Waiting for the white stuff.

You may remember, if you are as old as me, those bumper stickers that people used to have back in the 70's, that simply said "Frodo lives!" Usually on the back of old volvos, driving around funky towns like Davis, Asheville or Hilo... maybe because I'm teetering on the brink of Ravelympics, about to knit something for the Lord of the Rings fandom's Team Middle Earth, or because I'm planning my long-awaited party of a Lord of the Rings reread, but I kept thinking of the phrase "Ariann lives!!" this morning as I continued to dither about how big to actually make her collar, as I still have a bit o' the yarn left. Anyway, my feelings of being strangled and consumed by this sweater have lessened somewhat.

We area all sitting around waiting for a "big" dose of winter weather here in Atlanta, as it's calling for up to 2 inches of snow to dump in the metro area in the next 24 hours. I am astounded and gobsmacked by the walloping that DC and surrounds got, in the big snOMG event last week and before. I'm even kinda over being jealous, as that much weather, repeated that many times, just ceases to be any fun for anyone. I cancelled a trip up to the Olde Country today, as my mom's driveway is reportedly a sheet of black ice, and snow is piled up everywhere around there, too. I'm a little sad, but far less stressed than I would have been, had I been trundling up the road for that visit. I'm a bit sick of winter, here, but if it's gonna stick around, at least bring me some o' that white stuff!!

This week has been parent-teacher conferences at my school, and sweet baby Jebus, were they ever grueling! Most parents were lovely, but doing the meetings (45 of them) at a round table with other teachers, and pretty much back-to-back for 2 days straight, took any voyeuristic joy out of seeing just how far the apples were falling from the trees. There's only so many times I can hear myself saying the same damn things over and over again, and listening to my coworkers do this, too, just made me want to scream. The few crazies we saw, though, were buffered by having the whole team at the table, which was good. We were also able to have our boss call us into (ahem) "meetings" if the conferences were anticipated to be potentially too long. I left work yesterday at 4:30, feeling like I needed to take my brain out of my head and scrub it. Mercifully, a 2 hour nap and a nice yoga class full of forward bends took care of some of that chatter in my head, and what was left was dispatched by a tall, cold Dos Equis draft and the 2 hour premier of the new season of "Survivor: Heroes vs Villains." Now I have a 5 day weekend beginning, so I'm ever so relaxed and happy.

I've been contemplating a severe break from the internets, at least temporarily. I blog rarely, and so taking a break wouldn't really effect this site, here, but I've been looking back on the past 15 years or so, and remembering the days when I felt like I had time to tackle refinishing big pieces of furniture, paint rooms in my house, bicycle 40 miles, go to the gym, keep a clean house, garden a bit, take fun day trips and cook ambitious things like souffles and empanadas. Funny, it turns out all this stuff was going on back in my pre-Facebook/Ravelry/long bloglines mindless internet timewasting era. Imagine that! I actually have some "gotta do" type projects that involve the internets; job applications, photographing and uploading the prodigious stash to Ravelry, Those things, however, do not involve hours of idle chatter on Facebook and surfing Rav for potential projects that I'll never get around to knitting because I'm online so damn much, goofing around. I need to get some balance, here!!

Trying to figure out how this will look, what the parameters will be, can I manage it informally, or do there need to be strict things like the use of applications like Leechblocker and Freedom software put into practice. I kinda think that might help. Anyway, stay tuned for more on this. Or less.

I'm off, now, to bring in a load of firewood for the evening's fireside knitting, and to contemplate dinner (I'm thinking homemade tomato soup) and some housecleaning.