Yesterday was a full work day, but I did spend the evening knitting and reading, and sometimes also watching Hotel Babylon. In fact, I was watching Hotel Babylon on Netflix and just went ahead and watched several episodes in a row, using the time not only to knit, but also to clean out my purses and tidy cabinets.

I then got back to a book I'm reading and it said to give up multi-tasking for a week.

Multi-tasking is out of fashion now. It used to be one of the mainstays of time management, but apparently it cuts productivity and makes us nuts. We're not, the current research says, actually doing several things at once. We're just shifting our attention from one thing to another really fast. We end up doing worse at both tasks than we would have had we given either our full attention.

I'm not sure that I need full attention to watch Hotel Babylon.

It seems to me also that if one task is more mental, like reading or watching TV, then we could do a more physical task like knitting or doing Wii Free Step at the same time, since the two use different parts of the brain. However, I have to admit that I am a confirmed multi-tasker, and I am going to try to do without it for a week and see where it gets me.

#1 daughter and I went to visit my parents and then out to one of the local battlefields. This one is a national park, part of the wonderful system of national parks we have in this country.

There are people who go around to all the national parks after they retire, and I can see the charm of that.

This one preserves essentially unchanged the site of a horrible battle of the Civil War that took place just about this time of year a century and a half ago.

It was a beautiful spring day when we went, and we enjoyed traveling around the park, but it's also sobering to think of all the young men who died there, and the anguish of making the strategic decisions which people now can so easily say were unwise decisions.

Stand Waitie, the only Native American general in the Civil War on either side and the last Confederate general to surrender to the Federals, led a Cherokee battalion in this battle. Two generals were killed, and there seems to have been a lot of internal power play and political positioning. This battle gave the north control of the Telegraph Road, the main source of supplies and communication to the south, and of Missouri.

We were   getting photos and information for our educational website, and #1 daughter made this little video with the pictures:
It was an enjoyable day, and made me feel a bit like Spring Break. I also quit early yesterday, so today I must work to make up for it. I have a couple of blogs to do and content for a security company's website, and a couple of articles, and mountains of grading.

There will be some knitting, too, and perhaps even some sewing as well.

I'm working on Adelaide from Vintage Modern Knits: Contemporary Designs Using Classic Techniques. Since it's worked from the bottom up, you get all the zombie knitting first and the epic knitting at the end when you do the colorwork yoke.

I've therefore been knitting while reading Stark on my Kindle. Kindle reading is hands-free and therefore perfect for knitting.

My other knitting tip is what to do about painful hands and wrists. This comes from doing all that movement while keeping the hands essentially closed. The muscles that close the hands -- the flexors -- get stronger than the ones that open the hands -- the extensors -- and the result is a painful imbalance. The solution is to lift small weights in a strange way: hold your arms out in front of you with your little weights held loosely in each hand. Pull your hands back toward you from the wrist and then push them back down. You then turn your arms outward and do the same thing from the side, pulling the thumb side of the hand toward you from the wrist. These are small movements, but they isolate that extensor muscle and strengthen it. That way you can keep on cheerily knitting.

We're expecting rain today, so I hope to do a fair bit of cheery knitting once I get my work done. Exercise first, then breakfast, then work, then knitting while reading. That's the plan. I'll need to shoehorn grocery shopping and a little housework in there somewhere, too.

I finished the cotton cardigan I've been working on. It has no buttons, so I pinned the edges together here so it would stay on the hanger while I photographed it.  You can see in the photo below how nicely it shows the color of a shirt through its laciness.

I like this sweater a lot. I've begun another one. Yes, I did in fact spend some time yesterday knitting. I should have worked -- I'm behind on grading and still have the Aussies to write for this week -- but I just didn't feel like it.

Other things I should do: housework, laundry, digging up the garden, clearing junk out of my bedroom, reviewing all the books that have been sent to me, cooking proper meals for my family...

Oh, well. It'll all get done eventually, I suppose. I've got a site up at the WordPress Showcase, which is pretty cool. The site in question got quite a bit of traffic from being there, but only a few came on to my site from the link there. Makes sense. I still get the bragging rites.

Apart from that, I'm working on a whole bunch of interesting projects. I was feeling sorry for myself because I had planned to leave town for Spring Break, but that isn't going to happen. #1 daughter points out that I'm a grown up and therefore don't get Spring Break, but I do teach, so there's some frail sense to my idea that I ought to get Spring Break, isn't there? Maybe not.

My boys, who are actually college students, are both going South for the break, to beaches.

I plan to take up traveling at some point in the future. I'll probably have to wait until the boys are out of school so I can afford it, but the desire to travel about and see the sites grows on me.

I was watching a DVD from Netflix called "Two Fat Ladies" about a couple of old Englishwomen who travel about with a motorcycle and sidecar, cooking things. They burst into song, say things like, "I blame the Ameddicans," and cook up delicious-looking stuff. Obviously, they have a camera crew and much of the impression of just tootling around is an illusion, but they appear to take off with stuff in a wicker basket and otherwise no particular preparation at all. They cook in other people's kitchens and seem entirely unencumbered.

I figure I could do that. Take my laptop and go roving.

#1 daughter and I do plan to visit a couple of tourist sites in our area on one day during Spring Break.That can count as travel.

My new knitting project is a wool sweater, one of the Bohus type. For these sweaters, you knit the body and sleeves up from the bottom, join them, and knit a colorwork yoke in the round.

I'm using a pattern from Vintage Modern Knits. I might change the colorwork design, though. Don't those flowers look a bit like insects?

It's time for colorwork, though. I've been doing lacy stuff for quite a long time, and there was #2 son's completely plain sweater in the midst of it there, so colorwork it is.

On Friday, I started the day by finishing up my short class in the Next County to the North. Possibly because of sleep deprivation, I ended up giving the students a rant about the value of writing and of doing your best work and stuff like that.

I believe those things, but I think they probably rolled their eyes about it in the hall after class.

Following that, #1 daughter and I had a working lunch in the school coffee shop (the food is horrible) and then went on to a meeting with some new prospective clients. I like them a lot and I hope we get the job. They live and work in a geodesic dome in the Next County to the East, making alternative energy devices. We met in the library coffee shop.

I got home from the meeting just in time to leave for a singing gig in the Next County to the South. Traveling there is always fairly traumatic for me, because there are some fairly swoopy roads between here and there, but I slept on the way down and woke up just as we crossed the river.

It's hard for me to explain how I feel around large bodies of water. It's as though all the molecules of water in my body respond to a call from the molecules in the river, lake, or ocean. Even swimming pools have a bit of that effect for me. I probably shouldn't be living in a land-locked place.

We sang for the older people's group at a church there, ate weird things at their potluck, and then drove back home.

It was a fun day.

Yesterday I worked, but also spent some time sitting outside in the lovely springtime. I did some housework, and some slight gardening. My husband saw what pitiful stuff I was doing with the plants and took over. He can't stand to see things done badly. He has to jump in and do it better himself.

In the evening, #1 son and I watched Journey to the Center of the Earth and I finished up the sleeves of the Diagonals cardigan. Or at least provisionally finished them. I have to see whether they actually fit the sweater before I can say they're finished. However, I may finish up the cardigan entirely today. That would be nice.