Snooze

Here's the grey sweater (the one which will eventually have Something Interesting around the waist, neck and sleeves, but which is currently putting me to sleep). I took the picture a couple of days ago (using my patented "low light and built-in camera" technique to show it at its worst... but is there really a good way to take pictures of a top-down cardi on a relatively short circular needle?), so it's a little longer now. Not much though, because I spent most of the weekend working on Monkey socks for my sock pal (I'm done with one sock and a couple of inches into the second).

It's hard to see from this angle, but the front edges of the sweater come straight down from the intersection of the raglan lines and the neck--I only cast on enough stitches for the back and the sleeves, plus one more stitch for each front, then worked the increases as usual. I'm going to pick up stitches all around the front opening, and work 3 or 4 inches of trim, possibly from Knitting on the Edge (have I said this already?).

This may be a slightly better picture of the front, although the edges are rolling back on themselves. Anyway--three or four inches of trim on each side will be enough to meet and overlap slightly in the front, and hopefully fold down around the neck. What I can't decide is whether I want to have the same trim to be around the lower edge as well. On one hand, it seems like the same pattern in in both places will help unify the sweater. But on the other hand, it could also be an unnecessary horizontal line. And if I do put it on the lower edge too, should I knit the lower edge separately from the front edge or work increases at the lower corners? Or something else? I still have a few inches of sleep-inducing stockinette stitch body, plus the exhausting stockinette sleeves before I really need to decide.

Also exhausting: my weekend. Or, not so much my weekend as everyone else's weekend (I biked 30 miles and ran a half marathon as a training run, but I was the laziest). Kevin and I met up with about 25 other people from our triathlon team in Lake Placid for a training camp. The plan was that Kevin would bike 112 miles on Saturday, then swim 2.4 miles and run a half marathon on Sunday (in the real Lake Placid Ironman, the run would be a full 26.2 miles, but most training programs don't ask you to run the full distance till the race, because running that far is really draining). The bike course is 2 loops, so I was going to do the second loop with him, skip the swimming entirely, and do the run. As it turned out, Kevin decided he's had enough 30 miles into the second loop, so that's all the biking I did. I knit during his swim, and then we ran together.

I'd never been to Lake Placid before, and it was gorgeous, just like everyone said. But a little weird, because it was overrun with bikers, runners and swimmers (and also horse people, hockey players and figure skaters, plus what I assume is the usual assortment of outdoorsy and hiking people). In addition to our informal group, there were other clubs, as well as professionally organized triathlon training excursions. Usually, setting out to work out, I feel pretty virtuous--I got myself out of bed early, I'm going to run/bike, hurray for me! This usually lasts most of the day (which is actually a problem, training-wise, since it often makes me feel OK about skipping the second planned workout).

But not this weekend: we went for a short run after we got unpacked on Friday, then out to dinner. On the way to dinner, we passed runners, and I felt like we should be running. We got up at dawn on Sunday so Kevin could swim in the lake, passed runners, and I felt like we should be running (even though we were already planning to run after the swim). Clearly, I'm an exercise lemming. On the other hand, I usually feel bad going into businesses mid-bike (hot, sweaty, smell, and covered with dirt and grease). But as one of several hundred overheated, sweaty, smelly, dirty, greasy people, I blended right in. Kevin's Flickr set is mostly people from the team, but here's a funny one (next to the beach where everyone was swimming), and Kevin and me after our short run on Friday. We have a new camera that's waterproof (to 33 ft.) and drop-proof (from up to 5 ft.), so we're trying to be better about taking pictures.