Today, my pretties, we’re not going to talk about knitting. Yesterday was a really blah knitting day and kind of a blah day in general. (You know, it’s really hard to re-enter the atmosphere after such a fabulous knitting experience. Every project seems, well, pedestrian at this point. I’m sure it will pass soon.) Well, maybe a teeny tiny VERY important little bit about knitting….

Mr. Etherknitter, as most of you know, was in an awful skiing accident a while back and he hasn’t had as much progress as we’d all like in the bone growth department. So as all good knitters are wont to do in a time of need, we’re knitting for GROWTH! Find the details about Mr. Etherknitter here and the details for knitting to make that bone grow here and thank Maryse for the button here. I will be doing my part and knitting a bit today, with bone growth in mind. Pass it on!

Okay, back to the issue at hand. The weather. I’m not a weather person. I strive for comfort in my life, the kind of comfort the great indoors can provide. That’s not to say I don’t like to go outside, on occassion, but the conditions have to be pretty close to perfect. That doesn’t mean sun all the time either – I’m perfectly happy on a cloudy slightly cold day. Or a sunny briskly cold day. Or a warm, but not too warm, breezy sunny day. Or a snowy cold gray day. You get the picture. I just don’t really care that much about winter. If I want to go outside I go outside but most of the time I’m perfectly content to stay in my nice climate controlled home. Not so my husband. While we are perfect for each other, we’re so different in so many ways. He LIVES to be outside. He’s a Leo, born in August, and I’ve always thought that really influenced his love for the sun. (Me, on the other hand, I’m a Cappy tried and true – nothing but the dark, cold, bleak depressing winter for us!!) Anyway, G’s love of the sun and all things warm and outdoors really dictate a lot in our life. He suffers horribly from SAD – the minute the turn those clocks back in October it’s like a death knell on our house. In contrast, the minute they turn them forward it’s like spring and candy and lightness and all things good! He’s out there EVERY weekend, and I mean every weekend, playing tennis, sitting by the pool, soaking in those Vitamin D laden rays. Me? I’m in the house. Knitting.

So G works extremely hard for our family and we like to take vacations – preferably to warm climeates. We were supposed to be away this week. Right this second I was supposed to be on a sunny Bermuda beach with a virgin icy drink in one hand and a half-knit sock in the other. Instead, I’m here with you all! Why? Because G started watching the weather about three weeks ago and it was dismal. When I tell you there wasn’t sun in sight I mean it was rain, rain, rain, rain like you wouldn’t believe. He becamse OBSESSED with the weather in Bermuda. When the forecast everyday was cold and rainy, he cancelled the trip. (Luckily for us there weren’t any penalites.) Then he went about finding some place else to go.

Last week he found it – a place he’s always wanted to go – it’s exclusive, gorgeous, consistently rated one of the best resorts in the world and we’ve just passed peak season so the rates are much lower. Cap Juluca. AKA Paradise. We leave on Mother’s Day and come back on Wednesday – it’s a quick trip but with nothing to do but bask in the sun and eat at 5 star restaurants it was looking to be relaxing and rejuvenating. But…but…

Hmm. Tropical paradise, no? We ended up getting into a big argument about it. We can’t cancel this trip and even though when the weather was looking bad in Bermuda I was all like well we’ll be together and who cares and I can knit in the rain and blah blah blah and then he canceled the trip. THIS time, well, I was in a bad mood and then I was like why bother going if all it’s going to do is rain!? And he was all like what happened to the togetherness and the knitting in the rain? And I was all like well now it’s a world class resort and how can you go in the rain? Of course, we’re still more than ten days out and things can change quickly and I know that in the Caribbean it can rain for like five minutes and be sunny the rest of the day. But I can’t help but be obsessed now.

ETA: Georgie just called me – he called the hotel. (Insanity runs in the family obviously.) While not explicitly saying he was crazy, the woman he spoke to said that yes, it has been raining, but that the mini rain storms come in and out and don’t last and that 80% of the day it’s sunny. He feels better, so I guess I feel better too.

And have you seen the weather forecast for the weekend?

Rain on Saturday. Rain on Sunday. Any suggestions on what we should do about the meet-up? I know I’ve been lax about getting the names up there. I promise to have it updated by Saturday. That’s all that counts, right?

If you’re looking for me in the next week, chances are I’ll be off checking the weather.

One of the things that makes writing so amazingly incredibly difficult (and also why it makes it so so satisfying – please let me write again! PLEASE!) is that there is this HUGE gap between your imagination and what actually makes it onto the page. I can spend days and hours and days thinking over stories and having it be PERFECT in my mind and it never makes it out of my head exactly the way I want it to be. I’m not sure I know why this is – but it is. It’s probably the same for painting. Such inexactness is what makes it all so precious, maybe. I don’t know. But I know that writing is the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life (so far) and that it’s like pulling teeth to get started and full of disappointment and the greatest feeling when you’ve done what you set out to do. I often cry when I finish a story, or at least I used to. Part so glad it’s over part awe that I created this.

I called G yesterday and in hushed reverent tones I said, “That shawl. My shawl. You know the one on the floor? Well it’s beyond perfect.”
“I know. It’s great.”
“No. I unpinned it. It’s amazing. EXACTLY what I wanted.”
“I saw it yesterday. You’re the best.”
“But it’s OFF THE FLOOR. You DON’T understand. IT’S PERFECT.”

I was like Maria in West Side Story, flitting about the house with that shawl – oh so pretty, so pretty and witty and gay. I tried it on while I was naked. (By the way, triangular shawls – not so good with the naked. Those points don’t cover much.) I did Talia Shire in Godfather III pulling it up over my head dramatically. I thought about greeting G at the door with nothing on but the shawl (I can’t explain why this particular piece of knitting is causing me to take off my clothes. I’m not usually like that with handknits) but then I had to pick him up at the train.

The best part about this shawl is that I had a vision in my mind and I GOT EXACTLY WHAT I WANTED!! No where else in my creative life is this possible. With the writing – well I already explained that. With the photography – it depends. Sometimes I don’t know what I want with the flower pictures or the inanimate object pictures until I’ve taken one – liked it – and gone back to try to recreate it or change it slightly or jump off from there. And the kids, well, the kids is a cross your fingers on one hand, let the shutter fly on the other and hope for the best. It’s a split second kind of creativity and oftentimes I don’t remember framing the shot except it’s clearly obvious I did when I look at the results.

But knitting is different. It’s never perfect, there’s always some handknit anomaly somewhere in there, which is a GOOD thing and something my anxiety/control ridden/ocd mind wants and needs, but I can GET my vision! I can ACHIEVE what I set out to make. As soon as I finished my first DFS I had an idea about a DFS with beads. I was at Rhinebeck when I saw some black(ish) STR and thought wouldn’t it be so elegant in black with beads. I bought the yarn and left it in the drawer, oftentimes dreaming about it, and then the wedding came up. I’m glad I didn’t use the STR in the end, because I think the solid black is much more dramatic. And it’s HUGE. When I blocked it out I measured that it’s 35″ on each side of the middle line – so 70″ at the wingspan. And from the point to the top it’s about 35″ as well. (It hits way below my ass, thank you very much.) I feel such a sense of creative accomplishment. I had a vision, and that vision turned out to be true.

Thank you all so much for your comments. I will absolutely try to get pictures of me wearing it with the dress. Whatever dress works out. Wouldn’t you know it – I ordered some books from Amazon on Monday and did the regular shipping (not the free one) and the freaking books came yesterday. I ordered the dress on Sunday, paid for two day delivery – supposedly it shipped on Monday – and it’s not here yet. Today, I’m hoping. And please think good thoughts for it to fit. I would really, really like to wear the red dress and not the black one. The shawl will look SO much more dramatic against the red. 😉 (And I don’t really know the bride – I may have met her once, so I’m not feeling too bad about showing her up!)

I’ll end with this. SOMEONE better ask me about the shawl at the damn wedding. I asked G if he thought someone would ask about it. Did it look really good? Would people be impressed? (I know – Hello my name is Karen. I’m a validation whore.) He told me that I shouldn’t get my hopes up and used a couple of derogatory monikers to describe the people who most likely will be attending the wedding – excluding us of course. ONE person. I just want to tell ONE person that I made it myself.

Yesterday Wendy and I took a detour from the MDK Spring Fling East Coast Tour: Knit Squares or Die and headed off to The Museum of Natural History, you know, in order to feel like we were in third grade again on a SCHOOL TRIP! (I promised Wendy no puking.) When we weren’t being lulled into a false sense of security by Robert Redford’s crackly voice (in actuality he was telling us we’re all insignificant specks on the kitchen floor that is the universe and we will all die in a firey intergalactic collision) I was having the rug of life ripped out from under me. WARNING…WARNING! DO NOT READ FURTHER UNLESS YOU WANT THE RUG OF LIFE RIPPED OUT FROM UNDER YOU!!!!! Did you people know that those animals in the “history” museum were MURDERED and STUFFED for your viewing pleasure? BABY SITATUNGA were KILLED so you and your kids can point at them and say, “Look, another deer!” By the time you get to the Plains Indians, you’re like, hey – they slaughtered the Indians too! And then you remember, it IS a HISTORY museum.

Yeah. I’ll stick to paintings next time.

The butterflies were WAY cool though and a very cute boy (and when I say boy I mean he was at least 21) told us about pupas and stuff and even though Wendy was about to puke it was kind of hot to me. And it wasn’t because the room was 97freakingdegrees either. Man, though, those MOTHS are scary as shit.

After the museum it was on to another fabulous inspirational evening with the girls. Ann and the LI crew were there, along with Karola, long time reader who needs her own blog, and Katherine and Camille and baby Skye all the way from SLC! (Margene! You were like Kevin Bacon! I felt like I was standing RIGHT NEXT TO YOU!!!) Lots of other cool peeps too. We invaded a regular knit night and were welcomed with open arms. I’m sorry if I wasn’t my usual bright and sunny self (just ask Lt. Uhura) but I wasn’t feeling so well yesterday. Usually I’m much funnier. And prettier. And skinnier. If you come out tonight I will be a better me! See you at Knitty City!

PS – The contest is open until 11:59 PM TONIGHT. And since mysteriously ANOTHER book has appeared in my home, I will be giving away TWO signed copies. Winner chosen at random.

Have you seen this? Amy Lu is a GENIUS in the kitchen! I want to be her as soon as I learn how to cook!!!

My left eyelid has been twitching on and off for a week. That means I’m dying right? Or I’ve got some terrible neurological disease? How long does it have to twitch before I need to see someone? It doesn’t hurt. My eye doesn’t shut. It’s just the corner (farthest from my nose) won’t stop twitching.

Last night I didn’t spin or knit but I thought about it. I was kind of in a mood, shall we say, and I didn’t feel like anything but I didn’t feel like nothing either. Makes sense, right? So I climbed into bed and read my book. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon. Our favorite Bookish Girl kept telling me to read it and I picked it up way back when and I’ve been reading like half a page before I fall asleep every night. There is nothing better than falling asleep while you’re reading. Seriously. It’s the best sleep. Anyway, I noticed the other day when I opened the book that my marker was on page 500 and something. I thought oh I stuck in there and fell asleep. Reading half a paragraph a day CANNOT get you that far into a book. But I was that far. I’d say that’s a testament to the story. I must really like it to have read so much. It’s a good story.

I LOVE Turbo Tax. LOVE IT! We used to have our taxes done by a friend and then I decided I wanted to do them myself. We don’t have lots of fancy stuff to do – I mean my business is really just a Schedule C, nothing too complicated, but TT gets you through it all. And we usually end up with a nice chunk of change in the end. I know that the experts say you’re supposed to work it out so that you break even at the end of the year – owe nothing, get nothing back – so that you’re money is your own, but we like to think of the IRS as a kind of savings plan. The money in our paychecks would just be shit away anyway. So when we get that nice check in the Spring we can take a vacation. Pay some bills. You know. It’s like a present. 😉

Yesterday I started doing the taxes. I used TT last year so it saved A LOT of time. They just transfered over all the stuff from last year’s return and I just have to fill in this year’s numbers. Voila! They need to be done by this weekend. I’ve got company coming next week. I think. YAY!

I also sent out a job yesterday and my Project Spectrum Postcard swap stuff that is very, very late. I hope though, that my pal, Kelly, will get it before the end of the month. You know. When pink/red is over. I suck. I’m really hoping to do better next month. I promise.

My sister and the kids get back from vacation tomorrow! They’ve been gone FOREVER! YAY! I miss them so much. Not this weekend, but the next weekend, is the baby’s FIRST BIRTHDAY! Can you believe it? He’s such a sweetie pie. Ooooh! I miss them all I just want to eat them up!

Thanks for all the ghost stories. I haven’t picked a winner yet – I haven’t had a good read through them yet. Although when I read Jen‘s comment I didnt’ realize how long I had been in my office, that has no windows, and when I got up and walked into the hallway the house was pitch black. Every light in the house was on in like seconds. I’m just saying.

I miss my Beaded Diamond Fantasy Shawl.

I think I’m bored with socks. And I think I can’t do my sock pals socks two on two circulars. I tried to work it out in my mind and it just feels uncomfortable. And I don’t want to do magic loop. I’d love to cast on for them, but I don’t know how many stitches and what needle size and I don’t feel like figuring it out. Blah.

I need to start running again.

Limited Edition Sericel from Hanna-Barbera Studios

I’ve got no knitting or spinning (Well I did spin last night and let’s say I was underwhelmed at best. One step up and two steps back.) so I’m going to talk about something else. I can’t give all the details because it’s a client, but a new project has come to me that deals with the supernatural. This person has written their life story detailing their adventures with the “other side.” I may have alluded in my re-cap post about my weekend at Ann’s that I’m scared shitless of this stuff – basically because I guess I believe it. I hate scary movies. I’ve never had my fortune read and won’t. There was that unfortunate incident with the Ouija Board that said I’d die in like October ’88 but I’ve since decided that it was my so-called girlfriends fucking with me. Basically because I lived. 😉 My problem tends to be the fact that I have an extraordinary imagination. And not always in a good way. So nothing is really outside the realm of possibility for me because if I can imagine it, it can be true. (My shrink has often remarked I’m stuck in the magical thinking stage so characteristic of five year olds. You know, the idea that if you think something you can cause it. Like a kid may wish a parent dead, then think it could actually happen.) This contributes a lot to my anxiety as you can imagine. I can think up some pretty horrific things. 😉

But I’d also like to think I have a healthy dose of skepticism and rationality in me. For instance, I’m skeptical of EVERYTHING our current government says. I’m often extremely logical and rational.

I’ve personally never seen a ghost. There was that one instance with my dead grandfather when I was a preteen, but I was in bed reading Go Ask Alice and I probably thought I was high or something and made the whole thing up. More likely, though, I will dream about dead relatives (mainly my great aunts and grandmother) and when I wake from the dream I usually have a feeling that they came to tell me that everything will be all right. It’s not only happened to me, but my sister and my mother as well. And they’ve all had this same reassuring feeling afterward. Nothing scary. Just peace. When I’m feeling bad or uncertain I often wish to dream about them, but it doesn’t happen like that.

Anyway, in the last few days I’ve spent a decent amount of time talking to this person who I’m going to be working with and I have to say, I believe everything they say. They’re earnest, honest, exasperated a little bit and more than anything, they’ve been burdened with this ability to a certain extent. Besides the “supernatural element,” this project is about writing the story of coming to terms with something in your life that you don’t really want – that you didn’t ask for – but has stuck around nonetheless. I could immediately relate to her. My anxiety will not go away, but it’s much more manageable now that I’ve accepted it into my life instead of fighting it and being afraid of it. The person I’ll be working with is a medium, but has been terrified of it since childhood. I don’t know the whole story yet, but it seems that in the last ten years they’ve made a conscious effort to learn about it and explore it so as not to be afraid. To be accepting and open and hopefully have a content life.

I’ve been talking to G about this and while he gets just as freaked out as I am, I’ve tried to explain why I believe what this person is telling me. I suffer from anxiety and panic, which is basically the fight or flight instinct gone awry. My shrink, when he’s not admonishing me about my magical thinking tendencies, likes to joke that I would’ve been GREAT in the time of the dinosaurs. You know when that anxiety mechanism kept you alive instead of making you think you’re crazy? Well who’s to say that at that same time, humans needed to be able to communicate with people who might have passed before them in order to survive? How many of you can say that you’ve never known something was going to happen before it happened? Or had a feeling about something that you couldn’t shake, and only later found out what that feeling meant? Everyone has anxiety. Some of us are lucky enough to have some kind of mix-up in our brains where that anxiety switch is set WAY TOO HIGH. So what’s to prevent someone from having that extrasensory switch set WAY TOO HIGH? In my mind it’s the same type of thing.

I often remark to myself how extraordinarily powerful the mind is – I see it all the time with the convoluted shit I come up with – so it’s not out of the realm for me that these things can and do happen. What do you think?

Here’s a little game we’ll play. I’ve been feeling pretty calm since my talks with this person – like I’m not so terrified of the whole ghost thing anymore. I’m trying to inure myself to all this ghost talk – I mean how am I going to deal with this project if I can’t sleep at night – so tell me your scariest (but TRUE!) ghost story! The person who succeeds in making me run screaming from my house will win a skein of STR Prove It All Night. Gather round the campfire, kids. We’re gonna tell ghost stories!

PS – Does anyone remember that really freaky deaky scene in Three Men and A Baby where you can see the kid behind the curtain in the window? OHMYGOD that was so SCARY! (And apparently false. What do you think?)

OMG – Ann is wearing me out!

Because I am like a wee child who can’t be alone at night (even though I have my blankie to keep me company), my wheel and I are off to visit our favorite purling swine. She’s still on board even after I cried to her this morning that I am an anxious mess and likely not to eat, sleep or be drug-free this weekend. Now that’s love. Jen was kind enough to put me up last night even though I ran out of her house this morning like a bat out of hell at 7:30AM. No offense Jen, Xavi and Oscar! I’m just Crazy Aunt Cara!

You all have a good weekend. I’ll see you back here Monday. Same bat time, same bat channel. Pass the Xanax.