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For all that I’m working dayshift now, I’ve worked three nights this week. Hmmm. This is an AWFUL picture of me, but my friend Nichole took this of me last night, at work, trying on my top-down Noro raglan a la Glampyre.

You put all the stitches on yarn holders and see if the underarms meet. If they do, cool. If they’re close to meeting, and do meet with a little yank, you shrug and say, “eh, close enough,” like I did. It might be a SMALL cardigan, but it’ll be cute. Hell….

I’ve been doing my writing re-reading lately. This week I re-read Ueland’s If You Want to Write. I love this book, I really do. Ueland was a free, elemental writer, one who just didn’t give a crap about what the world thought in a time when a great deal of the western world was re-discovering criticism. She didn’t care. She just wrote, freely, quickly, with love and honesty. Truth and passion. And think about it, aren’t these the two things we strive for most in our lives and in our writing? Or if they aren’t, shouldn’t they be?

At the end of the book she talks about the writing of her book. Someone asked her what kind of planning she was putting into it. She had a moment of panic, and then she said to him,

“No, I haven’t planed it. I wouldn’t think of planning it.”
For when you begin to plan such a huge edifice of words, your heart fails you. It is too hard. It will never get done, it is too complex and frightful. No, write what comes to you now. More will come later…..
You write and plan it afterwards. You write it first because every word must come out with freedom, and with meaning because you think it is so and want to tell it. If this is done, the book will be alive. I don’t mean that it will be successful. It my be alive to only ten people. But to those then at least it will be alive. It will speak to them. It will help to free them. (p.168)

No, write what comes to you now. More will come later. And isn’t that the most exciting thing to hold in your heart? So many times I’ve had a wonderful idea and written a brief line about it, meaning to get back to it later, to work it in in the eighth chapter or somewhere else down the line, and I lose it entirely. Even if I remember what I meant, the instant of passion isn’t there anymore. Even in blogging this happens. I’m walking home from the grocery store, and a little girl rolls a ball to me on the sidewalk under the trees just getting their fall color, and I roll it back to her, smelling the lavender bush I’m standing beside, thinking this is a moment I want to write about. I get home and if I don’t write it (as I didn’t two days ago), it’s mostly gone. I can grapple with the skeleton of it, but the passion and truth of it has escaped.

Pioneer Melissa has been thinking about it lately, too. I like knowing there are many like me, with scraps of paper around the house Just In Case, others who are busy reminding themselves to “Write what comes to you now.” Don’t forget, more will come later. We are inexhaustible. It’s magic.

Whew. Didn’t know I even HAD a soapbox around here. Off to get my hair cut. Write! Knit! Do a little dance!

This is the best Save The World commercial I’ve seen in a LONG time. Hysterically funny, it’s worth the download and/or the jerkiness of reception. It’s a Greenpeace UK ad, and it’s awesome (features Jim Broadbent and Eddie Izzard, too!) Thanks, OutOut!

Wanna hear my two complaints? They’re good ones.

I stayed up too late reading my new copy of The Purl Stitch. A wonderful, generous, and extremely sweet little pixie who shall remain nameless (but some might know as Pioneer Melissa’s doppelganger) saw fit to gift me with her extra copy and I’m so LUCKY! Up ‘til two in the morning reading. And I mean gazing at every picture and explanation until my eyes swam. Lovely.

And then I had to rise early (whine, whinge) so I could order me up some Indigo Girls tickets. Ow! November 13th at the Fillmore, baybee. I’ll be SO there.

So not much sleep. But SUCH good reasons, no?

I have a feeling that on this new shift I’ll be way more pop-culture-fied. Thank god. I’ve been so out of it for so long. Well, since I was six, actually. Last night I developed a serious case of startitis and started not only a Booga J bag, but a top-down raglan a la Glampyre (love me some Noro). And I watched TV! Brand new Queer Eye, which was pretty damn funny – the dude just didn’t seem to get it, that it’s okay to spend money on some things. Like a bed. Or a shirt that doesn’t suck. Or a gift for his girlfriend. Even when he got it, he didn’t get it. You don’t need to use your sweat rag to wipe the canape tray (that was so blatantly horrifying that I think he must have done it just to be funny). And did anyone else notice that he was seen briefly as a waiter in The Restaurant, the Bravo show that followed Queer Eye? Is that where they found him?

And have you seen The Restaurant? I’m a sucker for any Bravo reality show, and this one is AWFUL and great in its awfulness. I’ve only seen last night’s episode, but it follows the opening of a restaurant conceived by a Celebrity Chef named Rocco. This doesn’t mean anything to me, but more interesting to me than Rocco is the wait staff. The filming seems totally on, very accurate (the only thing they don’t show is the drug use that is part and parcel of restaurant work).

I work 911, which can be stressful. I have to be able to make snap decisions about safety and life-saving priorities, deciding which lines to place on hold, which call to dispatch to the officers first, yadda yadda. But it ain’t anywhere NEAR as stressful as waitressing. Oh, god, I’ll never get over the three years I spent on my feet at the Oakland Grill. I still have nightmares about the tables that have been sitting for ten minutes with no drinks, about running out of wine (which apparently happened last week on the show), about losing entire tickets, about ticket walk-outs…. Nightmares about shots fired? Nah. About marrying ketchup bottles? Oh, yeah. I sat on the couch and worked on the Noro raglan and my stomach was in knots, just watching their faces as they realized that their customers HATED the food, that they were tired of waiting, that their orders were just plain wrong….. Awful, awful, awful. I’ll totally watch next week.

I’m such a sucker! But I’m a sucker that’s going to hear IG in a month, one with a fancy new book. Hope your day is going as well!

Digit reminds us to keep our extra toes clean:

Posted a crapload of Bethany’s pictures. Ow! You go, girl! I love her mascot, Stripes.

Whew. I made it to my new weekend (TWT). Didn’t know, for a minute, if I was going to make it or if I was going to just stay at work, forever. And ever. And ever. Like a record when it skips, like Bill Murray in Groudhog Day, I would stay in my headset, trapped at a computer terminal until I was old and grey.

Yesterday I managed to perfect my (new) morning routine. Up at six a.m. (OMG, usually just going to bed at that time), sat in the living room to check email and write a blog entry, made a little breakfast, DID MY WRITING (gold star, wheee!), took a walk, did a little yoga, took a shower and made it to work by nine. Felt like a million bucks. Then someone called in sick which meant I had to stay for twelve hours. And feeling so great and efficient, I volunteered to stay for fourteen. Dumb ass. Dumb ASS. Oh, yes, by eleven that night, I could no longer type. I MEAN it. I was writing words as they sounded in my head – I typed TIME instead of TYPE just because they kinda sounded the same and had the same number of letters. I couldn’t get a verb in the same sentence as a noun. Total disconnect occurred. It’s not that bad to work a fourteen, but not when you’ve been so very effing productive for the three hours prior to the shift.

Gawd.

Then, of course, I got home and Digit was making VERY good use of the while-the-cat’s-away thing and partying it up with the boys down the street. Never did get him inside – he rolled in about seven this morning, dirty and smelling like whiskey, yelling for his food.

And of course, I couldn’t sleep. I started another Booga J bag while watching the taped season finale of Sex in the City (I can’t help it – did anyone else besides Carrie and me (and I didn’t buy Carrie’s reaction) find Mikhail Baryshnikov hot? I could NOT believe I thought he was sexy. But I did. I didn’t expect that). Then I got in bed and read, expecting to fall asleep. Nope. An hour later, I gave up and sat up with a Koigu sock and a New Yorker and read for another hour. (Why didn’t you all tell me how great Koigu was? Oh, yeah. You did…..)

So it’s now almost one in the afternoon, I’m just getting up, and I feel like I’m back on my old schedule. Blast. And I’m also feeling lazier than hell. I had grand visions of laundry and cleaning out closets today. Ehh. Whatever.

Bored with myself. Means you must be, too. Off to be actively lazy. Yoipes.

That’s the thing about being sick. I missed a night at work, but by doing so worked some serious OT on the Wave-Along, and I’m DONE! And it’s HUGE!

And seriously, that Cascade Indulgence was some of the nicest fiber I’ve ever used, sooooo soft and whisper smooth and strong. It was really difficult to give it to Marama. But I did it, last night (after taking no less that eighty-two pictures of it. Not exaggerating. Difficult to get a good picture of dark grey yarn).

So here are some shots:

Just being finished on my lap, Adah helping the way she does best:

With Adah in the background for size reference (it’s about 70 inches long by 30 inches wide, I added two extra repeats across for a total of 116 stitches, on size 9 US, 4 skeins of Indulgence).

Folded up:

Wheee!

Oh! And the Wonderful Greta has finished her shawl, too! And hers has a great story behind its making. Whoo hoo! Anyone else? (remember, no deadline. Just whenever. That’s the way we play this one):

On a totally different subject, just to show you what happens in my brain when I’m sleepy, if you’re reading quickly (and you miss the word TOXIC) and you read this:

Toxic Flame Retardant Found in Breast Milk

You think, how cool! Mother’s milk really IS the best! Baby’s extra-safe, flame retardant built right in.

I dreamed this morning of being in on a rollercoaster ride, a rickety old one that had no seat belts, and it went around the side of a mountain. To the right was the ocean which was at first beautiful and then turned rough. Really rough. The rollercoaster took us right under and through great towering waves of water, hundreds of feet over our heads. We made it (barely) to the end of the ride. Isn’t this an odd dream for someone who feels pretty grounded right now? Other than changing shifts at work (which is weird but not life-transforming), I can’t imagine why I would dream so vividly of two such worrisome images. Can’t get more cliched than rollercoaster and wild waves, can you? Hmmmm.

[Oh, I just figured it out. It was the Wave-Along! Duh. What a ride!]