February, you make me so cranky. Everything seems so much harder in your lousy weather. Like getting out of my own driveway. Driving near or over the speed limit. Parking. You make me wonder why people decided to settle in Chicago. Those early pioneers must have come in the spring. My ancestors were from Scandinavia, so I am hypothetically made for this weather, but my dry skin and numerous hangnails suggest otherwise.

On the skin front, I've decided to take the homeopathic route. My hangnails always get infected, which stinks because people look at my hands a lot at work. So, I went to Whole Foods and plunked down $10 on a bottle of lavender essential oil. It really works. I had somehow forgotten that it also stings like hell "to promote healing". It also promotes calm moods (like sleep), which doesn't hurt.

On the knitting front: my first knitting class started on Wednesday, while sleet and snow swirled outside. I am teaching two classes this session, Basic Fairisle and Magic Loop. I am really enjoying the project for the fairisle class, the Fairly Easy Fairisle Cardigan from Stitch n Bitch Nation. It's a great beginning project that doesn't look like a beginner's project. In the second class, I am working on an adaptation of Eunny Jang's Endpaper Mitts. I'd hoped to have the first one finished by the first class tomorrow, but that seems unlikely. I'm a regular knitting machine, but there's only so much that I can accomplish at seven stitches to the inch. And instead of working on it this morning, I've been looking at Ravelry. I just did my first yarn swap on Ravelry for a skein of STR Flower Power, one of the club colors from last year that hasn't been released to the public yet. Woot! The yarn is really beautiful in person and arrived quite quickly. I am very pleased.

I'm thinking about buying a new ipod. Not one of the new Touch ones, which I would clearly break the first week that I had it, but the 80 gig Classic. I have a hand-me-down ipod mini with a 4 gig drive. Everytime that I want to put new music on, I have to take something off. I took off a Beatles album to add Cat Power this week. That hurts. So does the price tag, even though they've really come down since the last time I bought one. My 20 gig cost me the same amount that the 80 gig costs now. Sigh. Is an ipod strictly necessary? No. Am I tired of Sophie's Choice everytime I want to update my library? Yes.