On Joy

What better time for a blog post than with scant hours remaining before a final exam?  My brain is so saturated with Bioprocess Engineering that every additional page of notes I bring in front of my face causes my eyes to glaze over and my brain to subside into thought fragments that are neither coherent nor relevant to the subject at hand, the static white noise of the mental sphere.  So, trusting that my brain likely knows enough to be able to pass the exam, I have come here to ramble a bit about things I've been thinking about.

It turns out that I want to talk about joy.  Joy is probably the farthest thing from any student's mind directly before finals.  The world of a student consists of Studying Diligently and Sleep Deprivation and Stressful Agonizing Hours during exam period.  And yet, as my pastor pointed out yesterday, the Bible has the audacity to say "Be joyful always" with the always meaning... well, always.

Now, I consider myself to have a very cheerful disposition by default.  Even on Friday when my software crashed at work and I lost an hour's worth of laborious AutoCAD drawing, I sighed for a moment, but resolved to save more next time and thought cheerily about how much faster I'd be able to draw it now that I had perfected the process for that portion of the drawing.  However, one thing that has the uncanny ability to bypass all of my innate cheerfulness is being sick.  All it takes is a little virus to reduce me to an inconsolable puddle of self-pity, cut off from the outside world and my entire universe reduced to myself, my pile of blankets, and my box of kleenex.  A former roommate once commented that I was the most miserable sick-person she'd ever met.  When I get sick, I shut down completely.  I don't go out, I don't think, I sometimes remember to make meals, but that's about all.  So imagine my horror when I started to feel the onset of sickness on Friday, right when I needed to be studying for exams.

So not only am I sick and have to force myself to study throughout being sick, but now I have to be joyful too?  That just seems unnatural.  Weird.  Who does that?  And yet, obviously this is something I need to learn to do, as I have set myself on this journey of seeking out the heart of God.  Joy is something that I struggle with understanding.  It seems to be fundamentally different from happiness, since happiness is an emotion and the experience of it usually involuntary.  A command to be joyful, that implies volition.  That implies that the choices I make have a direct effect on my level of joy.  So how do I choose to be joyful?  How do I know whether I'm joyful or not?  What are the indicators of a life that is firmly rooted in joy every moment of every day?

I think perhaps I understand it better by coming at it from the opposite side.  What robs me of my joy?  When I am sick, how do I choose to let go of my joy?  Perhaps joy is related to focus, such that when my focus remains on how miserable I am, my misery consumes me and consumes the joy in my life.  But when my focus is on God, somehow despite the very real current of misery rushing around me, joy remains the anchor that holds me in place and keeps me from being carried down into greater unhappiness.

Even after chasing these rabbit-trails of thoughts around in my head, I still don't feel like I understand joy any better.  It remains mysterious but one day... one day I will catch it and pounce on it and declare to the world "THIS!  This is joy!"  Until that day, I will keep chasing it.  Practically, at this moment, that means that despite the scratchiness in my throat and the sniffles and the exam (t-45 mins now), I will declare that God is good to me, that no matter how I do on this exam, I will pass the course, that even when I feel miserable God is working all things out for my good and that I am abundantly and extravagantly blessed.  I want to choose joy, whatever that may be, and however that looks.

Post-Easter Baking

Yes, Easter has come and gone, but the whole weekend was so busy (notable events included JazzyBunny coming to visit from Ontario....awesome times with her!) that I didn't get to do a single bit of Easter baking.  Then I took off for California to go to a conference which is a whole other story in itself.  But, back to the baking.  So this story actually begins last year when my friend ifihadaboat introduced me to the time-honoured Mennonite tradition of making Paska at Easter.  What is Paska, you ask?  It is a light citrus bread made at Easter that is eaten voraciously by any in sight as soon as it comes out of the oven, usually slathered in icing.  My inaugural Paska experience was all sorts of delicious, and the two of us were quite pleased with ourselves for producing such an authentically scrumptious Paska.  This year, I was determined to repeat the experience even though my dear Mennonite partner-in-crime is now residing in the Northwest Territories and couldn't just pop over to help me make it.

The most difficult part of this recipe is that it requires a whole blended orange and lemon, and I have no blender.  But luckily, it was my awesome brother and sister-in-law Shalyn who came to my rescue and volunteered their Magic Bullet for this endeavour!  They even provided me with a container to bring home my orange-lemon sludge once I had sufficiently pureed it.  Now that is what family is for, I tell ya.  Always there for you in your hour of most dire procrastinatory-baking need.

Behold, here is my Paska dough, ready to enter the fiery furnace!  I stole the idea of adding embellishments to the top from a Ukrainian Paska website.

And here is the finished product, right out of the oven and ready for noms!  Those Mennonites would be proud.  Incidentally, this recipe is huuuge.  I had another whole loaf besides this one.  Good thing there were lots of people to help eat this up!

Next week is exams.  Bleh.  But the Langley Knit Night Secret Grinch Swap is coming up, which will be my one scheduled break before exams (no more baking, I swear!), and well worth waiting for.  I can't wait for the unveiling of the secret knitted items  =D  Stay tuned!

Designer and cat news

I have been knitting like a madwoman. I've even managed to partially get over being carsick so that I can knit on the bus! This is an exciting development that reclaims precious daytime hours for knitting. I'm very optimistic about how much progress I am going to make on the request list this year. I have also been doing homework like a madwoman. It is the nature of the procrastinator to be most productive in the time of highest stress and busyness. As I sit staring forlornly at my textbook, my imagination is spinning with projects to be knit, cookies to be baked, letters to be written, books to be read, etc etc. So, I actually have been doing quite a bit.

One item of interest is that I am officially a designer on Ravelry. I've had a couple charts up for a while, but recently started to compile all my other charts I've made for free download. I do plan to put up my Mario Boo and Question Box charts too, though I'm writing them up into an official scarf pattern rather than just tossing up the chart, because I realized that I wanted to write a pattern that would teach people non-reversible doubleknitting. So stay tuned for that! I know there are people reading this who have wandered over here from my Ravelry page, so if that's you, welcome! Stick around, have some cookies, leave a comment, I'd love to hear from you!

This also means that all semblance of anonymity is lost since my designer page contains my real name, though most of you know who I am anyhow. So, while we're revealing real life details, I'll let you know that you can find me other places on the interwebs. Most notably on the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research page which has a little blurb about my research if you're interested in science-y stuff and if you wonder what I do when I'm not knitting or baking.

The other news is regarding the only remaining feline at the ancestral home. Since poor Skittles met his untimely end likely in the belly of some coyotes last summer, only Creeper remains to keep my mom company with his chirruping meows while my dad is out working in the fields.

This fluffy bundle of cuteness was found to have diabetes recently. I didn't even know it was possible for cats to get diabetes. The poor little guy needs to have insulin injections now. It's not all bad for him though because he's been switched to an all-protein diet which means SALMON and TUNA every day. Truly, Creeper is eating like a king, and I'm sure will soon become ridiculously spoiled.

When discussing this with Zana on Sunday, she exclaimed, "Your mom needs a backup cat! What will happen if this one dies?" I tend to agree, though my mom seems to think that she's done with having new cats. We just need to conveniently arrange to have a kitten arrive at the house. Mwahaha!

Anyhow, not that this was ground-breaking news, but I wanted an excuse to post some cat pictures. Peace out my friends ^_^

A plethora of crafting

Has it really been so long since my last post? Oh poor neglected blog. What a tragedy to have such a forgetful owner as I. I shall placate you with tales of projects begun and projects finished! Multi-craft stories even! So here we go, this is going to be a fun post, because I have lots of pictures! Not that I've been crafting at a higher rate than usual, I just haven't had a chance to tell you about it of late.

So, let us begin where we left off. I knit a quick dice bag while I was on the plane because I needed a project I didn't have to think about, and the ziplock bag that I usually keep my dice in became so worn out that it broke. (On a slightly tragic side-note, my beloved DnD group has come to an end due to people moving far away. Tuesday nights will never be the same without all the terrible puns, talking in silly voices, interrupting the DM when he's trying to be profound, and crazy antics that our characters would get up to. I miss you guys.)

Now, before I continue, I must digress into some talk about Christmas trees. In the house where I grew up, we have a very high living room. Our old house burnt down when I was 2, so my parents had a chance to design the new house the way they wanted, and one thing they really wanted was a cathedral ceiling in the living room. This leaves a lot of space for Christmas trees, and we used to get HUGE ones when I was a kid. We would go out to the tree farm and cut one down, then put it on the truck and bring it home. Sometimes we would try to fit it up the stairs, but often my dad would just put it in the bucket of the tractor and lift it up to the balcony, so we would bring it directly into the living room through the balcony door. Then my mom would go and get the really tall ladder from the barn, and put on the lights, after which all the kids could put up the rest of the Christmas decorations. A few years ago, my mom decreed that because all the chilluns were far away and nobody got home in time to help her decorate the tree, she was only going to get small trees from now on. I remember the first 8ft tree. We all complained about how tiny it was, that it was just a little Charlie Brown tree, but my mom was not going to be dissuaded. So imagine my surprise when I came home to this tree:

So awesome! 16ft of glorious evergreen goodness. Oh how I love home.

I started some mystery items that will have to wait another month to be revealed because they're for a swap with the Langley Knit Night girls. Suffice it to say though, that they're awesome! In the meantime, here's some not-so-secret stuff.

Here's a quick pair of fingerless gloves. Likely going to mail them off to a friend soon, after I weave in the ends. This yarn and the yarn for the dice bag is Wooly Stripes, which I got at Dressew for an amazing $2/ball!!!! This pair was knit from one ball exactly, and I did the first one bottom-up and the second top-down to match the stripes. I have since spent way too much money at that yarn sale. Such as what you will see below, some Rowan Ribbon Twist that is going to become a sweater, even though it looks like a shapeless blob right now.

Below is a quick pair of booties I made for a coworker who just had a baby. I thought I'd try out this pattern (Christine's Stay-On Baby Booties) because it looked interesting, and I'm pretty happy with the result. Hopefully the baby will be too.

And, I've been saving the best for last, my mysterious sewing project is finished! Remember the post about Minou the cat helping me sew? Well, I finally managed to get out to visit my friend who owns a sewing machine, and managed to finish this sucker! The pattern is loosely based off of the Nintendo Messenger Bag Tutorial on Craftster. This was a gift for my awesome friend who goes by the nickname Lucifus online, and he had signed up on the knitting request list asking for a surprise, so the biggest surprise here was that it was sewn. I appliqued the symbol on the front (the geass symbol from the anime Code Geass) and made the outer part of the bag out of denim, and the inner lining out of green flannel. It's a very spacious bag, and I included a couple of snaps to keep it closed during transit. This is my first real sewing project (not including a pair of shorts I sewed when I was 12, under the supervision of my mother) so I'm really happy with how it turned out.

Lastly, I have begun knitting the Viking Girl Hat, and my friend is making the Viking Boy Hat, and together we shall make a matching pair for her cute twin babies. She will be here to visit soon, so I am SO excited for that!

I know this has been a whirlwind of a blog post, and I have no witty commentary to go along with my pictures, for which I blame Bioprocess Engineering, which is the course that is taking over my life right now. *shakes fist*

Have a lovely week! If it's still winter where you live, you can borrow some spring cheer from Vancouver.