I keep thinking of things to post, but then I keep working on the things to post and forgetting to take photos and then well, how boring is a post about stuff I say I am doing, yet have no proof of?
Last week I decided to have a little UFO Smackdown. I have a basket with projects in it, small ones, and most of them are oooold. At least several months and some a couple of years. A partial first mitten, a partial first sock, a scarf. Those were pulled out and Smacked Down! First mitten? Knitting complete, second mitten almost finished. First sock? Knitting complete, ends woven in. Scarf? Completed, ends (tons of flipping Silk Garden ends-stupid knots), woven in. And because it was intended at the start (over a year ago) to go to the Red Scarf Project, I let the momentum pull me (okay, you'll see that it wasn't me, but you get the idea) all the way to the post office. Hey, it may be a little late for this year, but they can use it next year if they want.
- Pattern: Noro Striped Scarf ala Jared Flood. Ravelry link.
- Yarn: Noro Silk Garden in colors 84 and 47
- Needles: Size 7
- Cast On: February 7, 2008 (WHAT! TWO YEARS!)
- Bound Off: January 17, 2010
This almost didn't make it into the mail. I have this thing, I can be going full force on something until I have one little hold up and WHAM! It all stops and I move onto something with a path of less resistance while I overthink how to overcome some little obstacle. (Wonder why you aren't seeing any completed cross-stitch snowmen?) Well, I had a scarf and I had a pile of stuff to take to the post office and had a vision in my head about how it should be. A label, a card, a gift card, stuff. I spent an hour debating the label. Make a label? Which would have been a project all by itself that would have taken me hours to design and figure out? Send without a label? Draw one? Meh. Then it hit me. Some brilliant person must have created one for download, right? I head over to the Red Scarf Group in ravelry and, YES! Somebody, an angel named Melissa, made it easy for me! Print, sign, tape. Done. That lovely woman even created care tags. I love her. I dug a card out of my stash of cards (really, even though it was a corny card with some angel holding a heart, and I could have held this up by making a trip to the card store and finding a perfect card, which would have added time I didn't have and more decision making, my stash of stuff needs to get used) and wrote a quick note of encouragement. Then, the gift card. I must have gone back and forth over this one a billion times. Knowing that the card may or may not end up with the scarf I was on the fence. This one little added errand could have held this good deed hostage for days. So I did what any good procrastinator learns to do. Handed the project off to someone who won't put so much thought into it that he ends up paralyzed. Not only did Pete head to Starbucks for a gift card, he took all of my mail to the post office AND a package to the Brown Store that needed to go UPS. I'll bet he didn't spend a second over-thinking any bit of it. Like which place to go first, what route is the easiest, which should be the last stop making it easiest to get to the highway on the way to a doctor's appointment. See what it is like to be me? I wonder what it is like to be so, what is the phrase? Focused? No, I can be focused. Goal oriented? I don't think it is that. What is it that makes a guy so straight to the task? Just do it.
2010. Ten. A guy totally came up with that ad campaign. Had it been me it would have been something more like, Just Do It. But first think about it for a little while. Then work out all of the options. Then research any alternatives. Then just do something else while you think about it some more. Don't forget to get bogged down in the details. After narrowing all of that down to a few practical ideas, go back and forth on those choices until you are just about to go crazy and it is the last minute at which point most of the decisions you have to make are eliminated because there just isn't time to execute them. Finally, with all the doubt remaining, but no more time, hand it off to the guy who will have no problem with Just Do It.
