Turkey Break

It was fantastic to get a 4-day break over Thanksgiving.  I was starting to feel a little overwhelmed with both school and dance, and taking few days to play catch-up helped a lot.  I got to see a lot of awesome family members:

eat some pumpkin pie:

play some very intense bingo:

and watch the first snow of the year start to blanket the ground!

We stayed in the cities through Friday evening before heading back to Duluth.  Right away I made a giant to-do list, filled with grading, knitting, cleaning, decorating, and choreographing.
As always, my eyes were bigger than my stomach.  Just this morning I finished the last of my latest round of paper grading:

That was a huge weight on my shoulders, as I wanted to get these papers back ASAP to help my students with their final paper re-writes.  Plus it leaves more time to knit in the evenings.
Unfortunately, my knitting did not fare as well as I had hoped.  I was aiming to complete one snowflake background per day over break, in order to stay ahead of the schedule I'd given myself.  That was far-fetched crazy hopeful of me.  In reality, I was only able to work on the background for snowflake 2 last night after I had graded papers until my eyes felt crossed all day.

I'm hoping to finish it up tonight... in between class and dance... or... when I'm supposed to be sleeping?  Tis the season for more coffee...
I attempted to work on the Kleio shawl's braid section on the drive down to the cities since the snowflake shawl is not travel-friendly, and got mildly disgruntled frustrated with the 200-something stitches of twisting and untwisting.

I can't believe that over two hours of knitting equates to barely a 1/4 an inch with this braid.  What's disheartening is that it's not the only time I have to make a braid on this shawl- I believe it's on there a total of 3 times- BAH!  This isn't even taking into account the fact that the second purple color had some ::ahem:: kitten chew points when Maeby got in to my yarn.  She chewed through at least one part of the yarn I hit while twisting, which didn't help the process.  Maybe this particular knit should be saved for my trip to Florida...
I'm close to halfway through untwisting it, and I'm going to take it to work to be part of my "lunch knitting" for when my brain needs a break.  This is also a Christmas present.  I need to not schedule knitting two giant shawl projects to be due right around the same time if I want to keep my sanity...
I'll be squeezing in choreographing this morning before heading in to work.  I'm not going to think about when I can get the snowflake knitting in today.  I'll just assume it's going to happen, mostly because it needs to.  Urgh...