More about things with wiggly lines

 

SNORK.  I've been off line all day and as a warm up to addressing the blog I tweeted that my first mail order yarn arrived today, uh oh . . . and there were five insta-whizz responses in as many minutes.*  You knitters.  You're something else.  Someone wants to know what project this yarn is for . . . and the less than satisfactory answer is that it's for Secret Projects #1 & 2.  The slightly more responsive answer is that I am amusing myself.  Translated, this means that although I am/can still only knit rectangles of varying proportions I am already going off the rails.  Surprise.  Not.  You may remember that even the hellhound blanket is made of three different coloured yarns.  Well, so is everything else (made of different different coloured yarns).**  I am enabling myself. *** I am keeping myself from getting bored.  This is sensible.  It's called Self Knowledge.

            One of the things that the Sainted Yarn Harlot says is that if you're one of these people who takes her knitting everywhere then possibly you have a teeny-weeny problem, the way Imelda Marcos had a teeny-weeny problem about shoes.†  Granted that I am perhaps not the best person to make judgements on what constitutes a problem †† but I think the Sainted Yarn Harlot has it all wrong.†††  One of the great, immediate draws of knitting is that it is the best fidget ever.   Sitting in a traffic jam while you watch the stoplights turn pretty colours like a kind of very slow fireworks and the only thing you can see is the butt end of a police car in the middle of the crossroads?  Can you read—for comprehension, mind—in this situation?  I can't.  But I can knit.  Your public transport is bounding dismayingly over the landscape like a cheetah after a springbok, and you don't dare read?  You can knit.  I admit I knit very slowly when I'm doing it mostly by feel, but it beats both throwing up and being bored.‡  Knitting has already insinuated itself into my life to such an extent that the idea of being caught somewhere without a Mobile Knitting Unit‡‡ is almost as awful as the idea of being caught somewhere without a book.‡‡‡  But it seems to me that's the point.  I mean, it's nice if you have the kind of life where you can just make time for a pleasant new hobby.§  I don't actually know anybody that has that kind of life, but they probably exist out there somewhere. §§  But knitting mops up the interstitial minutes . . . and at the end of it all you have a hellhound blanket.

            So . . . what is my excuse for having been off line all day?  I'm still sleeping badly—I keep snapping awake about once an hour imagining that I'm hearing the end of the world or a norindour coming through the window—so I'm getting up much too late and staggering around mumbling incomprehensibly to myself for too long, and needing too much caffeine before I can remember how to put a hellhound harness on—and I had to crank out two or three syllables of PEG II before I settled down to the real goal of the day, which was to finish learning St Clements College Bob Minor for handbells this afternoon.  The pressgang having shanghaied Fernanda away from us we are forced to find new six-bell ways to amuse ourselves.  St Clements is short but it packs a lot of incident in its brief span ARRGH. 

            So Pooka and her bell ringing ap and I had a fairly intense burst of St Clements over lunch,§§§ and I swore a lot, and then I ran out into the garden and Planted Things and declared to the hellebores and the camellias and the daffodils and the pansies that handbells are a silly way to waste time.#  And then of course Colin and Niall arrived and I had to shut up (and come indoors) and ring.  I love my Pooka.  I love, love, love my Pooka.##  Although it's the usual problem with doing anything with people who are a lot better at it than you are:  they instantly take up your slack and start dragging you farther.  Hey!  I learnt St Clements!  Lay off!  We were ringing frelling spliced this afternoon.  It doesn't get more brain-destroying than spliced on handbells.  Spliced is when you're happily (or even unhappily) ringing your given method and then your evil fiend of a conductor yells some other method at you and you have to start ringing that method in the middle of the method you're already ringing.  The brain-exploding part is that you have not only to make the switch at all, but you have to be able to comprehend where in the new method you are when you pop out of hyperspace into this new universe.  AAAAAUGH.  Granted this was the very shallow end of spliced, but it was still spliced. 

            I should drop out of this nonsense while I still have some brain left, and take up knitting.  Do you suppose it's too late?° 

* * *

* Then there were a dozen in ten minutes.  Now I am stopping counting.  

** I am eyeing the legwarmer pattern(s) with a view to adapting it to a series of long skinny ribbed rectangles, so I can pursue my patchwork yarn thing further.^ 

^ I keep telling you, sewing holds no terrors.  I come from a misspent youth of embroidery.

*** Blondviolinist tweeted that mail order yarn is a slippery slope.  AAAAIIIIIIIEEEEEEEE . . . wham.  Yup.  Slippery.  Very.  

†  Not even close.  —My All Star collection.  I grant you it's scary, but it's nowhere near that scary. 

†† Obsessive?  Moi?  And I wear those shoes, you know.  Like I knit that yarn and sing out of that (growing) collection of songbooks and ring those bells . . . ahem . . . several times a week.  And no, I haven't counted my rosebushes since I put a few more in last autumn.  And no, I'm not going to.^ 

^ I don't have a problem. . . . 

††† This is the only thing she has wrong, of course.^  

^ I have twice been laughing in the bath so hard over a Yarn Harlot book in the last week that the hellhounds have had to come in and make sure I wasn't being eaten by a marauding norindour.+   Or possibly by an invasion of Sweaters that Failed to Make Gauge.++ 

+ That ill-fitting window only accessible by flying things, you know. 

++ This is sort of the knitting version of firing out your quarter peal, except generally speaking you can hate yourself privately, I assume, if you've just knitted something that would fit a Tyrannosaurus Rex rather than your fourteen-year-old niece.~  In the tower you have to withstand either the glares or the pity of the entire rest of the band.  Uggh. 

~ And don't forget that your fourteen-year-old niece may be grateful you fired out because she doesn't believe in knitwear.  Leather, denim, or forget it.  

‡ And yes, you can listen to music and/or stare at the passing land- or cityscape and/or think deep, ardent thoughts about what the hell needs to happen in the next chapter of your confounded novel, but with knitting you get something at the end of it, which is not guaranteed for most of your other choices, especially not the one about the novel. 

‡‡ Yes.  There are now several, to suit all occasions.

‡‡‡ Moi?  Obsessive?  —The cross-fertilisation of one's . . . several beloveds.^  I also had a book delivery today and I was looking at the cover^^ of one of them and thinking, Hmm.  I would like yarn that colour. . . .

^ I too am a harlot.  I am a Multi Harlot. 

^^ http://www.candlestickpress.co.uk/pamphlet/ten-poems-about-tea/

§ Hobby.  Hahahahahahahaha.  The word itself is a bad joke.^

^ The word itself derives from my name.  See?  It's not my fault.  I was cursed at birth to be a (somewhat feverish) dilettante.    

§§ They're all independently wealthy and under 25.  Life accumulates, and earning a living is a ratbag.

§§§ Made more interesting by Chaos having one of his moments.  I'm sure he decided not to eat lunch to help me develop my powers of concentration.  Arrrrrrrrrgh. 

# And you don't get anything at the end either.

## When is the frelling iPad 2 coming out in this country???  Not that it's going to supplant the wonder that is Pooka the iPhone, but it's going to enhance like crazy.

° I wonder if I could learn something else this week and scare them with it next Thursday??  It seems kind of a waste that the Mwa ha ha ha ha-ing always seems to be on their side.