I love this time of year. Here on my scrap of the west coast, it turned into fall exactly 24 hours early. (Which gave Dad and I a two-hour rain delay at the Oakland Colosseum last Saturday waiting for the ball game to start, but that's neither here nor there.)
You know that thing where you find a knitting pattern that just takes you in certain way?
Maybe you don't have that thing. Maybe you don't knit. Maybe you whittle, or you paint, or you clean your house or something. I hear there are people that do that. Anyway, whatever your thing is, you know when it hits you just right and you just don't want to stop?
Whoosh. That's the way my days are going lately. Work's been a little hectic. Busy is good. I like feeling useful and I don't care for being bored, so I don't mind the busy. This is enough, though, that I'm coming home with my intellectual tank running on fumes. Things that take a certain amount of brain power have been going undone or underdone. Case in point, I cast on for another ribbed scarf over the weekend. This is getting serious. I'll have to change my Ravelry avatar to a knitted zombie soon. (Someone find me an amigurami pattern. You know there is one.)
I did what I'd consider crazy amounts of travel up and down the length of California this summer. I hit Humboldt, Big Sur, San Diego, and a few spots in between, and in nothing like so sensible an order as just listed.
In the midst of a busy summer with more travel plans than my hobbitty self copes with well, I reached into my yarn stash, pulled out a couple of balls of fingering weight merino, and cast on for the most complicated scarf pattern my over-taxed psyche could handle. Two-by-two rib, baby.
I just finished up a sewing project, which is now wrapped up and awaiting judging at the county fairgrounds.
The crunch at the end of a project always makes a godawful mess of my sewing room. If I'm smart (and occasionally I am) I do a good cleanup at the end of it, restoring order to chaos.
Mid-afternoon today I had an overwhelming wish to be at the beach. Specifically, something out towards Bodega, like Dillon, or Wright's Beach. When I was in high school and life seemed way more complicated than it had any right to be, sometimes I'd ditch school and head out there with a couple of friends. We'd stop at one of those fruit stands on Highway 121 and buy cherry juice, which would be warm and way too sweet by the time we got to the ocean. Wander through the kite store and pick out salt water taffy.
I'm still conferencing. It's strange, but bouncing around in a building with 15,000 people can be surprisingly lonely. I'm not one of those folks that easily makes friends with whoever I'm sitting next to in a Python presentation. I'm a little jealous of the folks who are here with 20 people from their office. They have someone to have lunch with.
Not that I have time for lunch. My days are packed full of so much information I'm worried about the maximum capacity of my brain.
It must be a strange thing working in a business right next to large conference center.
I'm in San Diego this week, for the ESRI User Conference. Translation: a bunch of map geeks have descended upon downtown San Diego, overrunning the ten blocks or so immediately surrounding the conference center, wearing our badges, matching ESRI saddle bags, and all wearing polo shirts and buttons that say things like "We are GIS."
I've been sewing on my grandmother's old viking for years now. Between she and I, it has some miles on it. I think it rolled off the assembly line a few years before I did, as evident by the bell-bottom clad models in the instruction manual photos, standing on impressively shaggy carpet. It's not a fancy machine, but sturdy, and has seen me through a great many sewing adventures.
"Mom, do you want to play with me?"
"What are we playing?"
"Legend of Zelda."
"On the computer or real life?"
"Real."
"Alright." I turn around. The kid's wearing a robin hood hat and brandishing a wooden sword. "So, you would be Link then?"
"Yes, and you're Princess Zelda."
"Good. Where's my sword?"
Big sigh. "You're the princess. The princess doesn't have a sword."
"Yes, well, Mommy is not that kind of princess. Where's my sword?"
