Goals!

I'm pretty impressed with myself these days.  Okay, I'm also The queen of denial so I'm totally, 1,000% ignoring the number of times I've broken my yarn diet.  But being the queen of denial, I'm ignoring that.  Instead, I'm focusing on the positive things.

Every year I set goals for myself.  I write them down then I basically ignore them.  But this year...

This year, I knew life would be a little rough and 99% of my days would not go as planned.  I planned on not living with a plan and I set my goals accordingly.  I still have goals for the year, they were just much more doable than normal.  And guess what - I'm actually doing a few of them!

It's only February and I've already read more than half the books on my list.  Not having internet (i.e. Netflix) sure is helping with that one.

One of my yarn drawers is ... well, not empty, but it has a definite empty corner.

I have not bought a single pen in 2020!  (We won't mention the notebook count.  We are focusing on the positives here, not the slip ups!)

I set a goal to increase the average number of monthly blog readers by the end of the year.  The goal I set had me increasing readership by about 300 each month.  It was a pretty 'out there' goal that I never expected to come close to reaching.  But, as of today, I only need to increase readership by an additional 538 in order to reach my goal for the whole year!  I have no idea why, but I'm way ahead of where I expected to be this month but thank you!  Thank you, thank you, thank you!  That is all your doing and I can't express how grateful I am.  I do wonder though, can I look a gift horse in the mouth?  Can I ask that you share a post or two over the next few months?  As excited as I am now, I can't imagine how fantastic it would feel to reach my annual goal in the first quarter.  There might even be a give-away if that happened!

Another goal I set for myself was to learn certain things.  I'm already making progress on mastering Excel.  I'm far from a master but I can do a lot more with it now than I could in December.  And, remember my goal to learn to knit with two yarns in one hand?  Done!  This one was so easy to learn I'm embarrassed that I had it on my list in the first place.  

Lofoten knit with Wool of the Andes

Now, if I could only learn to count.  Apparently this Lofoten hat is going to give me lots of practice knitting with two colors in one hand.  I'm about to tink the last row for the second time.  Good grief!  The pattern says to knit two yellow stitches then one gray and repeat.  Twice now I have knit two yellow and two gray. Argh!  But hey - I'm being positive here.  I'm choosing to think of it as more practice at two color knitting.   And, there is no deadline for this hat.  Thankfully!  Because it may be next February before I get past this one row.

I have to say though, despite my inability to count, I really like this method of holding the two yarns in one hand.  My stitches, floats and gauge seem to be much more even than when I knit with two hands.  I think there will be much more colorwork in my future!

And again, thank you all for showing up here and reading my blog.  I still don't know why you do.  According to all the 'how to blog' books, each post should be either educating you or selling you something.  That definitely doesn't happen here.  I just talk to you about my knitting instead of to my family.  And believe me, they are thankful!  I imagine my marriage would have lasted about 20 minutes if I talked this much about knitting to my husband.  We are both thankful for your continued presence here!

And while I'm blathering on about how thankful I am....  Many of you have blogs that I follow religiously.  Some of you may have noticed that I haven't been commenting lately.  My apologies for that!  I'm still reading, but I have to read them on my phone most of the time and my phone refuses to allow me to comment on anyone with a Wordpress blog.   It sends me into a never ending loop of wanting me to log in but then it wants me to create an account but it won't let me create an account until I log in.  Anyway, please know that I'm still reading.  I'm just commenting in my head instead of on the screen.