I want to apologise, to begin with, for my absence from the blog this week. It just turned out to be the sort of week where the things that are happening are enjoyable, but don’t really sum up to anything in the way of progress through life. I’ve marked this down as “must do better” in my entirely imaginery blog school report.

The big thing I’ve learned from this week is that dithering gets you nowhere. I have wasted much of my free time on dithering over three areas in particular.

Firstly, there’s knitting. It’s been far too hot all week to knit, although this morning feels vaguely promising. However, my intention was to put in some time and effort researching knitting patterns for my next (soon to be cast-on/next thing on my needles) project. As far as knitting goes, a pretty high-priority sort of research. Funny how the things you think don’t always happen. In my defence, I did look at knitting patterns, in fact I dug out some I haven’t looked through in a while and I found a few that I’m still interested in making one day. Unfortunately, I didn’t find quite the right thing to make on that mythical day in the not-too-distant future when the temperature deals a winning hand to woolly folk. I think I scuppered my chances of finding the right pattern because I focused solely on patterns for 4-ply yarn despite knowing in my heart that the garment is going to end up being knit in a DK weight. If I abandon the idea of 4-ply I can use one of the patterns from the One Thousand Sweaters book which will allow me to mix and match my neckline and armhole edging to suit my desires/requirements.

My second area of stagnation has, unfortunately, been my novel – I haven’t added a word for almost a week. Instead, I have read an entire novel that somebody else has written, which might explain my lack of progress with my own adventure because it is hard to think about the world in your head when that space is temporarily filled with a world that someone else has invented and peopled.

Thirdly, there’s my planner/agenda/diary. I’ve been bored with my setup recently. I know I’ve been bored because I’ve been over-consuming information from the internet about alternatives, and I haven’t been assiduous about using my own weekly layout. I suspect this lack of enthusiasm is either caused by, or is causing, my general lack of direction in all areas of my life. Whatever the reason, I’ve become obsessed with the idea of a bound diary and so I bought a 100-day hard-bound planner which I can play about with through the rest of this year in the hope it might answer the question of what I’m going to use next year. I’m setting it up to start at the beginning of next week, and I will do a full ‘first impressions’ write-up very soon, but for the moment I’m just going to say that it has some elements which I’m not too keen on and these proved to be the cue for yet more dithering, this time over decorative and functional stickers. Right now, I am just clinging on to the hope that using this setup will lead me to some kind of decision and prevent me from wasting any more of my life looking at how other people do their planning.

I’m sure all of these little setbacks will soon be resolved, but in the meantime I hope you’ve had a more decisive week than I have and that you are making progress in whatever direction you wish.