"i hate you all!" or "why i didn't do any pumpkin-carving last night"

Right around dinnertime, I decided last night would be a good night to carve the pumpkin I begged the DH to bring me from the regional market last week (or was it two weeks ago, now? Seriously, I have no concept of time anymore. Whole weeks vanish into the ether...). I figured, if I didn't carve it then, it wouldn't get carved before Halloween, and it would most likely meet the same fate as last year's pumpkin, which sat on our living room floor until it rotted and began to leak. So, actually managing to slice up the damn thing is something of a priority for me this year.

But before I could start carving, I needed to settle on a pattern. There's definitely a few Pumpkin Masters patterns I like this year (tho' none of them are free, and I can't bring myself to shell out for another damn pumpkin-carving kit), and spookmaster.com has a wide selection of interesting designs. Extremepumpkins.com is always amusing, even if most of the designs there require more pumpkin supplies, prep-time and/or fire-resistant display space than I have available. My absolute favorite designs there, btw, are the un-pumpkin and the Giant Carnivorous Pumpking, which is simultaneously hilarious and way creepy. But I just don't have the resources to go all-out with my pumpkin this year. It's gotta be a keep-it-simple,-stupid kind of thing.

So I asked the DH for his opinion. I was thinking of doing a cat of some sort. He said to do a skull, because skulls are cool. I agree that skulls are cool, but I did a skull last year, so I'm not really feeling the skull thing right now. So then I proposed bats, and he said sure; but I've got a ton of bat patterns. I wanted to know if I should do plain bats, or, say, the Batman: The Animated Series logo. So I kept pressing my case, and my not-so-DH snapped back at me and got all cranky, like I should shut up and stop pestering him. I just wanted some help deciding what to carve, because I'm about the most indecisive person on the face of the planet. If he was so friggin' annoyed by my asking him, he should've just nipped the thing in the bud when I first asked and said "I don't care what you carve in your stupid pumpkin because I'm a cranky asshole who hates doing anything fun that is holiday-related except for cooking and eating big-ass, fattening meals!" Then I would have gotten the message and stopped asking for his input much sooner.

From that grumpy frame of mind, I went to checking my e-mail, where I got several deeply annoying messages. One was from my family, reminding me that we have to find some time around Christmas to spend with them, because they're coming to a time-share here in NY this year, so they'll be "so close" to us instead of in VA where they usually do X-mess. That's a pain in the ass for so many reasons, I don't even want to go into them. Suffice it to say, Christmas is going to be even more of a hassle than usual this year, and ditto New Year's Eve. I'm not going to get to do anything on those days that I actually want to do, and I'm going to be expected to be cheerful about that, to boot. Grrr.

And then there were the e-mails from my bestest girlfriends. To bring you up to speed here: my friend R left me a voicemail on my birthday, September 20th, that was like, "hey Liz, just wanted to let you know that J and I are getting married on the Saturday after Thanksgiving in Virginia Beach, because we figured everyone would be home then. Just wanted to let you know in advance, before the invitations go out in a couple weeks, so you can reserve the date." Well, thanks for such great advance notice. Too bad we'd already made our plans for Thanksgiving, and they involved absolutely no travel outside the Syracuse metro area, because Thanksgiving weekend is the absolute worst weekend of the year to travel anywhere. And nary a "happy birthday" to be heard. Thanks, thanks a lot. So it seems all my other friends have made their travel plans. But I haven't yet, because, again, it's just more hassle than I can deal with right now, in more ways than I even want to explain here. So by this point, I was even madder about everything, and just ready to poke knitting needles into the eyes of every single person I love. I was so frustrated, I had to abandon all thoughts of pumpkin-carving so I could start to hammer down holiday travel plans and reply to those e-mails.

Thank goodness for the internet. All it took to make me feel better was some Stitchy McYarnpants and some blog-jumping. I found a bunch of blogging, knitting medical students and/or doctors and/or scientists! Yay, role-models! There's the Med Student Who Knits, The Doily Maven, Golden Needle, Minicia, The Knitting Doctor, and The Keyboard Biologist. I was seriously beginning to worry, what with that organic chemistry test I bombed on Thursday night, that I really am in the wrong field. It's very reassuring to know there are other people out there who are doing the whole becoming-a-doctor thing (or being a woman in science in general) and still managing to keep knitting and blogging about it.

Hey, speaking of knitting, I was doing that while I was surfing the blogs, and guess what! My Patons Allure Stitch 'n Bitch Nation steering wheel cover is almost done! I just need to make sure it'll fit Lucy's steering wheel, then BO and sew the ends together.


Doesn't it look all nice and round? The pattern actually says to do it in garter stitch, but I thought, hey, it's supposed to go around the wheel, right? Why not stockinette? This may be the first time I've chosen to do stockinette over garter, and I did it because, even besides the fact that I think stockinette's curl works better for this project, garter would've been just too damn boring. For future reference: the thing is a strip that's 3.5" wide (12 sts on size 8 needles), and when I finished one ball of the Allure, I had a strip that was 26.5" long. The overall length of the strip is around 46" right now, which should be just long enough to stretch around the steering wheel. The DH, of course, hates steering wheel covers - but that's his problem, not mine.

Sooo... besides that little spate of irritation and aggravation earlier in the evening which prevented me from doing any pumpkin-sculpting, yesterday was a pretty good day. I wore that red stripy no-sparkle Stitch n' Bitch Sparkle Hat which I made out of Gedifra Fashion Trend near the beginning of my obsession with that yarn.

It was warm, and it looked very cute. And that chemistry test I mentioned? We did get our grades back yesterday (those poor TAs must have been up all night grading!), and I did do terribly, but not nearly as terribly as I had thought I would do. I got a 45 (yeah, out of 100) - which amounted to a D+. The class average was 55, but there were more D's (26-45) than any other grade, so I don't feel too bad about my score on the whole. Hey, I passed! I was only one point away from a C-! I thought my score was going to be in the single digits! With a 45, I'm still in the running for a B for the semester, as long as I get B's on the next test and on the final. That's within the realm of possibility. But it'll be a ton of work. (Ugh.)

And there's still the possibility I can get to carving that pumpkin tomorrow night. But now it is time for me to get dressed so I can go to Starbucks and knit with my crew. Caffeine and knitting, yay!