Carrot

Here’s where things would have started to slide during the first iteration of this blog. There is knitting (thankfully), but I have nothing special to report—nothing newly finished, no milestones reached.

The incomparable ladies of the Limestone Creek Fiber Guild met yesterday, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself as usual, but there’s no reason for you to care about that. I baked a paleo cranberry orange loaf to bring with me and for which I might have shared the recipe had it been tasty, but it wasn’t. It turned out very wet. My host (who has experience with such things) thought it might have been the coconut flour. Apparently, coconut flour absorbs liquid at a different rate than wheat flour, so you have to let anything you mix it with sit for awhile before putting it in the oven. Good to know, but again, not at all relevant to knitting.

Work is very busy, and that does have a slight connection to knitting in that I’m considering putting a knitting-related carrot at the end of one particular work stick. One of the things I do for a living is teach freshman composition. At the moment I’m teaching through an online university, and I’m in the process of designing my own course. “Designing” is actually a rather lofty term for what I’m doing, which is pretty much the same thing I always do in the course. The difference is that  because this course is online, I’m having to literally write out every single word, even the ones I would normally speak. Up to this point, I’ve been teaching from a canned course the school acquired through a third-party “content provider,” and I don’t particularly like that. It will be a relief to be able to teach the course in a way that makes more sense to me. But I have to finish writing everything out—every word of every lecture, explanation, tip—if it’s going to be in the class in any form, it has to be written down so it can be processed through the online course creation machine. The idea is to make the material available in every conceivable format so as to accommodate students with different kinds of learning styles. So there will be audio, visuals, etc. And all of this is produced from the transcript I provide.

Anyhooo . . . this whole process is taking awhile and is becoming a bit of a slog. And, as usual, my monkey mind wanders to knitting. Here’s the thing, though. I think I’ve come up with the perfect incentive to help me power focus through getting my course finished. I’m considering starting The Knitting Guild Association Master Hand Knitting Program. (!!!!)

I’ve been wanting to start this program for ages. You’re given assignments to complete, and you swatch and do research for written reports and just generally knit and learn about knitting and get feedback from experts on your knitting and interact with a bunch of other people who are crazy about knitting. (!!!!!)

I seriously considered starting the program when we made our big move a year and a half ago. Stranger in a new place—no friends, not many obligations, all of that. As it turned out, though, we made a number of great friends right away, and there was more than I ever imagined to do. So no time for the Master Hand Knitting Program. But now . . . things have settled down; winter is upon us; I desperately need a light at the end of my course designing tunnel . . . I’m thinking this might be just the thing. I could allow myself a little thinking and preparing as a picker-upper during the next couple of months of work with an eye toward starting the program after I’ve finished writing the class, sometime in early 2015.

Hmmmm . . . I think I feel better already.