Phew, it's over!

Phew! What a relief.  It's over.  "It" being the Elizabeth Zimmerman Pi shawl, the full-time summer season at work, and summer itself.  Granted, it doesn't feel like summer is over.  It's still ungodly hot and humid, but it's September.  The kids are back in school, the leaves are changing color (okay, two leaves way out in the woods have changed color,) and the stores are removing the notebooks & backpacks from the shelves and replacing them with candy corn.  Candy corn season is probably my all time favorite season.

And then there's the end of my full time summer work schedule.  It's weekends only now.  And boy, have I enjoyed having a few days off.  For the last three weeks, I ended up going in on my days off to help out because we've been so short staffed.  And well, let's face it, work is fun.  Let me rephrase that.  Parts of work are fun.  Well, part of work is fun.  I LOVE the playing with the money part.  The hot, sweaty, buggy, physical labor parts, not so much.  But playing with the money is fun.  But no matter how much fun it is, I'm glad to have a few days off to catch up on sleep and eat a meal that doesn't come wrapped in paper.

And since I've had a couple of days off, I finally finished the Elizabeth Zimmerman Pi shawl and started a poncho.

OTN 09/09/15

I haven't blocked the shawl yet so it just looks like a big messy blob of weird knitting.  I'm sort of putting it off because of the ruffle I put on it.  I just can't bring myself to deal with blocking that.  And, I'm not sure I have enough blocking mats.  I think it's going to be pretty big once it's stretched out.

The poncho is the Autumn in Alta which I stumbled across on Ravelry.  I'm not normally a big poncho fan, but something about this one spoke to me and I already had appropriate yarn in the stash pile.  I'm not sure I'll still be in love with it when I get closer to the end of all that stockinette, but, worse case scenario - it will be a good work-knitting project.  Or it will be if I'm still working on it in October.  While the summers are blisteringly hot, it can get pretty dang chilly at the end of the season.  It may feel pretty good to have all that knitted wool fabric laying across my lap on those chilly nights at work.

But for now, I'm off to go eat a meal.  A real meal.  A home-cooked meal, eaten off a real plate, not styrofoam, with real silverware,  not plastic.  Life is good!