Not as Bad as Expected

(This post has been carefully designed to bore everyone--knitting to bore my family, rowing to bore the knitters... and probably my family too. And I'm going to talk about cupcakes again, now that you've finally stopped craving them. I'd recommend just skipping ahead to the end for a link to Baby M photos on the photographer's blog. Although, there's a cupcake hat there too, sorry about that.)

I'd been dreading the finishing work on Manu ever since I read the pattern--it's all i-cord, and I abhor i-cord (this is a sub-component of my hatred of knitting-on edgings... even though they turn out to be not so bad once I'm actually working on them). But by Friday, I'd finished up all of the other knitting (well, not the pockets, which I may leave off), and it was time to i-cord. And it wasn't really so bad--I finished it last night (Sunday), without ever feeling like it was consuming my weekend.

Which it wasn't: in between working on the i-cord, my boat went to its first race of the year, which also turned out to be not as bad as we'd expected. We spent all week almost bailing out (ha!) and thinking of reasons why we should just skip the whole thing, but the handy thing about racing as a team (it was a 4+, so there were four of us plus the cox) is that probably you won't all want to stay home at once, so you can talk each other back into going.

My least favorite moment is pushing away from the dock--it all seems kind of unreal till then--as though maybe you're just hanging out with some nice people (all dressed the same for some reason), and the water is pretty and I don't really like the beach but parks next to the water are nice and the grass is green and the sky is blue and clearly I didn't row in college because the weather in the early spring in New England is really gross, but masters race in the summer and fall, so the sky really is blue... and then you're carrying a boat down to the water but I don't really connect that with racing because I'm thinking about not tripping or running the boat into anything (like the side of a building). And then suddenly it's too late to back out, because you've shoved off from the dock (it would be too embarrassing to stand up and dive overboard!).

Anyway... we came in second, and now we can be less nervous next week.

At the race, I worked on a sock, then a bunch of the afternoon was also lost (at least from the perspective of the i-cord) because Kevin and I went on a bike ride. We're going to China in a week (remember, if you mention any previous trips which might or might not have been to China or somewhere near by in the comments, I will have to kill you... I will say that we're going because Kevin is giving a talk, and we told everyone--all 1,330,141,295 people!--that I'm a vegetarian), and after the work part of the trip we're going to bike in the western part of the country. Anyway--we upgraded our tandem to one that comes apart and packs in 2 suitcases, so we needed to break in the new bike.

Then on Sunday, Sunflowerfairy and I went up to the MA Sheep and Wool Festival, and I worked on the sock on the way--so that was more time away from the i-cord. But it's done anyway (except I suspect that the pockets, if I make them, will be be-corded), and the moral of the story is that i-cord isn't as bad as I think.

If you lived though that, look: a baby in a cupcake hat!