This may put me squarely in league with the foil hat people, but I look around at all the stuff that's been happening in the past week—globally and locally—and I have to wonder what else is going to happen. I suspect that we're in for something, but it's not going to be something we expect. It's going to be something that takes us all completely by surprise., like the mountain lion that drops out of the tree onto your head when you are hiking and slices your throat open. Wow. Didn't see that coming.

On that happy note . . .

I am so frustrated with my knitting and designing—or, more accurately, the lack of it. The other night I was working on the top-down sweater and I spilled tea on the sleeve. Fortunately, it was some of my favorite "Evening in Missoula" herbal tea and not some double-strength Oolong. I rushed the sweater over to the sink and rinsed it out. Then I had to let it dry, which meant no more work on it that evening. I received some sample yarn from a yarn company this week. Two of the skeins have enough yardage to knit scarves with, and I'm feel like a little lace knitting, so I cracked open a couple of stitch dictionaries. All that did was give me a full-blown case of analysis paralysis. I am so afraid of spending a month or six weeks designing and knitting something, only to discover that someone else has already done it. Browsing the Ravelry pattern database helps somewhat, but takes a lot of time.

And I am wrestling with whether or not I even want to knit warm-weather items. I almost had to force myself to do it for the newsletter, and they were never what I considered my best work. The problem I am facing is that—in order to have designs ready to go when the weather gets cold again in the fall—I need to be knitting them NOW, and getting the patterns written and edited over the summer. But will the yarn I choose still be available when the design is released?

And so I wallow in the slough of overanalysis and make no progress. This is very much akin to writer's block. I know that I need to just pick something and knit it and not worry about the rest of it. Of course, it doesn't help that DD#2 and I will be on a field trip all next week (the biennial Montana history trip for 7th and 8th graders), a field trip which includes a lot of knitting time. I don't want to take the sweater with me, but I need something that will keep me occupied for four days. I cast on for a scarf last night. If it pans out, it will likely end up as my trip knitting project. If not, I may just skip the summer season and start working on some Arans for the fall.

I miss my newsletter deadlines. I work much better under pressure, apparently.