The thing about Madrona

The thing about Madrona, is that even though it is supremely organized, cheerfully run and as easy for the teachers/speakers to navigate as possible, something about it kicks my ass and leaves me for dead. I think it starts with the time change. I was tired when I arrived that night, woke up earlier than I meant to, then stayed up later than I should have. It is so much fun, and there are such wonderful people and so many of them that I end up trying not to waste time sleeping. Avoiding sleep is a decision that totally comes back to bite you on the arse later, as there was one evening where I was forced to go to bed when I didn’t want to, since the risk of falling over in public seemed more plausible by the moment. There is SO MUCH rammed into every second that you are at the retreat that….well. Between the wool fumes, the knitters I wanted to meet and the ones who wanted to meet me and the lack of sleep I was on the edge of complete collapse before I left Tacoma and the hotel on Monday morning at 6:30am and arrived home about 6pm. (Hence no blog that day.) Yesterday I tried to blog but the needs of my corporeal self and those of my family won out…as it should be. I put the whole day down, stayed in my jammies and did only what I had to. Feeling much better today. It would take forever to tell you everything so I’m just hitting the high points.

Mountranier

Mount Rainier from my hotel room window. Nice eh? Also cool was this crazy fog in the morning. I would wake up and look out the window and it would be like the world was gone. Totally slipped into a void. We don’t get a lot of fog here in Toronto, so I found it fascinating. (Fog is something about warm air plus cold air plus moisture. We don’t have that. We have cold wet air, and warm wet air, not usually at the same time. We are a city of extremes.) I thought about taking a picture of the fog and the way it looked like nothing, and then realized I was on the brink of taking a picture of nothing and thought maybe I didn’t want my standards to slip that low.

Knitters. I got to see most of my FT friends again (though I slept through one of the meet-ups by accident.) Saw many, many wonderful people. Big shout out to Erica. (She was one of my favourites.)

Anita Luvera Mayer on women’s transitions. Sincerely. If you were there for her talk, I’m sure that you will agree with me that this was seriously a high point of not just Madrona, but your life. Discuss.

The Mittens of Rovaniemi class with Susanna Hansson. This was a super challenging class to learn how to make these.

Lenesrovanim0121

I’ve got to catch a bus so I’ll tell you more about that tomorrow. Stunning crazy knitting. Crazy.

Discovering that Fiona Ellis and I were on the same plane home and bargaining for window time for days. Fiona slighted me on Saturday (not really) and I took a demerit of 15 minutes of window which she earned back by doing my homework (for her class) on Sunday. We went back and forth the whole weekend long, 15 more minutes window time for her, then a 15 minute demerit for me…on and on and on, only to discover when we got on the plane:

Nowindow

No window.

(Maybe you had to be there and/or sleep deprived for 5 days, but we could hardly get a hold of ourselves. Dudes, it was really funny. )