A very knitty October, before a very wordy November

I have sold a whole bunch of skeins of yarn since Ravelry came out. This makes me happy. Sometimes I just get very freaked out by clutter and messiness. Looking at old pictures of my old apartments reminded me of how very much I need to get back to taking care of my things, and thus taking care of myself. It really is all connected- I need to move my body, eat a bit more worshipfully, tidy my living quarters, and shape up my reading and knitting queues. There are so many partially finished projects that it has begun giving me heartburn! Well, maybe.

My biggest heartburn, or at least heartache, is that I CANNOT knit Seraphim anymore. All the color printers are on the blink at work, and I am out of color ink at home (as I have been for months now)... which means I have no way of printing the charts. I finished the stockinette section this evening, and was raring to go when I realized that I can't read charts via computer screen. Apparently our intrepid heroine will be trekking to Best Buy in Tenleytown tomorrow- my favorite last-minute stop for necessities such as iPods (mine was broken!), headphones, and of course color ink. It's a PSC 1510xi All-in-One. That's my gentle reminder for tomorrow.

Besides continuing my love affair for Schaefer Anne and the Seraphim, which will be perfect metro knitting should I ever manage to print the pattern, I realized I have very little in the way of convenient portable knitting. I try to keep a few relatively simple projects on hand at all times for the metro- simple baby blanket squares, patterns with easy repeats, scarves and such. But right now, apparently everything on the needles is just too complicated. The super-secret holiday project is fairly portable, and the aran baby blanket would be fine if it weren't already a pretty hefty project. Maybe I should start a sock pattern? Unfortunately, all the socks I want to knit right now involve plain-colored Opal yarn in fantastically intricate cables. That defeats the purpose of portable!

What's a girl to do. Besides obsessively read Anne of Green Gables. I had forgotten how much I adore this book. I had forgotten how it made me laugh aloud, and weep copiously when I first read it in third grade. I thought maybe that was because I was a high-strung child. I know I've become more calm and rational in the intervening decade since I last read the books. But within a page I was laughing and tearing up. Oh, LM Montgomery, what a mighty tale you weave. My mother insists I was Anne-like from the beginning, so I didn't simply model my curiosity and wordiness and obsession with beauty on her alone. If I did not consciously mimic her, then we must simply be perfect kindred spirits. She was the first memorable heroine in my world, literary or real, and it is such a pleasure to revisit her now. I want to scream and shout at her that it will all turn out fine, that her optimism is anything but misplaced, that her imagination is natural and to be celebrated. Rereading Anne of Green Gables puts me in the mood to write, fast and furious, and peck out a real story of my own. I'd best get knitting, since it looks like I will be spending November in its accustomed novel-writing haze. Not much time for any other craft once I take up the quill, or in this case my baby laptop, and start on my goal of 2000 words a day. Maybe this year the tale will even be a bit more publishable. To my mother's eternal dismay I did not turn my young love for fantasy and dragons into becoming a JK Rowling, and I don't even write romance novels. I haven't written a memoir of my time in France, even if she did help me with a title. And explaining my job title to the non-computer set poses a bit of difficulty. I am thus somewhat of a failure of a writer daughter. Last November I attempted to rectify this- I ended up writing a lot of tripe, but it was enough to win NaNoWriMo by meeting the 50,000 word goal. Anyone with me for this year? Can we set down our pointy sticks long enough to create fiction? It's not too late to sign up...