Keep Swimming

Here is Finn, my faithful (albeit somewhat indifferent) desktop companion.  He leads by example, never getting too riled up about things one way or another.  He appreciates his treasures, but doesn't spend a lot of time obsessing about them.  He takes the time to hang out amongst the greenery, and remembers every once in a while to come up for air.  I could learn a lot from a goldfish.

I have begun my next Nouveau Nordica project , knitting with abandon in the sure knowledge that I have calculated both the size and the gauge correctly.  Or Not.  But the abandon part is true at least.  There is nothing like the momentum of enthusiasm I find in the first few inches of a new sweater.  I think it comes from the pristine quality of a project that I haven't (to my knowledge) messed up yet.  That first screw-up usually ends the honeymoon for me.  After that its just a regular old marriage: Do your best, keep on working, and hope it will seem funny to you later.

I spent some time yesterday on Project Management.  This is a euphemism I use to describe the act of fidgeting around with and reorganizing all my information.  I make spreadsheets and fill in notes on my calendar, and generally revisit all the parts of the project without actually working on any of them.  I guess it's my way of taking the book's (or maybe the author's) temperature.  Something drives me to intellectually pick up and put down every single piece of the work, making notes about what stage everything is in.  I am always hoping to find signs of actual progress during these navel-gazing sessions, and I guess I do, but it's never as reassuring as I would hope.  Ultimately I know what I knew before the fit of introspection:  The deadline is coming and I better haul ass.

The phenomenon that really blows my mind is the way projects have of filling up the time they have been allotted.  I know that if I had a year to do this book, that is how long it would take me.  If it were four months, rather than six, I guess I would somehow do that, too.  So I'll just have to keep swimming.