I only have a few moments before I go and start the day with knitters and a yarn shop and tonight I give a talk and…well. That part is pretty normal, but let me tell you what happened last night.  At exactly 10:32, I cast off  the socks I was knitting, and then something happened that hasn’t occurred in years and years. Maybe decades. 

I had no knitting. 

None.  Not on my person, not in my bag, not somewhere else in my stuff.  No knitting.  I think I was actually dizzy for a moment. I’m surprised you couldn’t feel the shock wave over at your house.  This couldn’t happen to me at home of course, where I have projects tucked away all over the place, but you’d think it would be a pretty easy situation to stumble into at some point with all the travel I do, but I’m super obsessed with knitting careful.  Usually I have several projects with me, and that provides a protective layer of overlap. Usually as I finish one, I start another, and that’s further insurance against finding myself knitless, but there I was last night, with just that happening. I cast off my socks – and there was nothing but a void.

I did the right thing though, I mean, even though I don’t really remember being in that position before. I didn’t panic.  I went to my suitcase and got out some yarn, and I wound it into balls by hand, and I got my spare needles out of my changepurse, where I keep them, and then it was sort of late, so I went to sleep with them by the bedside table.  When I woke up this morning I got ready to teach, and wrote you this, and that means that I have been knitless for about ten hours.  Granted, I was asleep for a chunk of that, and I did technically have it all right there so that I could do it whenever I wanted too,  but I guess it’s still somehow good to know that I’m not so dependent on knitting that I can’t go a single night without somehow winding up in the kind of trouble that has me sleeping in an orange jumpsuit with a new best friend named Beulah on the top bunk.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, there’s this really strange twitch over my right eye for absolutely no reason, and I think I want to start some socks.