When to knit or not to knit?

My friend JayJay, fellow-knitter, -blogger, -mommy, and -professor, asked in her comments if we have house elves or how else I get so much knitting done. Sadly, rent for the house doesn't include the services of house elves, and the majority of cleaning gets done by yours truly. Since I have a full-time job (at least during the semester) and a toddler, JayJay wants to know when it is that I get a chance to knit.

Ever since Conrad was born, DH and try very hard to do work at work, that is, not bring work home with us. This is difficult, particularly for DH, whose teaching interferes with his research, which means he needs to do research "on his own time," i.e., on weekends, at nights, and during summer breaks. It's much easier for me to leave work behind; I have a teaching position and am not expected to do research. While "getting ahead" nevertheless depends on my research record (one of the ironies in my job), I put research on the back burner for now. When I come home, I'm home. I work my butt off at the office and do all class prep/email/"service" (faculty meetings, advising etc.)/research there, usually four days a week. The last two semesters I had Fridays off, and I use that day to clean the house and do the laundry (incl. ironing. OMG, I hate ironing). I could (and should) do research on Fridays and wait with the cleaning until the weekend when DH is around, but I really want to spend weekends doing fun stuff with Conrad and DH, without worrying about dirty bathrooms. So, for now at least, Fridays are cleaning days. I don't mind Fridays; they give me a chance to listen to NPR all day long (local news from 9-10, two hours of my favorite news/talk show On Point, The Story at noon, then I switch off the radio because I can't stand Fresh Air's Terry Gross, and the radio's on again for the BBC News Hour. By 3 pm I'm usually done).

DH and I pride ourselves in not watching TV, which is, in truth, a big fat lie. We don't have cable, but we do have Netflix. Over the years we've watched a number of series (mainly British mysteries, such as A Touch of Frost, Wire in the Blood, Inspector Lewis, our much beloved Inspector Morse; also American shows such as The Wire, Mad Men, and Big Love), and these days we watch about 45-90 minutes of Netflix on most days after Conrad's gone to bed and we've cleaned up whatever Conrad- and/or dinner-inflected messes there are. The TV is downstairs, in the finished-but-unheated basement that is, for the most part, a Conrad-free zone, and we're never tempted to turn it on unless in the evenings. And even then the TV is just background noise; DH usually checks relevant soccer information online and I knit. That's when I do "complicated" knitting--anything more involved than stockinette or garter stitch. I guess I get about six hours of knitting done this way per week. Earlier this year I also started going to knit night, which adds two to three hours of knitting to the weekly tally, albeit "light" knitting, that is, nothing complicated. So now we're talking eight to nine hours of knitting.

In addition to "complicated" knitting downstairs, I keep a project of "light" knitting upstairs: a garter or stockinette stitch something, on which I work whenever I'm watching Conrad and am able to squeeze in a row or two (or sometimes just half a row) while he reads. But mostly we play together, so I don't knit much. (I started this very easy, stockinette stitch cowl in February and am hardly near the end. That's "upstairs knitting.") I also knit when I talk to my mom on the phone, usually during Fresh Air on Fridays. One of our little family traditions is for DH to read out loud one or two pieces from The New York Review of Books on Saturday mornings, while we're still in PJs, and I knit during that time. Let's say I get one to two hours of "upstairs knitting" done per week.

That's nine to eleven hours of knitting per week. You tell me: is that a lot? I have given up almost every other leisure activity for knitting: I hardly read for pleasure anymore except those 20 to 30 minutes in bed at night before I fall asleep (usually dropping the book in the process and then waking about again from the noise); I hardly ever go to the gym or the swimming pool (but we do go for long, long walks and hikes on weekends with Conrad); we no longer visit friends or entertain them (we still haven't made friends here); I'm very bad about staying in touch with friends via email or over the phone; I don't facebook; I seldomly blog; difficult to admit, but I also don't read as many blogs anymore; I stopped going to art shows; I no longer cook anything that takes longer than 30 minutes to make (we're fans of Cook's Illustrated 30 minute recipes).

(Gosh, I'm getting depressed just writing this. Knitting stole my social life! I'll end up as the bag lady who keeps thirteen cats at home and dies without anyone noticing it. No, seriously, it's not that I knit every free second I got. I spend most of my free seconds with Conrad and DH, so hopefully I won't die alone and forgotten. It's those free seconds after Conrad has gone to bed that I spend knitting rather than reading, socializing, etc.)

Here's when I don't knit: I never take knitting on the bus or to the doctor's; that time is reserved for reading one of the half a dozen of magazines we subscribe to (my fave: Harper's). I don't knit on the airplane (try that with a toddler!). I don't take knitting to work; if I do take a longish lunch break, I meet with DH and we read different sections of The New York Times, which we get for free on campus (awesome perk of the job). If I were to go to bars, the movies, dinner parties, restaurants, soccer and other games, or concerts, I wouldn't knit there (we don't go because--you guessed it--we have a toddler, not because we're that anti-social). We don't drive enough for me to take knitting along in the car. In short, I'm not the knitter who always carries a project around with her.

So, JayJay, that's how I get my knitting done. For spring break we went to see my in-laws, and I knit more than half of the Amelia cardigan during those 8 days or so, because my in-laws are just gaga over Conrad and won't share him even with his parents. :) I knitted a lot during that time.

Now you tell me, when do you knit??