flower scarf

After a “quiet week” that really wasn’t (due to many meetings and many phone calls–it occurs to me that I spent a significant amount of time this week helping people from at least three different departments, not even counting payroll), I get Saturday off and then have to work on Sunday. Working on Sunday isn’t all that unusual for me (it happens once every 8 weeks), but this time there will be a whole crew there helping out.

I think I’ve mentioned before that holidays aren’t really a payroll specialist’s friend…

• they mess up payroll schedules: next Friday would be our regular payday, but it happens to be a holiday–so payday will be Thursday instead, necessitating that we move our Monday/Tuesday processing to Sunday/Monday
• quite often we end up either working on the holiday or working on the weekend so we can have the holiday off
• even though holidays cause us to have to work lots of extra hours, the existence of the holiday makes it unlikely that we actually get paid overtime for those extra hours (since we have to actually WORK more than forty hours–not counting the holiday time off–in order to get paid overtime)
• holidays also add whole new layers of complexity to actually processing payroll accurately: we have to do extra audits to look for and fix problems; and also people often want to take time off to coincide with a holiday week, which causes a huge spike in data entry (for some specific reasons I could explain, but I don’t want to bore you completely to death)

My plan for this coming week is this:

Sunday: Work however long I’m needed, which will hopefully be from 7am until maybe 1pm
Monday: This will be my crazy long day this week, 6:45am until who knows (7pm if I’m lucky)
Tuesday: 6:45 to 3:15 (hey, I should be able to join the Downtown Knitters next week!)
Wednesday: 6:45 until…I’ll try to escape early, since I won’t get overtime for those extra hours I put in earlier in the week anyway; then I’ll probably run over to Twisted to check out their Anniversary Sale
Thursday: I’m OFF! Yay!!

AND THEN…

The following week I’m on vacation. I cannot wait. Nik and I haven’t had an actual vacation since last October, when we went on our honeymoon. Depoe Bay, here we come!

Yeah, I’m getting a little excited and it’s still over a week away!

On the knitting front: the SECRET project is nearly complete! Just some finishing touches left (which have to wait until it’s dry). The flower hexagons for the scarf are blocked and waiting to be sewn together, if I could only figure out the best way to do it.

Anyone have any suggestions? I’ve tried a few things, but been a bit unhappy with each for various reasons. The problem, I think, is that they were blocked pretty aggressively to get that open flower look which caused the stitches along the outer edge to stretch. So when I sew through them, the stitches tend to pull the whole side tighter and at the same time the whole thing is kind of loose…

I tried to just slip stitch them together, thinking that would give them a little firmness but it looked kind of odd–and pulled in too much. It just occurred to me to maybe try the slip stitch again, but doing two slip stitches in each stitch. That might make it pull in less and also give them a better foundation. Hmm.

Guess that’s the first thing I’ll try in the morning. I think I’m just not accustomed to sewing crocheted pieces together, so I’m fumbling around a bit here. I’ll figure out a way to handle it soon, I’m sure.

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