Vicarious knitting

I haven't exactly been lighting up the blogosphere with observations of and witticisms on my own personal yarn adventures, have I? I'm in a knitting dry spell lately, and no, the hat pattern didn't suck all the creative energy out of me. ;-) (That would be pretty pathetic, wouldn't it?)

No, blame it on the effect of noxious household cleaning products on my hands. Last week I spent a few days at the white elephant house, now that it's empty (except for the garage) cleaning in an effort to get the place to a point where it doesn't look scary-neglected. I've spent three days - so far - on the bathrooms trying to get 10+ years of hard water stains off the glass shower doors and surrounds. LimeAway, CLR, etc. - all did nothing on those vertical surfaces except smell bad and do a number on my hands. A little internet research turned up the off-label use of glass cooktop cleaner, which with a non-scratch scouring pad and LOTS of elbow grease actually worked. Still not great on the hands, but at least it did scour the lime off those damn glass panels and doors, which is more than I can say for everything else I tried.

Yes, I did start out wearing gloves, but inevitably water and cleaning product run into them, rendering them pointless, so off they come. The feeling of LimeAway sloshing around your fingers inside a latex glove reminded me of touching fire coral back in my island girl days - a momentary, odd, little tingle followed by a scorching burning like your skin wants to come off.

So, combine that with some big yard clean-up action, and I suppose my hands would make a manicurist either scream and run from then room ("The horror!") or grin with glee at what she could charge for repairing that much damage. When I did try to pick up some mindless knitting (the entrelac bag), the yarn wouldn't slide through my fingers; it was like trying to pull it through velcro. Yuck!!!

I've contented myself instead with browsing the new Knitty, scrolling through Ravelry, and stumbling across other fiber fun that other people are having and posting online. The hand lotion has started to improve things a bit, so I should get some stitches done before heading back for more adventures with cleansers, vacuum cleaners and such later in the week.