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So, I just mailed the letter off to JM. Two and a half years of needing to, and it was easy when I finally got around to it. And I love the little stories I got from y’all in response yesterday, some good, some not-so-good. I don’t really care, one way or the other. I hope he forgives me. But if he doesn’t, it’ll be enough for me to have sincerely apologized. If he doesn’t care one way or the other, that’s okay, too.

I’ve confused a couple of people along the way, though. Talking to a friend about it this morning (I made her read the letter), she said, “So, are you a confused lesbian?”

Simple answer? Probably. I don’t want to be with a man right now, haven’t for years. Not in a year that begins with 2, anyway. But I have deeply, madly loved particular men, and I don’t completely rule it out for my twilight years. Might be nice to have someone to open the pickle jars (tongue-in-cheek here). But for now, women are where it’s at. Yep. Simple answer that doesn’t quite make sense. But it doesn’t have to. That’s my answer and I’m sticking to it.

Cromarty? Coming along. About ten inches up the first sleeve. Terrified I’m not going to have enough yarn – I’m thinking four balls per sleeve, and I’ve always considered the sleeves to be 1/3 of the whole enchilada. So that means approximately 24 skeins, and I have 18. And I believe the 18 I have are the complete dye lot. (A terrified hush falls over the crowd.) Stay tuned.

Funny – if you see below, I’m actually Sheltand Wool, not Shetland Wool. Heh.

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.)