Accomplishment, My Way

It is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in the broken world. --Mary Oliver

I emerged from the work week feeling so grateful to have reached the weekend. I had had a doozy of a head cold all week and I was just looking forward to getting a decent night's sleep and waking up in the morning to having nowhere in particular to be.  Getting sick is the universe's way of reminding you that things can always be worse and that yes, actually, you really do have it pretty good.

Thanks for the reminder. Now kindly buzz off with your head colds.

Just before I sat down to write this post, I was feeling like I hadn't really accomplished much this week, but when I look through the photos on my phone, I realized that "accomplishment" has lots of different guises:

... Like feeling energetic enough to go to the gym this morning and then to come home and take Seymour out for a long walk. We stopped to admire the plum trees in bloom on the way home:

 ... Like taking time to enjoy the sunshine by the water with a little dog that refuses to look at a camera lens:

... Like making homemade pizza and realizing you made too much dough and having to make a set of bagels and rolls out of the rest of it:

... Like experimenting with a cinnamon roll recipe. It was a semi-success. The orange poppy seed glaze saved the day:

... Like finally taking photos of a vintage glass lampshade I brought home a few weeks ago:

I'm going to set it this way up and put a tea light in it. It'll make a lovely nightlight:

I suppose that I have been quite productive with this sweater at least. I am about halfway through the first sleeve, and it's turning out much better than thought it would. It feels weird to be knitting straight stockinette after so many weeks of knitting that cables and lace pattern. I always feel both glad and sad to say goodbye to a cable and lace chart. I depend on it for so long that it feels like it becomes a part of my brain, and to suddenly stop using it seems a bit like finishing a good book and having to say goodbye to the characters:

Sentimentality aside, this is the first time I've knitted set-in sleeves from the top-down, and even though I expressed my doubts about it in my last post, I am happy to say that I take it all back. They are awesome! Apologies to the knit gurus who came up with this method. You were right after all:

I'm really grateful to finally be rid of this cold, as I feel like I have a few hills to climb in the coming weeks. Life is like that, I guess. It never really plateaus into ho-hum existence. I suppose that's why we feel the need to be productive: it fools us into believing we can wrangle the world into straight lines when in reality, we are all just sort of floating and connecting and floating off again.

I guess I better float off and peel some shrimp for dinner. Have a good week.