On Traffic and Increased Knitting Time

Here in my adopted city of Cleveland, they are filming the second Captain America movie. You might have heard of it or about it. I know I have and not because I've been hanging at film locations for glimpses of starlets or even watching the local morning news. No. Rather, because of just how much the filming of this movie has impacted my work commute.

For some crazed reason, the city decided that it would be completely okay to allow the production company to close a major highway (and one of the few bridges used to get into the downtown area across the Cuyahoga River), known as the Shoreway, for two weeks. As a result, alternate routes had to take on the something like 37,000 vehicles that daily make their way into and out of town using the Shoreway. What that means for me is this: my normally 30 to 45 minute commute into town has changed into a 55 minute (if I leave by 6 in the morning) to an almost hour and a half drive through clogged, near-stand-still lanes on Interstate 90. FOR HALF A MONTH.

After a week of this stop-and-go madness, I made a choice. I decided to give myself a birthday present in the form of an early weeklong vacation. That's right. Starting next monday, which is my birthday incidently, I am taking a week's PTO time and having a staycation. We weren't going to do a big vacation this year anyway, what with all the necessary house renovations, so this just seemed like the next best thing. By the time I return to the interstate the week after next, the Shoreway should be back open and the traffic patterns, more or less, back to normal.

What that means: more knitting time. Oh sure, of course I'll also write and work on the house, getting carpets torn up and walls washed, and we might decide on a daytrip or two, but the real prize is the knitting.

 I'm halfway through the football square of the Maize and Blue Stained Glass Afghan for my brother. This blanket has an impending but flexible late July deadline that I probably won't make, as you may recall if you are one of my eleven subscribed readers.

By now, it's clear that there is a football there. It's snail's pace intarsia process has nearly been the death of this blanket on several occasions. I had to stop work on it yet again when I realized/remembered that it needed separate little balls for each different section of color.

A long time and numerous math calculations later, I had the required seven balls in use right now, three of which are full skeins, with an additional two that will need added on before the football is done for the lacing at the top.

(It's sitting on the hand-me-down couch we got from my brother, humorously enough.)

It's a bit like trying to find your way through a maze. Working a row goes something like this: Start row with white, find which brown ball goes next, cross with previous white ball, knit with brown ball, find which white ball goes next, cross with previous brown ball, knit, and repeat process, concluding with white. All the while, I've been praying to the powers-that-be to not have any of these many many balls tangle on me. So far I've been mostly successful. *Knock on wood.*

Here's to staycations, knitting, and movie traffic... And here's hoping that my next knitting post will include pictures of a completed football square.