the Village Knittiot

This is the question I have been continually asking myself for the last 7 hours.

Why am I here when I could be at home knitting, working on the oh so cool thumb for my mittens (now that I know how — Thank You, Erin!)?

Why am I here when I have nearly half a pound of unspun Merino at home begging to be played with?

Why am I here, when clearly my time would be better spent working on the blog?

More importantly, why am I here when I could be at home playing World of Warcraft?

Oh, right. Money. Bills. Food. That stuff. I can’t remember if it was a personality test, or a horoscope summation, that said I tend to dislike the practical details of life. Maybe it was both. Whichever, it was right. I hate the practical details of life. Yes, I want a clean toilet, in theory. But really, does it have to take so much time to clean your house? Or go grocery shopping? Or rake leaves? Or balance the checkbook? Or, for that matter, go to work?

The stuff of life, it would seem, is determined to take time. I am beginning to suspect that learning to enjoy it all may be an important part of this whole contentment thing… Hmmmm…

I have been working on “clever” all day. I assure you, a valiant effort has been put forth, but I think I’m going to have to abandon clever and settle for grammatically correct. And by the time I am done typing, we may have to abandon grammatically correct and just give me an A for effort.

It is 3:34 in the afternoon. I have 1 hour and 26 minutes left before it is time to go home, and my brain is more preocuppied with my grocery list than it is with being clever.

The next four days will consist of laying around a lot in my pajamas, playing video games, knitting, watching movies, and in general just relaxing. I seem to have come up against that usual hollywood-induced feeling that things are supposed to feel different because it is the holidays. Of course, things just feel as they always do. Probably I’m just missing my family. And I’m also sure that if I were home, they would be driving me up the wall.

More knitting was done, despite staying up way past my bedtime playing on the computer. I am definitely making progress on the mittens, but I don’t have a picture of them right now. I’ll try to post one later!

This is the decision I will face tonight at approximately 5:45 pm when I sit down with my newly purchased copy of Worlds of Warcraft(or as it is referred to in our household — WoW) to create my first character for my first MMORPG (massively multi-player on-line role-playing game –isn’t that a mouth full?).

I must choose a side. I think I am going with the Horde.

And this is not all that is joyous in my life at the moment. This is the mitten, or at least the tip of the mitten, I was enticed into making by that yarn-pusher over at Skein Street. She’s been on a bit of a mitten kick, and I decided to tag along. I am forever indebted to her for introducing me to the amazing Anna Zilboorg, who does wonderful things, like never ever referring to needle size, just giving a general gauge, and putting blank mitten patterns at the back of the book for you to fill in with your own kick ass designs. This one here is from her book Magnificent Mittens, but you can bet your ass after I get done with this pair, that I am to be putting funky pen to paper and coming up with a graph all my own.

Michelle, over at The Orange Yarn Please said they reminded her of Mitten Cakes (eliciting chortles of delight and laughter) — something to do with a Martha Stewartesque quality to them. But now, after discovering another fantastic book by Zilboorg called Knitting for Anarchists, I think maybe my new pal Anna is a little more Tank Girl than Martha Stewart.

Tackling the ultra-cool mitten pattern, which wasn’t at all as complicated as I had feared it would be, I was not surprised in the least to discover that Ms. Zilboorg caters to us independant knitters.

1 hour and 24 minutes until WoW…

Sometimes, I have really brilliant ideas. Occassionally, my really brilliant ideas work out to be semi-brilliant events, but mostly, they turn into amusing stories about disastrous happenings.

Like the time I talked my friend into making candles by melting wax in a small pan on the stove and we had to call the fire department because it caught on fire. I’m sure there were more than a few chuckles exchanged amongst the 911 operators that day when I tried to explain to them that they couldn’t send a fire truck because my mom would kill me. Or the time I tried to imitate what my friend Chris told us he’d been doing on his bike moments before he fell and needed a trip to the emergency room and 16 stitches in his head. I didn’t need stitches, but it didn’t feel good when my head, like his, hit pavement.

Saturday was my husband’s birthday. I’d already bought him something, but a week before, I decided I really ought to make him something too. My plan was to work on it when he wasn’t around so it would be a total surprise. It was a total surprise. When I gave it to him, it looked like this:

It was supposed to look like this, but what can you do?

I was about one skein and 3 hours short of my idealistic projections. I realized this on Saturday morning, 35 minutes before I was supposed to be home to take him to the movies. Oh well, I thought. Nothing is perfect. I decided to just wrap it up in the box, needles and all.

I had planned just enough time for one quick stop. There was this fun “retro-ish” wrapping paper and a rather cool black and white postcard of a very sexy David Bowie circa 1975 (better than a boring birthday card) that I thought would be perfect. I got up to the register and laid my $5.15 worth of merchandise on the counter and took out my credit card. “Oh,” said the girl behind the counter. “We have a minimum of $10.00 when you are paying with your card.” Now, this is a pet peeve of mine. I want to spend money at your shop. I will probably come back to your shop and spend more money in the future. But you are inhibiting my ability to spend my money at your shop. Note to self - doesn’t matter how cool this place is, it is now on the no-shopping list. Okay, I said, and left.

Once outside the shop, I realize I now have 20 minutes to get home, and there is literally nowhere for me to stop and find a card and some wrapping paper at this point. I get in the car. I have an unfinished hat, a DVD (Coffee and Cigarettes - Jim Jarmusch is brilliant), a department store box from a present someone got us for our wedding, a silver bow from last year’s Christmas presents, and a knitting pattern for said unfinished hat. And that’s when inspiration hit. You know, knitting patterns make great birthday cards.

DH was delighted with my ingenious impromptu birthday card, not being one to care much about the particulars of wrapping paper and greeting cards. The hat was definitely a surprise, and all in all we had a great day, which, now that I think about it, was pretty inevitable since it involved homemade margaritas…

Well, I guess they are. Fantastic, that is.

Unless of course you go to bed cranky on Thursday night — so cranky that you have to breathe deeply and visit your happy place in order to even make it within proximity of the land of nod.

And then you spend the entire night tossing and turning only to be woken from your very light slumber every hour and a half because you keep hearing yourself shout “No!” to no one in particular.

And then when you finally fall into a deep sleep, it is only to have a nightmare that for some ungodly reason has John Voight in it. Yuck!

And then you hear this horrible noise, and part of you thinks it is just a dream. But then you realize, no, it isn’t a dream, it is really happening. In my house. So you jolt out of sleep, but you’re too scared to move. You lay there breathing and listening intently for what seems like 5 hours. Then when you aren’t too scared to move anymore, you wake up your husband — because surely it will help if you both aren’t sleeping. When he asks you if you want him to go check things out, you say no, of course not dodo, because if you learned one lesson in life from scarey movies it is not to go check out strange noises, because if you do, you will die. Also, you don’t know where your cell phone is and then you’ll be all alone in the house. Except, of course, for the body of your dead husband who just had to go look and see what deranged psychopath was making noise in your kitchen. And then you would have to go and look for your cell phone, and then, you guessed it. Dead too.
So he asks you what time it is. It is 4:30 in the morning. You will be getting up in one hour. Not nearly enough time to calm down and go back to sleep for any decent amount of time. So you get up. What else are you going to do? About an hour later you finally figure out that the scarey noise in the kitchen was only your coffee maker, which not only turns on automatically (at 4:15 a.m.), but grinds the beans before it brews your perfectly roasted coffee and pours it into the nice thermal carafe. I used to think of it as better than a mere coffee pot, more like a special morning friend. Now, I am pissed off at my special morning friend, but in a totally passive-aggressive way. I still need the coffee pot. It knows it. I know it. And there we are at an impasse.

So you stumble through the morning. You got up early so you should have gotten a ton of stuff done. But you poked a bit at the computer. You picked up a few pairs of underwear and put it in the laundry. Then you sat down, just for a couple minutes, to try to untangle a pile of yarn that had somehow gotten a little out of control. Before you know it, it is 6:45 (almost an hour later, and 15 minutes before you need to be getting in the shower) the pile of yarn has grown. It is definitely more tangled than when you picked it up. There is no way you will even get this one thing done. So you do the sensible thing. You put the yarn down, and you have a good cry. That way, you can get it out of the way. Move on. Enter your day fresh. Put it all behind you. Have a great day. It is, after all, Friday. The happiest day of the week.

This worked for a good couple of hours, but you forgot about work. You forgot that whenever work can shit on your day, it will. So when the incompetent “office manager” (read glorified secretary who can’t use a computer to save her fucking life) tries to pawn another project off on you because, well, “You know computers,” you have to keep yourself from leeping out of your seat to crack her skull against the the filing cabinet. And your boss just stands there in your office not saying anything. You try to defend your boundaries. She pushes. He shuffles his feet and looks down. Guess who’s doing her fucking project?

It is 10:56 a.m. I have exactly 6 hours and 4 minutes to turn this day around. Tonight is date night, and goddamnit if I’m not going to set it all aside and enjoy this evening with my husband, who is also probably tired on account of the being woken up by some crazy nut at 4:30 in the morning.

Boy howdy, I love Fridays!