More New Year Thoughts

Before I left town for the holidays, I went through a sort of "spring cleaning" in my apartment. I hate coming back to an untidy house after taking trips so The Brain and I cleaned every room from top to bottom, cleared out the fridge and cupboards of any food that might spoil (don't worry--we ate it), and made sure the floors were scrubbed and the bed made with fresh sheets. I also decided to go through the entire storage closet and clean out anything we had that wasn't necessary. It turns out that my many moves over the past decade have whittled down my belongings quite a bit, and the only things I found that I could get rid of were a couple of very fragrant vanilla candles (I don't like vanilla-scented things) and some falling-apart picture frames.

Since we knew that the electricians would be coming to repair the three outlets in our apartment that had randomly decided not to work any more (this was the final blow in a long series of unrelated catastrophes that all but pushed us out of town in fear for our lives during the first three weeks of December...don't ask), we also had to rearrange some things in the living room so they would have access to the outlets. I decided this was a good opportunity to move my ugly knitting shelves into the spare bedroom, therefore making our living room more open and nice-looking.

The bookcase ended up fitting perfectly in a strange angled corner of the spare room, between the door and the head of my treadmill. (The other half of the room is taken up by The Brain's bicycles. It's sort of our unofficial workout room.) It's not as convenient to have the bookcase all the way down the hall, but I have to admit that our living room does look nicer now and it's not as though our apartment is so big that I can't make it back there! The bookcase holds the entirety of my yarn stash, and all my leftovers go into the plastic set of drawers. As you can see, I really don't have an over-abundance of yarn to work through. It really is quite reassuring. :)

All this cleanliness and rearranging had me thinking more about clearing the knitting slate in the new year. I really don't have any long-forgotten UFOs like my brother does, but it is nice to take stock of everything I accomplished in the past year and consider what I want to accomplish in the coming year. While doing my yearly stash roundup, I discovered that while I had gotten my "older" stash yarn down to 7113 yards in 2009, I also added to the stash and am starting 2010 with 16842 yards of yarn. Considering the fact that I knitted up (or gave away/sold) 17602 yards in 2009, not counting any sample or test knitting I did, I feel reasonably confident that I can become stashless by the end of the year. I just have to keep to my goal of not making unnecessary or impulse yarn purchases!

I also did a final project count of all FOs for 2009, and I'm posting them here only for documentation.

4 - Pairs of socks
19 - Accessories (hats, gloves, legwarmers, baby blankets, etc.)
9 - Sweaters (not counting two that are 95% finished)
11 - Lace shawls