Knitting Annoyances

So my first annoyance is that my awesome Foliage hat has grown as I've worn it (I have been wearing it a lot because it's cold in my house), so it's now too big. I've turned up the ribbed brim so it's no longer in my eyes, but now it's just a tad too short. Grr. I'm not sure what to do about this, if anything.

My second annoyance is with my Noro. Knots. And the big annoyance with Noro knots is that they make zero effort to join two pieces in color sequence, so you either have a huge discrepency in your color, or you have to cut and wind. I chose to do the latter because I knew that it would bug the sh*t out of me to have such an abrupt color change. So much Noro's genius is in how the color shifts happen, so it's frustrating. It also means that I'm down a bunch of yarn, and I've got to hope that what I've ordered from Webs will not be drastically different. The scarf is really pretty, though honestly, I'm not *adoring* this colorway (#241, for one thing, my colors look totally different in real life than what I'm seeing on the screen). It's more muddy and muted than I'm liking. I'll try and do pictures tonight.

Speaking of colors looking different on the screen vs. in-life, after I made my Webs purchase, I checked out Dream in Color Smooshy on Ravelry, and the reviews were mixed. One issue mentioned was this one, that the colors look amazing on the screen but are way more muted in person. I looked for the yarn I bought in people's projects and essentially it's a blue yarn, which is totally different from how it looks on the screen. As gorgeous as the Lunar Zazzle is on-line, if that's not actually how it looks, and if all those Rav projects are a more accurate representation, I knew I'd be wicked disappointed with it, so I called them. They haven't shipped my order yet, so I swapped out the Lunar Zazzle for the Pansy Golightly. Also looking at the Rav projects, the colors look way more muted on there than on the Webs page, but it's much more purple, which is much more a ME colorway than the bright blue. (Okay, it just occurred to me to look around in people's stash, and yeah, I made the right choice. It does look like there's a wide variation of shades in this.) The gentleman I spoke with said they'd be shipping in the next couple of days...now I place my order on the 8th, so not having it even shipped until the 14th seems kind of a long delay. YARN YARN MUST HAVE YARN. *ahem* Man, I wish Webs carried Koigu.

I did a few rows on the Just Enough Ruffles scarf...it's hard to feel motivated when it's not going to be warm enough to wear the coat it goes with for a couple months at least, probably longer.

And, in life outside of knitting (is there such a thing?), dude, I'm tired. My lovely daughter is up way too much at night and my lovely younger son has a croupy cough so he was up a ton too. I'm setting myself a challenge, to purchase only the perishables for the next month, to use up the stuff we've got stockpiled in the pantry and freezer. Tonight, I used up 5 cans from the pantry! I'm making crock pot chicken, so I used 2 cans of corn, 1 can of black beans, 2 cans of Del Monte Zesty Mild Green Chiles (wow, I just noticed how much salt those have in them, hmm), and frozen chicken thighs. About a half hour before serving, I'll add a block of cream cheese. Normally I do this with jarred salsa instead of the canned tomato things, but I had them on hand, and I don't have the salsa I normally use (Trader Joe's Peach salsa). So, we'll see how it turns out. I'm quite sure the kid won't eat it, but they can have the rice. I love the crockpot.