Life, Knitting and the Pursuit of Roller Coasters

It’s sort of a clean slate for ‘08 around here. I’m taking next week off, and I’m leaning closer to not going to visit the folks for New Years proper. That means aside from a doctor’s appt on Thursday, I have 9 days home alone by myself with the kitties. I’m thinking back, and in the 8 (as of Jan 15th) years since I’ve been working I’ve always used my vacation time to get out of town. I don’t think I’ve been at home by myself (excluding an occasional illness) for more than a 4-day stretch. I’ve done 9-day road trips solo before, but never just spent the time at home. It’ll be an interesting experience and should be a great time to do some decompression and get the @home-to-do-list into a manageable state.

I have a few at-home projects that have been weighing on me, and I just need to reboot my brain since it kinda checked out for the better part of the last month. I’ll have the holiday knitting wrapped up (dad got an IOU for his second sock, but otherwise the rest was done) this weekend while I decompress. A couple other small UFO’s from earlier in the year will likely be tackled this week and I may frog a couple projects to clean up the needles. I mainly want to spend the week decluttering though. I have a catch-all room that’s full, a holiday closet that’s a mess, and another hall closet that’s not being utilized well. Plus the kitchen just needs a major top-to-bottom overhaul and scrubbing. I’d like to actually have a functional home that’s a little easier to maintain. Since I revamped the bedroom a couple months ago, I know that I’m not that far off from getting it to a workable point. The start of a new year seems like a good time to get to it.

Tucked around all the sweat equity, I’ve got some online reading I’ve let slide and a backlog of about 2 weeks of blog reading to catch up on. If I can get back to the point of feeling “caught up”, I might just get back in the swing of staying on top of things again.