Back to Real Life

Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream

That's the feeling around here these days. I'm not ready to do a whole wedding-party-honeymoon-recovery recap, not yet. There's a kind of haze surrounding the three weeks between when my summer classes ended and when we returned to work this Monday. I want to do a recap (or maybe write an email to Meg), and I want to do it soon, but life is getting in the way like it always does. We've been working out commute schedules for the fall semester, buying groceries (like adults), and recycling more cardboard boxes than we know what to do with. Those things haven't changed in and of themselves, but life is fundamentally different now.

For one thing, I have mental energy to focus on the knitting and spinning again. Those projects have piled up, and I want to share them. I have a few skeins of handspun that need to be blogged after they've had a bath, and there's a whole sweater that I started, struggled with, and finished that I haven't blogged about at all. Those posts are also percolating in my brain, and I'm glad to have the room for them to percolate.

I want to talk about all these things, and write lesson plans for my new class, and take care of all the same things I was taking care of before getting married. Everything else has taken a back seat, but it's different from other life changes, like when I put everything on hold to write my thesis for graduate school, or when I moved to San Francisco. Instead of feeling like I got stuck in a stagnant pool, I feel as though I've gone over a waterfall in my little boat. And now there's someone to help steer and row. Sitting here in a cafe, waiting for the car to get an oil change, they're playing one of the songs I danced to 20 days ago with my new husband. All I feel is peaceful joy.



Oh yeah, and he's started hinting that he wants a sweater.

Signing off for now...

I know what you're thinking. "She never usually TELLS us when she's going to stop blogging for two or three weeks." But I guess I will this time, since I know about the pause in advance, rather than the absence being due to sheer laziness.

We had this week off work to wrap up last-minute details, see out-of-town family, and chill out a bit. I've been working on the Bernhart cardigan, which has been flying along. I decided on a whim to knit the edging before starting the sleeves, which is totally backwards for me. I'm doing this because I've had my eye on one or two cap-sleeved cardigan patterns (Redhook by Jared Flood comes to mind), and I want to visualize how this would look on me before I start daydreaming about those projects.



We also took a hike in Muir Woods to get away from everything.



The significant other had a moment of recognition, as he knew some people from Troop 80 (he was in Troop 12 back in his boy scouting days).



This hike was the best idea ever.



We took a slightly more strenuous trail than we would usually pick, which was very rewarding. It was just sunny enough for us to work up a sweat, and we sat on a rock in a tiny meadow at our destination before returning (rather quickly, going downhill) back to civilization.



It gave us space to be peaceful, to think, and to process the fact that we'll be married on Saturday. I'll be back in August with more pictures of Hawaii than I'll know what to do with.