Fluff and stuff: 5 things 10.2.2020

• Cats are getting snugglier by the day, which is extremely welcome. Bonus: they are fond of belly rubs. Such a treat to be *encouraged* to pet the softest fur.
• One of my oldest friends came to stay unexpectedly – one of the two friends I’ve had since I was 13. Talking with him I realised that all three of us are in pretty similar life phases, facing very similar challenges: moving to new places, trying to get work and life lined up in that new place, trying to make some kind of career shift in our 40s and dealing with all the extreme discomfort that entails. Sort of comforting to know that it’s not just me; all my weird unemployment bullshit can’t just be the result of bad choices if we’re all going through the same thing.
• Interviewed for a job that might not be terrible but isn’t even a proper job to start with, only a freelance role with hopes of a Job (TM) to come. If they could offer me now the job they envisage in 12 months, that would be pretty much perfect, though, so here’s hoping? Incidentally, a pox on video interviews. I’ve acclimatised to phone interviews, but video, ughhh. Quite apart from anything else, they always seem to require me to install a different app and then the interview starts with tech stress and I worry about whether the camera is properly pointed at me and I can’t see my interviewer properly and… just no, please. No.
• Small good news: a rejected design got accepted somewhere else for more money. It’s a pretty simple concept and most of the hard word was already done in the swatching phase, so now it’s just a question of doing the actual knitting and a quick write-up. The fee will cover all of my (astonishingly large but also astonishingly cheap) yarn purchases for the year so far, which is nice, but mostly I’m just enjoying the sense of having an active design project again.
• I’m also starting another self-designed sweater that may or may not turn out to be a publishable design… developing the concept has been a weird process of holding three different goals in my head. It needs to tick the boxes that the recipient specifically wants ticked. It needs to be something I won’t hate knitting. And while it doesn’t need to be publishable, every decision I make gets weighed against criteria for a publishable design. Is this going to be something other people would want to knit? If not, is it worth adjusting, and how, and does that detract from the main goal? Like I say, weird and a bit interesting. Pretty late in the process I’ve just veered away from the concept I was developing to something that feels more right for the recipient, but both of them could in theory be publishable. If I feel like pursuing them. Which I might.

* Nos 8-9 of #52recipes: fancy salad with spicy roast carrots, again from Diana Henry. The kids did not appreciate either of the two sauces (salad should not be sweet, they tell me! and I guess yoghurt should not be garlicky?) but I was surprised how good the carrots were with avo; nice little twist to repeat with regular, non-sweet salads. And buttermilk chicken thighs, mmmmm.