I'm off to the country of my birth tomorrow, to spend some much needed R&R with my family on their farm in the country for a week (so don't expect to hear from me for a week or more). I am really looking forward to it...it is the most peaceful place I know, and I have a couple of dozen totally cool family members who live in the vicinity.
In other news, I finally finished that knitting project I mentioned a while back. It was supposed to be a sweater for a trip my good friend Gail and I were going to make to Ireland in November. However, since making the plans Gail has had a mild stroke, and I am not well myself, so we have (very sadly) decided to cancel the trip. I was so looking forward to it, and now I doubt it will ever happen. It makes my heart very heavy.
However, I can always wear the sweater (pictured below), and think of the trip that might have been (except that I've lost 30 pounds since I started the sweater because of my illness (and will likely lose more), so now I think it will take some serious blocking to make it fit, especially since I knit it so it would be very loose in my old size).
Why do I talk about something as seemingly-inane as my knitting projects in this otherwise crusading-feminist type blog? Because knitting is my stress relief valve. People may wonder how I manage to keep plugging away at all the depressing studies I work on. The answer is twofold: I do it because I feel beholden to the other women left in the field to speak out on their behalf because I have nothing left to lose in my career by doing so, and knitting is the stress outlet that at least allows me to handle, at some level, the unrelentingly depressing nature of the studies I do.
So I guess the moral of the story is that if you are woman caught up in a discriminatory or gender-hostile work environment, try to find a stress relief outlet elsewhere in your life. It will help.
