Rachael

Oh, I had a rough night last night. Started with a headache. I was very responsible, and after my 14 hour shift, I went to the pharmacy and picked up the Imitrex. Ain’tcha proud of me? Took it home, took a bath, took the medicine. Dude. How do people snort drugs? It was miserable, snorting that thing. There was an immediate rush, then a disgusting drip that lasted an hour. No immediate relief, but I fell asleep, so that was good.

Then I woke at 5am to a cat that wins the Most Irritating Feline award for 2004. And it’s only February. Adah’s found that clawing my new couch wakes me up. Oh, yes. It does. Then I feed her — yes, she thinks it’s a reward, but what am I supposed to do at five in the morning when she claws the couch every few minutes, just as I’m dropping back off to sleep? Digit, because of medical conditions, can’t eat her food, so I lock her in the bathroom. Approximately eleven seconds after she finishes inhaling her food, she hurls her solid little body at the door, over and over. And over. And over. So I get up to let her out. She then has the energy to tear around the house, up and over the kitchen countertops, knocking over anything I’ve left out, up and over my body, up and over Digit’s body. Digit is now PISSED off, so he starts squalling at the door. I get up to let him out. Twenty minutes later, there’s a screaming cat fight outside. He’s tangling with the neighbor cat, like he does everyday. Those neighbors HATE me and my cat (although their cat is always fighting with mine in MY yard), so I get up to break it up. When he comes in, HE wants to eat. In order to feed him, I have to separate them again, so Adah goes back into the bathroom. And starts hurling herself against the door again.

By now it’s six-thirty and I have to get up in an hour. The headache is back, with a vengeance. I finally fall into a nappish state and have a dream about the only ex-boyfriend I feel guilty about. JM was an angel, a beautiful man whom I truly, deeply loved, and then just let go, without much explanation. Two and half years ago, he left me a voice mail (since I was being an asshole and not answering my phone) saying he had a dream of me in which he let me go. Since then, I dream of him a couple of times a year. I see him walking away from me, and my heart breaks. It’s an awful dream, and it means that I have to contact him to apologize. I last had the dream in Venice, last March. I wrote him a letter while seated at a cafe table on the Grand Canal. I didn’t mail it.

I am not ashamed of any of my dealings with anyone. Except for him. Now I have to find the damn letter, open it, and decide whether to mail it or re-write it. But I have to exorcise this regret. I don’t regret not being with him. But I regret my behavior. I don’t care if he ever speaks to me; I just need him to know that I was scared and that I’m sorry.

And it’s all Adah’s damn fault, leaving me lying there, awake, thinking, watching the clock tick towards the alarm….

Back at work, only a 12 hour shift today. The headache is abating now — I think it’s more of a sinus thing today. Cromarty is coming along. Damn, this sweater is going to take forever, but it’s such a pleasant forever. Oh! I have to go test which fiber I am.

You are Shetland Wool.
You are a traditional sort who can sometimes be a
little on the harsh side. Though you look
delicate you are tough as nails and prone to
intricacies. Despite your acerbic ways you are
widely respected and even revered.

What kind of yarn are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Good god. Acerbic? But shetland wool, whoopee!

I’m working a sleeve! Yowzer! Lookee:

And darling Rob, who supplied this Kersti goodness, pointed out that it’s not size that matters. Ahem. The number of stitches are going to be the same, no matter what size needles you’ve got. This sweater is going to take a while, I tell ya. It has a LOT of stitches. It’s so satisfying, but it is NOT mindless. And the scary thing is that it only has two (out of four) difficulty stars in the book. Good lord. A four-star might kill me.

I’m at work, my Monday, starting a 14 hour shift. On my way in this morning, I talked to Bethany; she was on the ferry, her head hanging over the rail, watching the school of dolphins below. I’m jealous. But in a good you’d-better-take-pictures kind of way. Hope she knits on the beach.

Michelle points out, sweetly, that I didn’t really mean “hoi polloi,” yesterday, and suggests “hoity-toity.” She’s right, and I’m a little chagrined, my Grammar Avengin’ buddies. As a child I internalized the wrong meaning to this word, and even though I KNOW it means the opposite of what I think it does, I routinely forget it. (Just like if I’m not very careful, I say con-fis-ti-cate instead on confiscate. Now, that’s TRULY embarrassing.)

Shakin’ it off, shakin’ it off.

Shakin’ it off to the tune of US needles, size ONE!

Yes. I got gauge with ones.
The hell?

I am the loosest knitter in the universe, I do believe. (This makes me particularly popular in certain bars.) This is an aran-weight yarn, and suggested needle size would be four or five (US) to get Ms. Starmore’s 25stitches/4 inches. Me? Ones. Oy. Lord, the only way I could get 25st/4in on (US)5 would be to use sock-weight yarn. Now that would make an interesting Celtic sweater, no? Mini-ringel cables?

But I swatched! (Minimally, seen here. But it’s more than I usually do.)

And I’m about an inch up one sleeve (after doing a facing which I’ve determined it needs – I don’t like that raw cabled edge curl thing). It looks fabulous. I could SO easily eff this all up, so I’m proceeding slowly and thoughtfully. This will not be a read-while-knitting piece, and I’d like to finish it up quickly (as quickly as allowed by size ONES), so I’ll be getting a lot of TV watching done, I prognosticate. (A more appropriate word-choice would be “predict,” but “prognosticate” is at the outside of allowed, so I’m throwing a four-dollar word atcha. And I like how it echoes my incorrect pronunciation of confisticate.)

I adore Koigu, both the Painter’s Palette and this Kersti. Carrie asks, what gives? Why is Koigu so good? Listen: It’s smooshy. It makes a great, very soft fabric (I swear this stuff can’t be 100% wool, but it says it is), that when knitted, makes you want to be a Very Little Creature and bounce on it. It’s squoozable. If Carson from Queer Eye touched it, he’d zjooojzh it. It’s like wool angel food cake – lotsa air in the batter. That about right, fellow Koigu fans?

And yes, Em, I slept with Kersti on our first date. I don’t regret it, not for a minute. In the morning, she was still there for me.

But size ones.
Zjeeejzh.

I had such a good day yesterday. Wanna know what I did?

Nothing.

Well, I managed to do my laundry in between Doing Nothing times, but that’s it. Woke up late, and messed around on the computer all day. I even, get this, pretended to take a nap. And it was nice, it really was. During the day my brain is always too busy to take a nap – it never buys what I’m trying to do. The second I lie down it starts to make long lists of all the cool, fun, evironmentally sensible things I COULD and SHOULD be doing with my time. Yesterday I took Marcel with me, good ole Prousty, and we had a nice little afternoon chat (I can call him that. We’re pals, me ‘n’ Proust). And I really think I would have slept, had I not heard the mail lady coming! (I know, I should say mail deliverer, but mail lady, with its close ties to male lady, is what I say in my head, so there you have it.)

And you know what? I think she’s been carrying my Koigu around with her for days! I ran out to the sidewalk, and she was walking away, empty-handed, from my house. When I called out to her, she turned around and asked if I was Rachael and said that she had had something for me. I guess she hadn’t wanted to leave it on my doorstep in the heavy rain we’ve had (I have no porch), and I suppose I’m grateful. I guess. I was getting worried. And now, drum roll, please:

I have Koigu Kersti from the WonderBoys for Alice Starmore’s Cromarty. Oh, yes. (And that’s yummy Noro 95 underneath, just for fun.)

I absolutely HAVE to finish a project today, so I can start swatching. Yes, you read it here first. For Koigu and Alice, I will swatch. Swatch, Rachael, swatch. Watch Rachael swatch!

(I even took a skein to bed with me last night. I’m not kidding. Look.)

And after a day of doing nothing but anticipating my mail lady, I got to do something REALLY fun – a friend and I went to see the Lion King! We first went to Bernal Heights and had a drink at The Best Bar in the World and dinner at the Liberty Cafe, and then paid for parking right on Market (how cosmopolitan of us – I usually circle FOREVER looking for a spot) and sauntered into the Orpheum.

Where we were promptly stopped. When he handed over his tickets for them to scan (how high-tech it all is nowadays), there arose a flurry of activity. The man at the door started waving for someone, who started waving for someone else. The line behind us started grumbling. I started to think we had stolen tickets and was regretting not bringing my police ID, which might come in handy while getting booked at the local precinct.

But no, turns out that we had bought so early that our original seats turned out to be obstructed when the final stage was built. So they had to give us different tickets, thus all the waving. We sat 7th row, center.

Hee. Just call me hoi-polloi and get it over with. I saw people up in the third balcony shaking their (tiny little) fists at me. I know they were. When I sit up there, I always do the same thing.

The musical was incredible! I didn’t really know what to expect, and I have to be honest, a straight translation from the cartoon to the stage surprised me. It’s an odd concept, that. But the costumes and the ensemble music made it work. Most of the cast were incredible, obviously. Except for the King. I couldn’t wait for him to die. (And the stampede scene was AWESOME.) I even got a little choked up at a couple of parts. Just for a minute, and then I remembered that people in the seventh row don’t weep, they mist.

A good day. Today, I’m off to San Rafael to perform a yarn miracle for La Brainy. Then, to finish up that project I mentioned. Then, to swatch. I’ve never been so excited to swatch in all my thirty-one years.

Yow! (And I know she’s my sister, so I’m prejudiced, but Bethany is funny as hell today.)

For dear Cari, who believes in chickens, another City Hall hen:

So the doctor emailed me. Finally. I do realize that it had only been a day and a half since I emailed her, but I am somewhat internet obsessed. Had you noticed? I like it when the emails fly back and forth, two people on line at the same time (but funnily enough I hate IMing), zap, zing, splat. I have a zjoosh sound that plays on my computer when I get a new email, and it’s such a pretty, happy sound. I like to hear it often. I DON’T like to wait a day and a half to hear back from a date. And it was a good email – she had fun, would like to do it again. Yeah, yeah….

I am so impatient that I bore myself.

Plotted with darling Greta on Sunday. Won’t reveal our plans to take over the world, but I just have to let you know that she is as remarkable on the phone as she is on her blog. Damn. And her plans for me to name my Rogue “Anne of Green Cables” just flipped my brain OUT.

Pop Culture update:

Sex and the City rocks with fibery goodness, no? A cabled pink hoodie AND an Icelandic lopi, on one screen. Damn. And Mischa’s still hot-hot-hot.

To the straight people watching The L Word: Be advised, a woman who is engaged to her boyfriend whom she loves, when attracted to a stunning Italian woman, will NOT cry copiously and demand to be left alone, and then pull her sweatshirt over her head. In the middle of the day. While the Italian looks mostly uninterested. Won’t happen. The rest of the show is humorously on-key, though.

Now. It’s my weekend. I’m putting my feet up for a while. I’ve been online WAY too long. You know when you just can’t pry your little fingers off the keyboard, and you realize you’re giving up quality knitting/reading/walking/writing time so you can read other people’s thoughts about their own knitting/reading/walking/writing time? Das me. I’m out.

https://rachaelherron.com/for_dear_cari_w/

It’s Maggi’s birthday! Just another day closer to perfection, that’s all.

I am totally happy and a little freaked out that there are so many L.M. Montgomery fans out there. It’s eerie, innit? How many threads connect us? We love to write. We love to knit. We love grammar. We love librarians and bookmobiles. We love Anne.

Anne was HUGE in my life. I used to, and probably still should, credit her with the way I turned out. I think as a kid I had a tendency to be a little morbid. I worried about the worst, sure it would happen. I couldn’t ride in a car without thinking of how easy it would be to crash. Feeding the chickens meant certain histoplasmosis. Then I started reading the Anne of Green Gables books, and over the course of years of reading all of them (and then re-reading, and re-reading again), I kind of became her. Or at least, I desperately wanted to have her imagination and ability to shift things around until they were Good. And I kinda learned it. A little.

(Huge confession, something not even my little mama knows (but she will now): When I was eighteen, my mother gave me my great-great aunt Lucy’s wedding ring. It’s small and delicate and I rarely take it off. It’s my most precious object. I had “Because of Anne” inscribed inside the band. I know. Incredibly silly. But I loved her that much, and still do. She’s probably the most alive fictional character that I carry in my mind, and the most influential.)

And now, thanks to Grace (OMG, see her comment yesterday, it’s wonderful), I have the first two volumes of the journals arriving from alibris. They’re out of print, so they’re PRICEY, but I don’t care. I know they’ll be much darker than the Anne or Emily books, but I don’t care. It’s just more language from Ms. Montgomery. I gotta go get my spoon, ‘cause I’m gonna eat it up.

(My favorite Montgomery, outside the Anne books, was The Blue Castle.)

Sharon in England sent me this, which I loved. It’s from the UK Telegraph. Someone stole a BUS in my favorite city. It’s police AND Venice related, so she gets two points.

Canal Chase in Venice Fuelled by Vodka and Nostalgia
By Bruce Johnston in Rome

(Filed: 02/02/2004)

A police chase broke out on the canals of Venice early yesterday after a Russian seaman, apparently fuelled by vodka and nostalgia, stole a water bus and roared off into the night.

After a 90-minute hunt officers caught up with and stormed the vaporetto as it moved at full throttle and arrested the man.

The man was named as Viktor Sobolev, 36, who officers said had illegally entered Italy and was evidently drunk after consuming “a copious amount of alcohol”.

He later explained his action by saying that he had missed being at sea.

At first the authorities took him for an al-Qa’eda terrorist intent on launching an attack on the huge petrochemical complex at Porto Marghera, just across from Venice on the lagoon.

As a result, the vaporetto’s disappearance from its berth near St Mark’s basin triggered a special anti-terrorist alert which was introduced to protect sensitive targets in Italy after the September 11 atrocities in America.

Venice’s transport corporation ACTV raised the alarm shortly before midnight.

Realising that one of its boats used on route 51 connecting the Lido with St Marks and Piazzale Roma, was missing, it used Global Positioning System technology on board to pinpoint its position. The system is usually used by Venetian authorities to check that water buses are keeping to the city’s strict speed limits.

As police and coastguards set off in hot pursuit the Russian turned his wheel hard, directing the large water bus at a lighter police boat in an unsuccessful attempt at ramming it.

Detective inspector Luigi Petrillo said: “Eventually we managed to force the vaporetto to do a U-turn back in the direction of Venice, and board it as it was moving.”

Sobolev faces charges of aggravated theft, resisting police officers, being without immigration papers, and breaking various navigation laws.

Hee!

**The doctor/date hasn’t emailed me back. Not that I mind so much, ’cause I was ambivalent anyway about the whole Dating thing. Even “You’re not my type” would be cool and understandable. But I think my feelings might get a little hurt if she NEVER emails back. Huh.**

On more important subjects, check this out. It’s beautiful. For my migraines, Sonja very sweetly sent me a flax eye pillow that she made herself. It’s silky and soft, and here it is with two of my favorite things, Proust and Digit.

Isn’t that awesome?