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just life

the sock saga

one day, we were walking around tavira when we stumbled on a sign on a clothes shop that read “knitting club”… and despite being in college the last time i knit anything, i immediately wanted to sign up for that. knitting is a bit of a solitary activity, but with company it transforms into something so much better. besides, i’ve always been more of a hands-on learning person, so i was hoping to be able to absorb some knowledge through watching the group knit.

when i joined the ladies there were doing socks, so socks it was!

of course, i had never knit anything but scarves and badly made hats, so i must have started these at least 20 times…

but eventually kept going, helped by the kind encouragement of the group and some youtube watching. doing the magic loop allows you to knit 2 socks using just one circular pair of needles, which i had never tried before but is brilliant. for weeks, i knit on long rides and while on the phone with friends and family. slowly but surely, the socks grew.

and now, here they are! perhaps a bit tight and wonky, but i’m so super proud of being able to do this with my own hands. i’m already planning the next pair, and a weather scarf of 2018’s temperatures. :)

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just life one second everyday

2018, one second everyday

one last post about last year:

looking at the whole year like this brings on a wave of gratitude and happiness for these treasured memories. so many smiles and friends — old and new. almost six years later, i’m still happy to have taken on this task to record one second of video every day.

2018 was a good year. onwards to new adventures!

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just life

one second everyday — december 2018

for the first half of december there was lots of english practice with dani over facetime ahead of her exam, christmas card writing and packing before heading north.

after that, it was they typical whirlwind of christmas, with lots of family and friend’s visits, two races for paulo, a tile painting workshop in porto, and a lot of packing for our flights today. oh, and socks! i finished knitting my first socks ever, and i’m mighty proud of the wonky result. hurray!

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just life

100 gym visits in a year!

that was item number #30 on my list, and this was the year it got done!

i’ve been tracking this goal on beeminder since march and making steady progress on it. after long breaks in july/august and then again in october, things got tight towards the end of the year… so i stepped up the game to include some more swimming and ended up hitting the goal yesterday with one last swim — just in time!

the back is still dodgy, but at least it’s moving a little. onwards! :)

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just life one second everyday

one second everyday — november 2018

november was good, the way months spent at home usually are: quietly productive, with long-term plans moving forward. the days were mostly the same mix of work-gym-eat-work, and as a result, i ended up forgetting to film quite a few seconds, but that’s ok.

the highlight of the month was having dani stay over for a few days, studying for her upcoming ielts exam and preparing for her first job interview. we also launched the new profile pages on postcrossing, i joined a knitting club and got started on my first ever pair of socks, and had friends over for “friendsgiving”. :)