I think I’ve been pretty open about my feelings about the rain. I don’t like it. I get that it has to rain and I understand how good it is for the flowers and preventing forest fires and that other places have lots of drought and I should be grateful for my rain, and on that level.. I am. It’s just that on a purely personal level…I HATE IT. I don’t like the way it lands all over you, I don’t like the way it lands on my glasses so that I can’t see, I don’t like the way it gets into your shoes and makes your socks wet, and this time of year it’s worse, because I’m mostly wearing Birks, and I don’t like the way that rain makes the bowl shaped footbeds your own personal puddles that can be with you everywhere you go. I have a friend that says she thinks I was a cat in a previous life, and I’d buy it. The only way I can get down with rain is as an observer. Warm in dry in a cozy house, knitting or reading or (ironically) in a warm bath. (Apparently I only like to be wet on my own terms. I like swimming too.)
Second that with the fact that I hate the dentist (not personal, he’s a lovely man, I just have a thing about teeth) and a rainy day where I have to go to the dentist is just about my personal prescription for a foul mood, and that’s what today is. A very rainy day where I have to go to the dentist.
Now, normally, confronted with a day like this, I hunker down and knit, but with the Sock Summit so close (I can feel its hot breath on the back of my neck that’s how close it is) I’m going to have to find comfort with my laptop, a pile of spreadsheets and the further development of a serious crush on the lady who makes our database run. (She’s clever as a clutch of racoons.) It’s still a very low knitting time for me, which is (also) ironic, considering that it’s a knitting convention that’s killing my knitting time.
The most bizarre part of this whole thing (not that there haven’t been massive, enormous shares of bizarre already) is that even though I’m only knitting at a medicinal level (which is to say “just enough to keep me from eating every spreadsheet in this place and washing it down with a box of staples”) is that it doesn’t feel like I’m not knitting much.
I chalk this up to being immersed in the details of a very, very knitterly four days coming up. I might not be knitting, but I’m talking about knitters, arranging knitters, getting chairs for knitters, emailing knitting teachers, looking at knitting handouts and talking about what knitters will do and how they do it for about 14 hours a day, which appears to be an odd but excellent stand in. There is… despite the appalling lack of knitting… lots of knitting in my life right now. What little bits have gotten done? I’m still plugging along on the blanket – which is not big enough to matter, so I’m not showing you…. and eeking out, ever so slowly, a pair of socks – mostly while I fly from here to Portland and back again.
I believe (and I’m really sure that Tina has this plan too…) that following the Summit, she and I are both going to have a serious rest and do nothing but sleep, eat…
and knit. I can’t wait. I’m living for it. I have projects picked out. I have yarn mentally piled up. I have plans for knitting that far surpass the few days of rest we have planned. In my mind, I am going to knit whole sweaters – and spin whole big bags of fibre, and churn out socks and lace scarves and finish the blanket. In my mind, those few days are going to be a miracle that balances out all of this non-knitting time. All of this stressed out time. All of this time that I look at yarn lovingly and from afar, and think fond thoughts about it and what it will be like.
Neither Tina nor I are talking about the truth, which is that right now, probably the only thing either of us is going to be capable of is lying somewhere quiet with big, big glasses of cold beer, staring off at the horizon and thinking about what just happened, whatever just happened. Still. Maybe we could do that with yarn.