Wednesday, August 30, 2006

I see daylight

My desk has moved, temporarily to my boss' office. Which means that I have real natural light as I type this, it also means that the usually cramped 10x10 Ft of office are now REALLY cramped. It's lucky I have a nice, compact iMac desktop, so that my computer can perch on the front half of this desk. The entire back half is stacked (thankfully, neatly stacked) with all the binders of product info and protocols from the lab, and my notebooks. One of which I optimistically put in a box, then had to run to retrieve two hours later.

The lab is being renovated next week, so this week has been the week of packing, trashing, and frantically finishing as many experiments as possible before we're cramped into a much smaller space for the interim. It's a bit tiring. I am taking off week two of the fortnight of chaos, not going out of town, but officially unavailable to pop in to the lab and keep things going. I am hoping that I will also be unavailable to regular phonecalls asking where things are, or what stage x y or z experiment is at right now. This hope may be a little unrealistic, but we'll see.

This morning I finally got back to the gym, it had been nearly 2 weeks since my last swim. At about 5.30 I realized that was MY alarm going off, and leapt to a sitting position, somehow making the bed make a fantastic *SPROING* noise, which scared the crap out of one sleeping cat and one sleeping husband. Things went much more smoothly after that, however, once I had reassured them both that it was just me waking up violently. I had baklava and yoghurt for breakfast (I know, horribly decadent), pulled on my swimsuit and jeans, and made it there in time to fit in a 20 min swim and 10 min in the sauna before I had to get dressed and escape the impending workmen in the women's changing area. The gym is being renovated too.

My swim felt really good, I swam 3 laps more than my previous standard for 20 minutes. This time I remembered to put my goggles on squarely before getting in the water, so they remained mostly un-fogged and I got the fun of watching my hands under water and the shadow I cast on the pool bottom as I swam. I don't know why, but that's always a really fun aspect of swimming to me. Stuff looks different and mysterious under water, especially my own hands, trailing a few bubbles, with my silver rings glinting in the blue green light filtering through the water. Nail polish looks extra shimmery under water too, but I'm not wearing any today. I may paint my nails a frosty blue and pretend I'm a mermaid on my next swim.

I had been thinking of using part of my week off to paint the bedroom, but I'd probably better not add any form of home renovation to the mix just now. Too much chaos!

Sunday, August 06, 2006

work in progress


work in progress
Originally uploaded by Rosemary Grace.
Marble is relishing a rare opportunity to check out the work in progress. When I was winding the wool for this scarf into balls, she got hold of one and ate a fair bit of wool before I caught her. So now I know I can't leave it unattended in between working on it. Real wool seems to have a magnetic attraction for cats. They're not nearly so interested in the synthetic or cotton yarn I've used previously.

This is hand dyed and spun wool that I treated myself to before I even knew what I'd make with it, there's a lot of variegation in the colour that is not showing up in the photo, little streaks of violet and cobalt blue. It's a little strange knitting myself a scarf in the hottest months of summer, but I look forward to chillier weather when I can start to wear it.