My knitting has screeched to a dramatic halt:

Over this past weekend, I fractured my ring finger. It was late at night and I was heading up to bed. I turned off the lights and was heading towards the stairs when I stepped on a kiddie toy, slipped, and in that slow motion panic of trying not to fall I thrust my hand out to grab the banister but instead hammered my hand into it.  It was so late that I debated going to the emergency room to get it x-rayed, but the emergency room is really just for immediate medical attention, so I tried to sleep (didn’t work out so great) and went to the doctor the next day. I have a split under my ring finger, and it’s taped to my middle finger for support.

The timing is especially unfortunate because I was *this* close to finishing the second sleeve of my Pomme De Pin cardigan for the Briggs & Little Spring KAL, which meant I couldn’t finish it. I have tried to do a bit of knitting the past few days, but to work around the splint creates some weird tension in the joints and it is painfully slow.  And I do mean painfully.

Stefanie suggested I take one of my swatches and make a cozy for it, which struck me as a brilliant idea:

I just haphazardly stitched the edges together and sewed up the top, which wasn’t too bad, even though it did take me ages. It keeps the gauze cleaner, too. That was from when I made these mittens for Lila – I did them so quickly one night after I realized Lila had lost almost all of her other mittens and the stores had stopped selling kid’s mittens. Naturally, she lost one before I could get modeled shots.

Also, the novel I’ve been working on for months has hit a snag. A series of unfortunate events in the Canadian Literature world has suddenly raised a lot of questions about whether or not white writers should be writing stories about those from marginalized cultures, and the novel I had been writing focuses on the life of a young man from Mexico working on his Masters at the University of Toronto. Now I have to figure out if I’m being ignorant and culturally appropriating, so I’ve stopped working on it and will try to work on other things, and try to listen to what is being said. Maybe it will all work out, and I hope it does, but I’m feeling pretty down about that. I love the main character so much, when I think of changing him into someone else, it pains me.

So, don’t mind me. I’m just having a little pity party over here. I’ll leave you with a photo of an absolutely stunning pink cherry tree that I saw on a walk last night: