My dog is shiny

(Cute shiny dog photo to distract from knitting-free post)

It's been sort of a crazy week around here - I'm just realizing today that it hasn't actually been extra busy, it's just harder to cope with it. Because I Haven't Had Coffee Since Sunday.

The BikeJerk's been having stomach issues for a while (work-stress related) and has quit eating and drinking any number of things that make life worth living (tomatoes, wine, cheese, spicy food). He had no problem quitting those things (except the mental anguish of a food-lover deprived of his previously iron stomach), and so I had no problem continuing to eat them in front of him, trying not to _visibly_ enjoy them. But it finally came down to coffee. And he loves coffee. A lot. It seemed like a little too much torture to continue to brew coffee in the house (filling it up with its lovely aroma) with him not able to drink any, so I stopped drinking it. [I know that die-hard coffee drinkers would just stop somewhere to get their morning fix, but I'm not that die-hard.] I never even had caffeine on a regular basis until about 4 years ago, but let me tell you, that doesn't make it any easier to stop. I feel much better now, but Monday and Tuesday were a haze.

Anyway, I hardly know how I've spent my time this week. There are new piles of books, so I assume I spent some time in the library. There are two balls of yarn to make the BikeJerk a new hat, so I deduce that I bought that. There's a lovely hank of handspun, which I must have spun, but it's all a blur.

There's a decent amount of knitting going on around here, but no pictures (even of the handspun - perhaps this weekend when I'm actually at home during daylight hours?): almost half of what's on the needles is secret for one reason or another, and most else is just tedious to share (yes, my scarf is now twice as long as it was, but it's still a rectangle. Nothing to see here, folks, just move along.). But I'll leave you with something that struck me last weekend. A woman at the knitting brunch I sometimes attend had a wonderful insight - maybe others have already realized this, but it struck me nicely: buying yarn (or spinning fiber, which was her example) is not just buying to have, like a lot of things are, but rather buying moments of happiness sometime in the future, when you'll sit down with your angora (or whatever), and do something you enjoy very much. Even though the happiness is somewhere in the future, even the act of buying the yarn partakes of the joy, because you can picture how happy and relaxed you'll be doing that knitting or spinning.

It's a lovely way to think of it, I think, though, to borrow a slogan from the liquor companies: Knit responsibly.