no Shakespeare, but there is knitting

 It's been something like a month since I last posted. I owe the blog (and presumably, anyone who reads this) four or five Shakespeare reviews. They are on the way; I just got bogged down in A Midsummer Night's Dream and haven't made my way out of the forest yet. Blame it on Puck.

Today was a mostly uneventful day. The most significant thing that happened involved a conversation with someone that jogged something loose in my brain and allowed me to get past the section in my thesis that has been paralyzing me for the last week and a half. The conversation wasn't related to my topic, but suddenly, I could look at my advisor's comments and what I'd written about someone else's analysis, and I realized that my advisor's comments were helpful. Seriously, what the heck did this author mean, and was there really that much of a difference between these things that appear the same that he had to go and give them two different names and toss out confusing examples that didn't actually jive with what he was trying to argue? That realization fixed a few things, which was very pleasant.

Life's been interesting in some respects. I am, finally, officially, a permanent resident of Canada. I spent most of March panicking about my interview, which turned out to be a couple questions which had already been answered in the paperwork, and then signing a couple things. Oh, and paying them another $500, sitting through a powerpoint presentation on being a PR in Canada (once in English, once in French), and then sitting and waiting for my name to be called. J. and I were one of the last couples called in the waiting room. The other couple had a pregnant woman, too, although she was nine months pregnant and I was only four and a half months along. We ended up chatting with her and her partner and wondering how long it was going to take for them to sort out their computer problems. They still hadn't been called up by the time we were leaving, but I hope everything went well for them and that their baby has either arrived safely or will soon arrive safely. I love how they made the most pregnant woman wait the longest, though. It was probably an alphabetical thing, but still.

We did have a very cheerful immigration agent, which was quite pleasant. The entire staff at that office seemed to be in a good mood, despite computer issues. This was helpful, since I was wound as tightly as a spring. J. was very gracious about putting up with my constant freak-outs about something that was essentially a foregone conclusion, but this has been a long process. And I'm pregnant, so my moods aren't quite what they would be normally. I'm prone to being more than a tad inclined to worrying, but throw a fetus in my womb and that tendency gets much worse. I actually tried to take worrying off for Lent this year, just to help with my sanity. It didn't entirely work, but forcibly reminding myself that worrying doesn't actually fix the problem, and makes me feel worse to boot did make a small difference.

Besides the thesis, and the immigration stuff, I have had the knitting. I finished a hat the other day.

 Isn't it lovely? It's a beret, and is double-knit so it can be worn in the winter. I made it of Mission Falls 1824 yarn, which has been discontinued. I try to use the small amounts of Mission Falls in my stash sparingly, on worthy projects. It is soft and the colours are lovely and slightly muted, and it is machine-washable. So I took this hat off the needles, wove in the ends, and settled it on my head, eager to wear my beautiful hat. That was when I discovered that the hat looked much bigger on the needles than it was in reality. This hat is so small that it is going into the pile of baby hats in the spare room. That's right. I inadvertently knit a hat for Munchkin. I hope it likes the hat. (Munchkin is still an 'it' because the ultrasound where we will ideally find out the baby's gender is next week).

This project turned out the appropriate size, so I'm not too worried about my knitting skills going weird. This is a hot water bottle cozy. I gave one of the jogless stripes method a try on this one, and it mostly worked.

The hot water bottle cozy had been a project in the back of my mind for a while, but I finally knit one because pregnancy makes my back hurt. Last week, there were several nights in a row during which I had to curl up with the hot water bottle because my lower back hurt too much to let me fall asleep. This whole making a person thing is harder than it sounded when we started on it.