It is, my knitty friends, one hundred million degrees below zero outside, and I am not even kidding a little bit. It’s the kind of cold that someone like me will do just about anything to avoid, and I am. I’m writing, knitting and doing the mountains of laundry that sprang up out of nowhere like mushrooms on a dank forest floor, and I’m hoping that the outside world doesn’t need me for anything until it’s way less frosty out there.
The focus on laundry today is an imperative, since I leave for Madrona on the 13th, and I realized this weekend that even though it was just yesterday that it was January, all of a sudden this is February, and not the start of it either. I leave for Madrona in 48 hours, and if I don’t do some laundry not only will I leave this family in a tragic state of affairs (which I am not too worried about. They are all tall enough to have an episode with Sir Washie) but I will be travelling with only commercial socks, my bottom of the barrel underpants and the shirt that has a coffee stain on the front. (Considering that I am extremely unlikely to stop being the sort of doofus, who will spill coffee on myself just about first thing everyday while I am at Madrona, shouldn’t really bother me…but I do like to at least give myself a chance to rise above.)
Once I’d worked out that I had only a few days to get ready, I realized that meant that meeting my goal of having the Must Have Cardie (Laura has a nice one here) to wear at Madrona was also looking pretty slim. I abandoned it a couple of weeks ago to work harder on the Vintage socks…and then those sucked up – well, the universe, to be completely fair, and now here I am 48 hours before my flight with only two fronts and two sleeves, which can only make a sweater if you’re someone who thinks creatively about sweaters, like….Teva Durham or Norah Gaughan or even my buddy Denny, who would all totally work out a way to make the sleeves the backs and the fronts the sleeves and have a cabled shrug at the end of it.
I’m not them though, and so I have the back left to do, and the bands, and find buttons and that might even be doable, I thought. Might be doable right up until for reasons that I can’t properly explain to you, but might have something to do with a backlash from the fussiest socks in the world….
I grabbed a skein of sock yarn and started the worlds plainest sock.
(Yarn from that darn Rabbitch, who apparently exists only to corrupt me. Sock yarn in “Revenge”. (Her shop is here….though I don’t see this colourway just now. Whoops. It’s here. My bad. )
I was just going to do the ribbing, I told myself. Then get seriously diligent about the sweater. Seriously. I would just do the ribbing and then I’d have a plain sock to work on while I read and worked and that really was my plan.
Then, I couldn’t put it down. I’m totally charmed by this colourway, and I keep promising myself that I’m just going to do a few more rounds and then put it down…and then I’m all “Hey! Turquoise! Hey! Pink! Hey! Acid yellow and black and it’s red again!” and…..
I can’t seem to stop. I look over at the sweater, I give myself a stern talking to, then I remember that I’m the boss of me and I’ll knit what I want, and then I work on the sock. Then I remind myself that I really do want a warm sweater to wear in Tacoma, and then I think… is it even cold enough to care in Tacoma? I checked. It is a very toasty 10C (that’s 48F) in Tacoma right now. That is chilly, not cold, although I know that not finishing that sweater will likely bring an arctic wind upon Tacoma the minute I get off the plane and plunge the place into never-seen-before temperatures so low that I will sob for my Must Have cardigan, just to teach me a lesson about cockiness and project abandonment and not keeping promises to myself. The worst thing is, that if I continue to let this sock seduce me, not only will I have no sweater, I’ll won’t even have a pair of socks. I’ll just have one, since there’s certainly not time to finish the pair. Maybe I should go back to the sweater.
Or not. It’s a really great sock.