Dead…er, Deadline. Plus, Another Yarn Giveaway!

Wound but not knitted, this yarn from Imperial Stock Ranch wants to come live with you! Comment on the blog before Jan. 18 for a chance to win.

Those of you who know me in real life have already heard my muttering and grumbling about this thing called a deadline which I am facing right now.  Unlike Mr. Trask, who dealt with his deadline last year by drinking more Red Bull and hence getting steadily more cheerful (to the point of being a bit frightening), my first impulse when faced with a deadline is to hide in bed (this may explain my love-hate relationship with finishing things, as discussed on New Year’s Eve). These days, I am an adult, or at least I act like one when outside the house, so I have discovered new coping mechanisms for deadline trauma:

• Singing the Indiana Jones theme to myself while driving;
• Telling everyone I know I am on deadline, to shame myself into action;
• Chocolate Bribery;
• Just putting my butt in the chair and getting on with it.

That last one is the most effective, but I find I have to go through the first three stages before getting to the fourth.  Perhaps this discovery will make me more productive in future; I can get all my procrastination by driving madly to a public place while eating chocolate and humming inspiring music; at the public place I could yell out, “Deadline!” and then turn around, go home, and be butt-in-chair.  Hey, it’s possible. [You may notice that I am not mentioning the non-helpful deadline techniques I tried and discarded, such as whining, playing Lexulous, watching clips of polar bears destroying BBC spy cams, lying on the couch and eating Nutella straight from the jar, etc. As the bard said, Let the dead past bury its dead.]

Usually, my go-to procrastination technique is knitting – specifically, starting new knitting projects.  Since this deadline is an enormous one, and since part of it is, in fact, knitting on deadline, I am not allowing myself to do this.  No, even though there are two babies, and one father-laid-up-after-surgery, for whom I could be knitting (and feeling pretty good about myself for making things for other people), I am not knitting anything that is not part of the deadline.  Instead, I’m using my Ravelry queue to save all the patterns I want to make. Maybe this will make me a leaner, meaner knitter, only starting projects I truly will finish. Plus, the yarn giveaway is making my stash leaner and meaner already.  What do you guys think?  Is this the first day of the rest of my life?

Speaking of my stash, Terrye won the yarn from just before the holidays – the Lorna’s Laces sock yarn – and now we’re moving on to gorgeous, American-made Imperial Stock Ranch Columbia 2-ply yarn (rav lnk).  Worsted weight, blue as the Oregon sky, sheepy yet soft, this yarn wants to come home with you.  This is the yarn that makes yarn-sniffers swoon.  Comment on the blog before noon on Jan. 18 for a chance to win this yarn!