Tiny bubbles....

I did not, surprise, surprise, finish my NaNo novel this year. Shocker, yes, I know. But I still drank my prosecco.

It's tasty, I'll give it that. I don't generally drink dry wines, but pretty much by definition, if it's carbonated, it's dry. I'm not wild about it on that point, but it wasn't too dry. Nice and, for the most part, balanced.

I was fairly surprised, however, by the length of the buzz. I've gotten buzzier on other wines, but this is hanging on like you would not believe. My liver is fairly efficient, dealing with most alcohol fairly quickly (under a half hour in most cases), but apparently the tiny bubbles have stymied my poor liver and the buzz is hanging on, 45 minutes in. The mild fog is clearing now and my muscles are tensing up into their standard positions, but it was a bit unnerving. I don't usually get so blotto on two glasses of wine alone.

In knitting news, I'm not done with the whirly-gigs yet. I'd love to be (they're driving me a bit nuts), but I've got half the yarn left to go. I was hoping to get some major knitting done tomorrow, and maybe take a walk (since the weather is allegedly going to be agreeable in great degree), but we'll have to see. There are cookies to be baked, and my mother may yet have more shopping to do.

Sigh. I used to love shopping, but now it's become a great chore. I'm not sure if this is a good sign or a bad one!

No frills just yet, but soon.

Very soon.

I'd give an evil laugh, but I might cough myself out, so. Imagine one here.

Anyway, here's where I am on the shawl:

For them as what's keeping score at home, that's the point where I'm going to put the ruffle on. I've picked up stitches along the top of the shawl and put the base stitch markers in and am ready to count stitches and figure out where the ruffles go.

Since I'm pantsing this particular ruffle, it's going to get interesting from here on in.

In other news, however, I have some super cool stitch markers:

Despite the fact that I detest them, I have donut stitch markers. I detest donuts, that is, not the stitch markers in question. I'm rather fond of them. They got given me by a member of The Coven, who was apparently feeling her clay-molding skillz one day. I've got a regular donut with chocolate icing and sprinkles and a strawberry donut with pink icing and sprinkles. They're adorable.

And that's all the knitting news fit to blog, really. It took me a blue age getting those last few rows done. Everyone and their brother told me, 'oh, those last few rows really eat the yarn', but for me they didn't. It felt like it took forever to get to the end of that second skein. Then I tied on (yes, I made knots in my yarn; sue me, it's Lion Brand, I think it can handle it) the third skein and it did, at that point, seem to suck yarn. But not until then, and I didn't tie on the new skein until I did the bottom eyelet row (my shawl has eyelets across the top where you do YOs to add stitches so I did a row of eyelets to make the bottom two edges match).

Still, don't care. I've got some free time tomorrow -- not much, but some -- so I'm going to count stitches and plan out ruffles. And take a nap. I read an article that said that taking naps 2-5 times per week is associated with an up to 30% lower risk of heart disease.

For a woman who, a mere four years ago, had cholesterol that was ticking slowly upward (it's started going down again, never fear), this is a not-inconsiderable thing.

So I'm going to take more naps next month, through the NaNoWriMo phases, and take my other cardiovascular tonics:

red wine and dark chocolate.

Sigh. It's soooo hard looking out for my health. But I will do it!