Judge Not

This post comes to you from another airport lounge, as I get ready to fly out for the weekend. Joe’s working out west today, and I’ve got some work to do there Monday, so it made sense for me to join him today and maybe sneak in a little skiing over the weekend. (The skiing has stuck, it would appear. Joe remains more enthusiastic about it than I am, but I’m coming to like it better as the terror fades. Toddlers still ski faster than I do, though.)  I have this whole theory about how travel this much without being crazy or mean, and it’s all about organization, so yesterday I packed everything I wanted to take with me.   I laid it all out, tidy and organized, and wrote myself little lists, and thought carefully about the knitting I wanted to take with me, and I got that into project bags, and lined it up on the table. About two minutes after that, I glanced at the clock, realized I had to be downtown for a meeting in an hour, surveyed everything that I’d pulled together gave myself a nice little pat on the back for having it so together, grabbed my bag and headed for the bus. The bus came, I had to run – you don’t care about that part, the important thing is that as I settled myself on the bus for the short ride to the subway, I reached into my bag to get my knitting, and before my hand was even all the way in there, I knew it. No knitting. None. In my organizational zeal I’d taken it from my regular bag and put in by my travel bag and then instead of doing what I usually do (which is go to the airport with the travel bag) I’d left with my regular bag and … and it’s hard to describe the sense of panic I had. Organization might be how I travel without being crazy and mean, but knitting is how I exist without being crazy or mean and without it I really wasn’t really sure what was going to happen. I thought about it – it was going to be about three hours without knitting.

I reasoned with myself. really, I’d be taking notes part of the time, I’d be eating part of the time, I’d be talking part of the time…I could do three hours without knitting if I was going to be busy, right?

36 minutes later I was in the door of the yarn shop closest to the meeting, and 4 minutes after that I was back out the door with a ball of red Galway, a pack of DPNs and the knowledge that I can knit a pair of mittens without a pattern, and 6 minutes after that I was at the meeting looking for all the world like a normal (if slightly sweaty and rushed) human being. *

supernormal 2017-01-20

Having started, it only makes sense to finish them I guess, though I had no intention of knitting mittens at all, but emergencies are emergencies.

*PS “normal human being” isn’t exactly how people look at you if you take a picture of your half knit mitten on your hand in the airport lounge, but whatever.