey-terracotta version, so I did a little swatching to see what I’d be getting into either way. TGIS can stand for Thank Goodness It’s Saturday, but Chez Blue Garter it has another meaning: Thank Goodness I Swatched! I’ll show you pictures of the sorry results tomorrow.

Orange, it turns out, does not play well with the other children. So it’s back to the drawing board for the Fair Isle Yoke sweater. In the meantime, I thought I’d measure out some sock yarn to see if I can dye it self striping. Grumperina’s latest caught my eye, and I thought it would be nifty if I could do two shades of green and have them alternate in synch with the cables. I knit up the first eight rounds of Hello Yarn’s pattern modified ala Grumperina, then ripped them out to see how long my color repetitions would need to be. Um…really long. I had to use most of the furniture in my living room as a niddy noddy. You should have seen me circling around the back of the couch, around the marimba stool, past the coffee table, over the rocker, and around the purple chair, paying out yarn as I went. I felt like a medieval penitent making the equivalent of the pilgrimage to Jerusalem in laps around a garden maze. 400 yards of sock yarn, my friends — that’s a lot of trips around the living room. And it may all be for naught if I can’t keep the resulting enormous skein from tangling hopelessly in the dye vat. Putting it in indigo will probably be a two- or three-person job. Let’s hope some of my classmates are up for the experiment.