Time for Long and Short’s Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge. The topic is, well, things I like to do on stormy days. Writing is the obvious choice. And drinking tea – big fan of the Murchie’s Storm Watcher in loose and bags (and so many of their other teas too; they make great green-black blends like the No 10). A new activity, however, is crocheting. I picked it up during January intercession, when I taught a course on flow activities. What are flow activities? From Wikipedia, the characteristics of flow are:
Intense and focused concentration on the present moment
Merging of action and awareness
A loss of reflective self-consciousness
A sense of personal control or agency over the situation or activity
A distortion of temporal experience, as one’s subjective experience of time is altered
Experience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding experience
Here’s a Ted Talk on Flow from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who coined the term.
Writing is certainly a flow activity for me and I’ve lost more than one day to writing. I hadn’t expected crocheting would become one for me, but thought it might be a good contender for some of the students. My mother came as a guest teacher and a few of them (and my co-teacher) got into it, but it also hooked me (pun intended).
My first project was the hat that was the class project. Mom had started us off with a little circle. Mine, however, turned into more a beret than than the beanie intended 🤣. Now I’m working on this scarf project. I found the pattern just googling and loved that it came with a YouTube video, that helped me with the new stitches. I’ve been working on it on rainy days (ah for more snowy days!) while listening to Kate Elliot’s Furious Heaven.
Ramblings 
