Candice DeWitt

The weather has turned, and autumn is decidedly on the way. It’s a cool, gray, dreary day in the best kind of way. Declan and I are both home sick today, embracing a day of rest for our infection-fighting bodies instead of feeling the need to power through the day for the sake of productivity.

The weather change has me craving soup and homemade bread, wanting to shift away from all the outside activities and turn more inward to focus on home as we begin to go into a period of more indoor living. I’ve canned large batches of tomatoes for winter, jams have been added to the pantry over summer as they come in season, and apple picking will be happening in the next week or two and I’ll be dehydrating apple slices, making apple pie filling, and soaking up all that fall brings before everything gets cold and barren. I’ve even taken up my paintbrushes again to practice some art, painting some fall leaves just for fun. I wouldn’t call myself an artist, by any means, but for my first attempt at a new technique I’m pretty pleased with it, and it’s now framed and sitting on a shelf in my home office for the season.

It’s an almost thrilling feeling, knowing that my life right now gets to be lived more by the seasons and embrace some of the things I’ve always known and felt. We’re not meant to be productive every day of our lives, just as our gardens aren’t always in bloom year-round. We go in spurts of growth and rest, too.

This season I am working on slowing down. Simplifying. Buying less, baking less, and just – on the whole – putting far less pressure on myself to create the “perfect” holiday season. Most days I am ok with it. Other days, like today, I find myself jumping in and going overboard again.

So far, today, I have baked a gingerbread house for decorating later, baked gingerbread cakelets, made birdseed ornaments for the birds for Solstice, and am currently working on baking through a batch of my great grandma’s chocolate chip cookies. I still have decorating of this gingerbread house to do, and some mint Oreos to dip in chocolate.

This is, to be fair, a far cry from my usual holiday treat making. I have attempted to tone everything down. In the middle of all of this, though, I realized I’m still trying to do too much. Or, at least, too much for a single day. Maybe if I had spread out the cookie baking earlier in the season? Or maybe scheduled a day kid-free to bake in peace instead of feeling like I’m fighting constantly in the kitchen to bake? Maybe next year will be better?

The semester is FINALLY over, which means I can now go back to a somewhat normal life for the holidays. I’m still awaiting the grade for my final project for the class, but I nailed my final exam with a 98/100 score, so I’m just going to put school out of my mind for a good while and take some time to get caught up on housework, my non-education-related reading, knitting, etc.

I am… struggling with the holidays this season. I love the glitter and the lights and the cozy nights with family and friends and the food… and I have found myself outright hating the commercial aspect with gift-giving and such. Everything is so loud and overwhelming. I saw an ad while watching Hulu that implied giving a GAP-branded hooded sweatshirt every year was like a tradition and that it implied love and thought. It’s. Just. A. Sweatshirt. And one that was probably made by small children in some 3rd world country for that matter.

The thing is… no one I buy for actually needs anything. We all have houses that are full of stuff, and we’re just going to be adding more stuff to those houses. Or maybe we’ll be replacing our perfectly fine stuff with brand new stuff just because it’s new and we have to get rid of something to make room for it… which, either way, just means we’re contributing more to landfills and waste and and and… the amount of stress I feel when I think about all of this is probably ridiculous, but this is what I’m going through this year.

I am pushing through some of it this year, because it was already too late for me to really plan anything different, but I think next year we’re going to approach the holidays much differently. A far more reasonable, less commercialized holiday is what I’d love to try.

We’ll see.

Speaking of gifts… Sean has requested a knit hat for Christmas, so that has been my latest project. He rarely asks me to knit him anything, so when he asked for a hat I had to immediately get started on it. He specifically requested I use stash yarn because, in his words, “you already have plenty of yarn to choose from” so that’s what he’s getting – a hat knit out of the leftovers from a sweater I knitted a few years ago. I’m not going to lie – I’m disappointed by not being able to go yarn shopping for this gift. But I can’t fault him – I did have yarn to use for it, AND it helps me with my stash down numbers so I can end the year with less yarn than I started with. And I know he will appreciate that I didn’t spend extra money on yarn lol.

Tonight we’re baking Gingerbread houses. I ordered this cute little mold set from Pampered Chef because I’m all about shortcuts when my kid is involved in helping. So we’re going to try baking those tonight and see how it goes. We don’t normally do gingerbread houses so maybe it’ll become a nice little tradition for us.

November is the pearl-grey month, the changeling between warm crimson October and cold white December, the month when the leaves fall in slow drifting whirls, and the shapes of the trees are revealed, when the earth imperceptibly wakes, and stretches her bare limbs and displays her stubborn unconquerable strength before she settles uneasily into winter. November is secret and silent.

Alison Uttley

Daylight savings today, and thus begins the slow decline into seasonal depression on top of my regular anxiety and depression. It’s somewhat hard to believe that November is already here – it feels like October was such a blur and, yet, dragged on.

This was, in part, because I spent the month of October dealing with some things I had been ignoring. Diet was the first thing to come up thanks to what I’m pretty sure was food poisoning, and, since the beginning of the month, I’ve basically been eating vegan-ish and avoiding animal products where I can. Life is busy and stressful and it isn’t something I am aiming to go 100% on (not yet, at least). I don’t want to be out with friends and refuse to eat something because it isn’t vegan. I’ll eat some chicken if/when I want it. But I’m aiming to have the bulk of my food intake be plant-based, with a heavier focus on lots of green veggies, and it seems to have really helped over these last few weeks.

The second thing, which was really the biggest and most difficult, was that I decided to quit drinking alcohol for the month. Quitting drinking was something I’ve off-and-on tried (and failed). It isn’t so much something I want to do so much as something I know I need to do along with the rest of my self-care. Over the last few years – since having Declan, actually – my relationship with alcohol has become poorly managed and, probably not coincidentally, hasn’t helped my anxiety and depression any.

I’m not going to pretend this month has been easy because it hasn’t. At all. I’ve always been the type of person to feel things deeply and intensely. I’ve never really been taught how to deal with that, however. I’ve never learned how to acknowledge those feelings and then let them go instead of wallowing in them. I don’t like feelings. I don’t like to feel like I do. Alcohol became the perfect tool to numb that – an escape to dull the intensity. It provided a temporary bliss that made the world tolerable. And, then, it became a problem.

Quitting drinking isn’t just hard because of the cravings and the desire to run away from my feelings. It is hard because of having to face those feelings. To sit alone at home, night after night, and feel how lonely I am. How frustrated or sad or angry I am. I don’t have any answers, still, about how to even manage this. I have spent a good portion of the month just kind of surviving. Trying to take each day as it comes and push through.

I’m pretty sure Buttercup can sense all of this because he’s been close by my side more than usual these last few weeks. Also, we have achieved belly rubs! He likes flop down next to me at night while I’m reading and let me rub his belly. Silver linings, I suppose.

November is National Knit a Sweater Month, so I decided to cast on for a Throwback cardigan to give myself something to turn my attention to. With my annual knitting weekend coming up, I figured it would be perfect timing to try to knock out a sweater and feel some sense of accomplishment. So far, two days in, I’ve managed to almost complete the yoke. As quick as this is going, I’m going to guess that I will be able to knit the bulk of this in the upcoming weekend. Hopefully, at least.

Hey look, I finally finished a thing. It only sat for over a month simply needing the seed stitch on the sleeves. Took hardly any time at all, which I knew but just… kept putting off.

Now to search for the perfect black skirt or dress to layer this over.

Pattern is My Boy Lollipop, knit in Ritual Dyes Priestess in the Cancer zodiac colorway.

I do not need to start a new project. I certainly didn’t necessarily NEED to buy more yarn. To be fair, I didn’t actually buy a sweater quantity of yarn today – I had purchased that Tartan color back in July when we were in Michigan. And I ABSOLUTELY DO NOT NEED TO START A NEW PROJECT.

But when my sweet friend Ellis drove down from Cleveland to visit before she moves clear across the country, I took us on a little field trip to one of my favorite little stores in Columbus, Sew to Speak, and decided I needed a Throwback sweater. And given that I already had enough of the Brooklyn Tweed for the base color, I just needed to choose my contrasting colors for the colorwork. Embers, Tent, and Woodsmoke turned out to be the perfect colorways to accent the Tartan color. And because I know if I don’t start this sweater now, it probably won’t get made until next year (if even then), and I’d rather wear it this year rather than next.

Nevermind that I picked up a bunch of yarn at Wool Gathering this year, which was all destined for more summery knits. That’s a good enough excuse anyway, isn’t it? I’m not going to want to wear a fingering weight cardigan when it’s 0 degrees outside anyway. So I’m just going to cooly pretend that I’ll get to that yarn after I knit up this lovely sweater, which might actually be true at the rate I’ve been knitting and actually finishing projects… it’s entirely possible that by the time this sweater ends up completed it will be March and I’ll be dying for summer and looking at knitting more lightweight tops and cardigans.

I should probably finish that My Boy Lollipop top that has been sitting waiting for just a few spare rows of sleeve edging before I can officially call it complete. And no, I have no idea why I keep putting it off… it would literally take me maybe an hour to call it done but I just… can’t be bothered to start them. It feels like far more work than I know it really is.

Well, we’re back into school season and I didn’t do pretty much anything on my summer break to do list. I didn’t finish a single book despite my pile of them, nor did I finish any knits other than a sock project I had in the works for too long. I may have been hoping for a relaxed summer, but what we actually had was lots of random stuff going on that didn’t lend itself to much time to just slow down and just… be.

I did start a Crumb cardigan earlier in the summer but it turns out I loathe the CoBaSi yarn I bought for it. I have been forcing myself to knit on it in an attempt to finish it but it languishes in my knitting bag still waiting for sleeves. I had this BEAUTIFUL “Cancer” zodiac-themed yarn from Ritual Dyes I recently acquired from my Michigan trip visit to Wool & Honey that I was itching to knit, and ended up casting on for a My Boy Lollipop for some knitting I actually enjoy. And it has not disappointed – this yarn is DELICIOUS. SO soft, so wonderful to work with, and just such a pretty shade of blue that my Cancerian little heart adores.

This little project has been toting around with me everywhere lately. I have opted to knit on my lunch breaks at work instead of doing homework, as I’m trying to work on balancing my life better this semester, which has meant this project going along pretty swimmingly. It helps that it’s such an easy, straightforward pattern to follow so there’s no need to spend most of my lunch break trying to follow charts and only finish a row a day.

I’m trying hard to finish this make before I start anything else, but with winter approaching I’m feeling the pull to cast on all the things. Declan needs a new winter hat, this bike commuting thing means needing some new gloves and maybe some cute legwarmers for the chilly morning bike ride to work, there’s a few sweaters I want to knit… that’s not even counting the sewing I want to do. I have another Fen Dress in progress in some Carolina Gingham, some black linen for a sleeved Hinterland… plus there’s always knitting accessories to go with those dresses. So much I want to do!

Last week I popped into my local bike shop, Rocky’s, with the idea of scoping out a new bike to save up for as I work on commuting by bike more around town. I’ve been trying to bike to work more since it’s only a mile each way, both for the exercise and the eco-friendliness of it – but mostly the exercise because let’s be real: 8 hours a day tied to a desk job isn’t doing me any favors weight and health-wise.

My 23 year old mountain bike works but isn’t very comfortable and I knew I’d need an upgrade soon. I’ve had my eye on a few brands, but wanted to try one out before committing to spending that kind of money on a bike in case I ended up not being comfortable on it. I mean, this little romanticized daydream of mine of riding a step through bike around town to work, the farmer’s market, etc could really be a dream and I might totally hate the bike, right?

Rocky’s didn’t happen to have the version I was looking for in stock (an Electra Loft 7D), but the wonderful owner – Carol – said she’d put it in her cart for her next big order, prefacing it with that it could be a few weeks before it was in. No big deal – I wasn’t really in a hurry (or so I thought).

Friends, IT WAS LESS THAN A WEEK! I received a phone call yesterday letting me know the bike was in, built, and ready for me to come look at her. So, like any excited dork would do, I did a little happy dance at my desk, rushed home on my old mountain bike, picked up the kid with the car, and then rushed back to the bike shop to check it out.

Love at first sight, let me tell ya. Declan even called her gorgeous and gave her a kiss. And the ride? Oh my god, SO much nicer than that old mountain bike that I’m probably too big for. Whether I intended on buying a bike that day or not didn’t matter – this baby was coming home with me. And come home, she did.

All she’s missing is a basket on the front so I can haul my lunch bag to/from work without my backpack, and a rear rack so I can strap down my Yellowbird Food Shed produce box on Fridays (because right now I drive to work on Fridays because I’d have no other way to get the box home on my mountain bike, and it’s too big of a box to comfortably haul the mile home by walking. I have the front basket on order already, and am waiting to hear back from the bike shop on the rear rack.

In the meantime, while I wait, I’m cleaning the house to ready it for Declan’s 5th birthday party next week, canning up MORE pizza sauce, and trying to finish up a few crafting/sewing projects so I can get my desk space cleared and ready to jump head-first back into college. There will most likely be another batch (the 4th, but hey, who’s counting?) of pizza sauce before the weekend is over with the rate my tomatoes are ripening.

The tomatoes are beginning to ripen in the garden, which means I am starting to ever-so-slowly can up this year’s batch of pizza sauce for use later in the winter. I’m using the recipe from Preserving by the Pint, which has been a fabulous book these last few years as I scale back on, well, pretty much everything.

Pre-kid, you’d find me with pounds and POUNDS of garden produce that I’d be canning up for use later in the season. But these days… not so much. It’s a combination of reasons, really – not putting out as big of a garden anymore, having a kid sucks up a lot more time I’d otherwise spend in the kitchen, and just overall trying to live a little more minimally to help combat the anxiety and everyday stress that I deal with by only making things I absolutely know we’ll eat and use up (rather than because all those jams and jellies sounded fun and then just sit there because I’m the only one who eats them in the house).

The minimal aspect is really something on my brain a lot more lately, especially as we are getting so close to school starting back up and schedules getting even crazier in our lives. The amount of stuff we have has begun to weigh on me and drive me crazy, and I’m about to just go around the house with a bunch of trash bags and toss it all. Just my kitchen cabinets, alone – stuffed with more food than I know what to do with because we buy for recipes and then life happens and we get too busy and never make them – makes me feel anxious every time I open the cabinet or try to come up with a grocery list that will only add to the mess.

I’ve gone on these minimalist-ish binges before. I’ll purge a bunch of things, feel happier, and then move on and fall back to my old ways. But the older I get, the more important it feels to stick with it, both because things are just things and experiences are what Declan appreciates more, and because I really just do not want to spend the majority of my life cleaning up after everyone and stressing about how messy the house is when all of that could be eliminated if I just got rid of a bunch of stuff.

So that’s my mission for the first part of August before life gets hectic again: decrapify the house. Our trash guys will probably hate me over the next few weeks 😀