Knit Like a Man

Missing in action.

January 24th, 2008

So here I am, after being unusually quiet for about a week and a half. What have we missed? Well, a number of my New Year’s Resolutions are already shot to hell: Less yarn; more knitting; fewer carbs; more walking; less clutter; more cleaning; and let’s just say there hasn’t been a great rush of progress on the others.

Ravelry is becoming my unraveling. For those of you not yet part of it, one of it’s best/worst features is that you can see what your friends are knitting or thinking of knitting, and you can add them to your queue as well. It is not difficult to find yourself adding twenty and thirty projects to your queue, and many fine ones are knit from free patterns by designers both famous and obscure. You can also see many finished projects in different kinds of yarn, and where knitters have run into trouble, they provide notes telling you what happened and how they fixed it.

So not only has Ravelry become an addiction, it is actively enabling other addictions. Yarn, for example. Despite my efforts to resist, I went out on one of our colder nastier days and traveled blocks and blocks to buy some Noro Silk Garden Lite for a striped Noro scarf, and also some minty pastel cotton for a five-hour baby jacket. I also ordered a set of Options interchangeable needles from Knitpicks. They arrived just today, and I can see already why they’re so popular–they really are a delight to knit with.

So that’s at least six projects in various stages of completion, none of them as close to the finish line as I’d like them to be.

And–hold onto your seats–Asif has been working toward a deferred salary leave for the last two years and he’s finally taking it. He has from January 1 to June 30 off, and he’s going to spend five months traveling…to Dubai, India, Israel/Palestine, and then Turkey or Northern Africa or some other random place. I will be able to spend two weeks visiting him in one of these places (possibly Goa), we just need to negotiate where and when.

He wants a new knitted cover for his cellphone, as he wore the last one to pieces. I have some spare seasilk kicking around, which means that’s the likely yarn of choice. So that would be project number seven. At least that one’s small, and has a hard deadline–though I doubt I’ll get much of a sense of accomplishment from it.

I feel odd ending this by talking about Heath Ledger, but I think it would be stranger to not mention it at all. He was a brave young actor who was going through a difficult time, whose career had escalated from fluffy teen fare to a succession of startling, powerful adult performances (I’m Not There, Casanova, Candy, his apparently chilling turn as the Joker in The Dark Knight, and of course Brokeback Mountain). For all that, we had not seen the best of him–it was just beginning to emerge. And now it never will.

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