I've been toying with the idea of writing a blog post for a couple of weeks now, but I keep stopping because I can't work out how to adequately account for my absence.
I guess it comes down to this...I was depressed....I still am depressed. Not enough to make me want to stay in bed and shut out the world, but enough to make it really hard to do anything but collapse on the couch with my knitting in the evenings. Enough to totally sap my creativity.
We've been going through some fairly stressful stuff - nothing has turned out badly, but these are things that are stressful even when they go right - I sold my house in Sydney, we bought a house (110m up the road from the one we live in now) and we've been seeing a financial planner to work out what we do with the house we live in now (sell it or rent it out). We decided to buy the new house a little earlier than we were intending as it was a nice house in a good location, so that meant that settlement on my Sydney house hadn't completed yet and we needed everything to go smoothly to have the deposit for the new house on time. I'm a world-champion-standard worrier, so all of that was a huge source of stress, right up until the moment it all fell neatly into place.
In the last week, we've filled in and sent our final loan documentation, and there's still paperwork to be done before settlement on the 5th of July. There's no reason to believe anything will go wrong, but AAAAArgh. I just can't wait until it's all over.
There are packing boxes everywhere, and when I can't find something, I don't know whether to keep looking, or to give up because it's in the bottom of a box somewhere!
I haven't gone to Stitch n Bitch in months because it's really hard to get out of the house on a Tuesday evening.
I have been knitting, just not taking photos of anything. I finished my Dad's alpaca vest, and gave it to him and he likes it very much, but I forgot to photograph it and he's 1000km away in another state so I can't just pop over and take a photo.
For the most part, though, I've been working on a Citron. This was as a result of a suggestion by the lovely Beanly on the Got Friends group on Ravelry. She suggested that Citron was a good choice as a project to mark the selling of my Sydney house - it represented something I loved about the house (the citrus trees) and I could buy the yarn when I visited Sydney in late May to meet my new niece. I bought 4 balls of Morris and Sons Empire 4ply in the gorgeous Plumage colourway (which doesn't look at all citrus-y) and I'm up to the seventh of five sections on the pattern. 7th of 5? Yep, I'm making it bigger than called for in the pattern. I'm hoping to get 8 sections but I'm on my last ball of the yarn I had put aside for this project (I've got two more if I need them but they're meant to be something else) so I will reassess after I finish section 7.
On top of all of that, I'm recruiting at work. We recently put two more staff on to my understaffed team, and last week one of our existing team members submitted his resignation. So it's off into interview-land we go again!
I'm very tired. I hope that I can recover some equilibrium once we move into the new house, and once we have a new staff member chosen. I can't take leave to just sit on my bum and recover as I'll need to take a couple of days off when we move, and any time at home at the moment needs to get taken up with packing boxes. I'm trying to be as gentle with myself as possible, but this depression thingy is very annoying. Of course, I shouldn't complain, there are lots of people having a much rougher time than I am....