Nothing gold can stay.

So I've been away for a while. I cannot think of a way to sum up everything that has happened, nor can I come up with an entirely valid excuse as to why I've been away so long. All I can do to explain my absence is tell you that life seldom works out like you've planned it. One day you're traveling the world and experiencing a thrilling life, and then next day you come home to find that things aren't quite how you left them. It's no one's fault that things are different, it's the nature of the world for things to change, but in order for life to continue moving in a fluid way, you have to be willing to change too. I hate to say it my lovelies, but I am sometimes not so good at change.

So when I got back from abroad and the world was different from what I remembered, I did not handle it well. I am ashamed to admit that I ran away and hid. I isolated myself from the people I love, I didn't communicate my fear or pain, and worst of all, I let my inspiration and passion wilt. There was a time that I didn't knit anything for about six months. That may sound trivial and unimportant but knitting is something that I love dearly and to walk away from it was heartbreaking for me. To stare at a basket of yarn and not get a single idea, to pick up my needles and have them feel wrong in my hands, to drive by a yarn store and not even have the slightest interest in stopping by. It's like a part of me was broken, it's like I knew that knitting made me happy and I felt like I didn't deserve to be happy anymore.

Over the last handful of months I've been trying to get better. I've been trying to communicate more and I've been trying to be okay with being happy again. I started knitting again and at first it was just a few rows here and there but last week I finished a pair of socks.

    
It's nothing fancy but the point is that I started and finished. It felt really good to finish something that I had set out to do. It made me proud of myself and that's something I don't feel very often. It's not that I don't have reasons to be proud of my life, I'm just not a prideful person so when I feel that emotion it's a rarity.

So I'm starting to get better and little by little I'm finding myself again. I can't promise you that I'm going to be the perfect blogger, and I can't promise you that I'm going to be back for good, but I can promise you that I will keep trying.

Thank you to everyone who has been supportive and patient with me in this difficult time, it's more love and dedication than I ever expected and I feel truly honored to have so many wonderful people in my life.

Standby for more blog posts, hopefully the ones in the future will be a little more funny and a little less depressing.

-Alexis

Making amends and catching up.

Well blog, it has been quite a while. I mostly got caught up in the frenzy of moving home again and celebrating my 21st birthday, and then Christmas with my family, but it's no excuse and I apologize for my lack of blogging. Lack of blogging, however, does not mean that there has been a lack of knitting. Since there would be too much to shove into one blog post, I'll just give you the cliff notes version.

Since you last heard from me:

We left Timor. Said goodbye to Angela, our wonderful mana/housekeeper/fixer of broken things and then jumped on a plane to Bali. I'd post pictures of that, but I didn't take any.

From there we jumped to Singapore. Now that I have pictures of.

On our first day there we rode the Singapore Flyer; the world's largest Ferris Wheel.

 I knit while admiring the view, and Carrick ventured bravely forward, even though he wasn't thrilled by the prospect of being so high off the ground.

Later we went to the Singapore Zoo and saw phenomenal things.

It started raining (and by that I mean dumping all the water in the atmosphere onto our heads), but we got ponchos and stuck it out.

After that we rode a train 9 hours to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. We saw the sights and made a Canadian friend called Tom (he's the blonde one)!

We didn't stay in Malaysia long though, because the next stop on our trip had all of us excited (even Tom, he came along with us!) Bangkok, Thailand!

We went to the Great King's palace and got caught in another storm (no ponchos this time).

We watched the River Goddess festival from a bridge.

We saw some beautiful things in Bangkok. And then the boys had to be boys by eating scorpions.

Then we ended the trip abroad with a 15 hour (yes, fifteen hour) train ride North West to Chiang Mai, Thailand where we:

Rode in rickshaws,

posed like supermodels with out comically tiny coffee,

and all the other low-key, touristy things.

And after our adventure was over, we came home to celebrate birthdays and Christmas with our loved ones. I'd get into all the knitting I did while I was away and for Christmas 2012, but that would make this less of a post and more of a novel. I'll catch you up soon, I promise.