September 7, 2007

Hope is the thing with socks on

Finished.

Cuffsstrscaug0709

Not the book, just the socks, though the evidence of one finished thing is providing hope for the other.

Strscfini0709

Yarn is STR "Flower Power", pattern is "Summer of Love Lace" by JC Briar. This was the August shipment of the Sock Club, and while it's exclusive to the club right now, it'll be available to anybody who loves it as much as I do sometime next year.

Augstrscfin0709-1

These socks are a little big for me, for a very good reason. They are a bribe. Jayme-the-wonder-publicist, who is in charge of where I go and what I do for 8 days starting next week...loves them. Adores them, covets them deeply. When she said this, I realized that I suddenly have some leverage. After some complex negotiation, Jayme and I have agreed that if she can arrange my travel and life for those 8 days in a way that does not leave me weeping, starving or sleep deprived....
I will give them to her.

They have been knit in her size, and I am providing these pictures and this public declaration of my intentions as proof of our deal. Jayme suggested that she could have the socks if she could find a workaround for these common tour occurrences.

1. Lying on a hotel floor crying out of sheer exhaustion.
2. Having a nervous breakdown in an airport.
3. Starving (technically speaking, not eating anything except airplane pretzels for over 24 hours).
4. Going to sleep at 1am from an event and waking up at 3am for a flight.

Understandably, my standards are a little bit higher. I would like the following:

1. Eight hours between when an event ends and when I have to get on a plane.
2. No starving, with starving defined (for our purposes) as the absence of food (or the time to eat it) for a period of greater than 12 hours.
3. Absolutely no hotel rooms without phones, room service or internet access. (Also, there are worse things in store for Jayme than a little sock deprivation if I ever have drunken karaoke on the patio under my hotel room window during the three hours I have been allotted for sleep again. I know that she could never have known about that, or hardly prevented it, but someone should pay.)
4. The absence of all armed drivers or media escorts.
5. Not getting up before 5am more than 3 days in a row.
6. If there must be connecting flights, more than 4 minutes must be allotted to traverse a huge freakin' airport.
7. If I do run into trouble not related to Jayme, like say, locking myself out of my hotel room in my underpants or dropping my shoes out of high windows, Jayme will, when I tell her about it, not laugh until I am home. (I understand that this one will be difficult, given my track record, but these are nice socks.)
8. No bookstores with only 10 chairs available for knitters.
9. No 3 hour flights with guys who want to know if I am lonely without my husband. (I know this one is mostly luck, but it's so gross I want to try and avoid it anyway.)
10. An understanding that if coffee is not available to me within 15 minutes of my awakening I can hardly be blamed for ANYTHING.

I am willing to let her off the hook for the nervous breakdowns in an airport because they are not always her fault, and she can hardly be blamed for my continuing difficulties with O'Hare or that thing in Detroit.

Cuffsbstr0709

Game on Jayme. Lets rumble, and remember, I know other people with size 7.5 feet.

Posted by Stephanie at September 7, 2007 12:02 PM