The Up Side

Unless you’ve done it, I don’t think that I can adequately describe to you what it is like to fly with a head cold. I had two flights yesterday, Toronto to Vancouver, then Vancouver to Portland, and right at the beginning of the first flight, when the air pressure rendered me really painfully deaf in both ears – and it stayed that way until about seven hours after I landed… I started to try and think of what it was like and how I would explain it. All descriptions failed me. It was awful. Horrendous. Anyone who’s ever flown with a sealed bag of chips and watched it puff up as you gained altitude.. or anyone who’s watched their sealed half-drunk bottle of water caved in on itself as you landed now has a pretty good idea of the impact of pressure on stuff. Now imagine that your head is full of stuff, and that the sealed containers are your sinuses and ears and let your imagination go wild. Enough said. It’s a painful and unattractive interval that I’m trying to leave behind me. In fact, the only good thing about the flight yesterday, was that it was hours of knitting time, and when I wasn’t trying to sleep (I was high as a kite on decongestants) I did knit. Just enough to finish a pretty pair of socks, and that was totally the only up side.

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These are the very, very pretty Niagara socks from The Eclectic Sole, knit in C*eye*ber Fiber sock yarn in “Maybelle”. I only made one modification, which was to change the heel to my standard one. (I’m a little stuck in my ways.)

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Sock pictures courtesy of Tina, which is awesome, because my camera is still broken and also it is very hard to take pictures of your own feet. Tina and I are holed up in a hotel, doing the final testing on the registration system for Sock Summit, since registration goes live tomorrow morning at 10am PDT. We’re trying hard to stay focused, when we’re really pretty scared. It’s really hard to have your fate rest in the hands of a computer server and a whack of code. We’ve tried to think of everything. We’ve impressed upon the tech people involved that there are more knitters than they think (no matter what they think) but when push comes to shove it’s still a server that you’re relying on, not something reliable or loyal – like a person. It’s a new server. It’s a big server. It’s a well tested server and we are tormenting it in lots of ways to make sure it works well tomorrow, but… well. Tomorrow is tomorrow, and servers are servers, and that’s really stressful. A little while ago when there was a wee glitch, I actually started compiling a small pile of items that I thought the server would like (a pair of handknit socks, a USB key, a data cd…) that I could burn in a small sacrificial fire to try and appease it. (It didn’t come to that, but I was willing to take it that far.) It doesn’t help at all that the only things two knitters can do if a server glitches is sit around trying not to say really unforgivably terrible things to the tech people, while alternately hysterically laughing and wondering if that numbness in their right arms is stress or an actual heart attack.

Cross your needles for us.. will ya? We’ve made such a good plan.

(ps. My cold is much better today.)