Not my favourite kind of post…

Just a quick post to say that I’m resting my wrists again! Sigh.

I started a new job (YAY!), but it involves a lot of writing and typing, and that’s leading to some wrist-ey pains. When I’m feeling sore just from a regular day, adding knitting on top just isn’t a good idea. It’s a bummer, but I’m trying to be smart and give my body a rest when I’m not working.

I do have some fun progress to show you from before things started feeling sore and burny, though! Look for that stuff soon :)

In the meantime, wish me healing and stronger arm muscles! ;)

Enforced Knitting Breaks Are No Fun.

My wrists hurt.

Sometimes, I knit a bit too much in one session. Often, the student side of my life, or some part of one of my jobs, requires a LOT of typing or handwriting in a short span of time (ie. hand writing comments onto 40+ essays in a couple of days, or doing revisions to a dissertation chapter in one very focussed weekend).

Even one of those activities tends to aggravate my wrists and forearms, but if there’s more than one going on at once, I can be pretty certain I’m going to have a flare up of “UGH WTF WRISTS”, as I think of it.

Unfortunately, when this happens to me, it seems to take far longer to heal the injury than it did to cause it in the first place. A couple of days of high-intensity wrist activity, and I end up facing a week, or more, of NO KNITTING time.

This is what’s been going on in the last week! Siiiiiiigh. It’s a HUGE bummer. And, remember this post? Not being able to knit makes managing my stress way more challenging for me.

Instead of knitting, to keep myself busy, I’ve been reading a lot (I just finished John Green’s An Abundance of Katherines – verdict: interesting, but nowhere near as good as The Fault In Our Stars or Looking for Alaska; I’m also just finishing up Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls, and starting Carrie Pitzulo’s Bachelors and Bunnies: The Sexual Politics of Playboy, going for walks by the ocean (which I love doing even when I CAN knit), and watching lots of documentaries (The Loving Story, for example, is AMAZING – and it’s on netflix right now!).

Despite those fun activities, I am DYING to get back to knitting on my chevron stripe blanket. Hopefully soon… in the meantime, I’m going to keep icing my wrists and trying to stay busy. Do you have strategies for keeping your knitting muscles happy or helping them heal when they get hurt?