author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

It's Day 9. Yesterday I tested positive again. But I wound up going home yesterday for a couple hours, while John was out and we would not come into contact, in order to do some laundry. And while I was there, I took the opportunity to grab those much-missed physical copies of Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way and Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones. But first I did something else.

See, while I was in Metairie, Dad showed me this vintage Singer portable sewing machine of Mom's that he'd found at the bottom of the closet. He was thinking about selling it, if he could figure out how much it was worth. Of course I offered to take it off his hands. (Are you kidding? How could I not? Haven't you seen my typewriter?) So when I started driving back to Boulder, it was in the trunk. And there it stayed through much of my isolation period, in my car in the hotel parking lot.

Yesterday, while the laundry was spinning, I brought it inside and began my investigation. By plugging its serial number (AC976189) into this lookup table, I was able to identify the machine as Model No. 127 (possibly variant 127-24 according to this chart), dating from January of 1930 and featuring the innovative and weirdly rocket-shaped vibrating shuttle. (It also features an add-on motor controlled via knee-lever, but that's not currently behaving itself and will need professional attention.) I downloaded the appropriate owner's manual from here, followed its instructions for threaded the bobbin and the needle, and, by rotating the handwheel manually, sewed a few trial stitches in a bit of scrap cloth.

And it performed beautifully.

Flush with success, I turned to my World Fantasy 2011 canvas tote where one of its original seams was coming unraveled. The bobbin thread got stuck and snapped just the once, but otherwise, it was smooth sailing. And my tote is partially mended!

This whole exercise made me unreasonably happy, just utterly joyful way out of proportion to any logical explanation. I wanted to do more with it, like, right now! But, alas, the laundry was finished, and it was time for me to fold it and bag it and take it back up Diagonal Highway to Isolation Station.

As I said, I made sure to pick up my copies of The Artist's Way and Writing Down the Bones. I figured, maybe I'd been unfair to Baig's How to Be a Writer. I'd basically had a tantrum at it for not being the book I wanted it to be. Although, in my defense, that really did seem to be what it was trying to do--to be Writing Down the Bones for the two-thousand-teens. Trying, and failing. Offensively. But nevermind. Ranting and raving about it was of limited utility. I figured my energy would be better spent on rereading the books I actually enjoyed and found useful.

So the next morning--this morning--I cracked open The Artist's Way and reread the first few sections. And in the section headed FILLING THE WELL, STOCKING THE POND, I hit this bit of text, and then I just laughed:

Any regular, repetitive action primes the well.... A little experiment with some mending can cast a whole new light on these activities. Needlework, by definition regular and repetitive, both soothes and stimulates the artist within. Whole plots can be stitched up while we sew. As artists, we can very literally reap what we sew.

Well no wonder part of me bubbled up with joy at the prospect of rehabilitating a vintage sewing machine and using it to rehabilitate a beloved tote. That's precisely how this works! And, really, when was the last time I deliberately paused between writing tasks to knit, or tat, or cross-stitch, or spin?

I took the lesson to heart and darned a pair of socks this evening. And, with Cameron's "artist dates" in mind, I made sure to take a walk--and, for my efforts, I was rewarded, not just with the delightful discovery of the loudest frogs in Boulder County on a rain-flooded lawn nearby, but also with a small plot discovery which I immediately jotted down upon returning to my desk.

Tomorrow morning I will finally check out of this hotel, spend tomorrow night at the home of a friend who's out of town and has offered me use of her place, and then Sunday--Easter Sunday, at that!--it will be Day 11, all of John's guests will have gone home again, and so, at last, will I.

Right. Blogging. Wow I'm tired, and it's laaaaaate. But I am trying to get back to this Blogging Every Day thing, so.

As I expected yesterday, today's antigen test came up negative. That makes two tests spaced about 48 hours apart--plus no symptoms for like four days running--which means I'm free to roam about the county. And I did, by golly!

I may have in fact overdone it a little. I feel great, no trouble breathing, no persistent coughing, nothing like that, but... Wow. Tired.

So. What did I do on my first day out and about post-covid? Well...

A bunch of writing! Which, happily, didn't differentiate today from the latter half of my isolation period. As soon as I felt well enough to be upright and do productive things, I did get back into attending one or two co-writing sessions most days, and that resulted in getting a whole bunch of words down on paper and in pixels. Which, if one can swing it (which I can't always, but sometimes I can), is a great comfort and a triumph when one is sick and housebound and demoralized and only able to breathe freely because pseudoephedrine exists.

I mentioned Cat Rambo's writer community yesterday--of all the perks listed there, the co-writing sessions have been what I've found to have the greatest benefit to me personally. They start at particular scheduled times, even the unmoderated ones, and so there is an hour at which I need to be not only in front of my keyboard and working but also in front of my webcam saying hi to other people doing the same. Accountability! It's been very good for me.

(It also resulted in some very nice social time at WorldCon. I got to go have dinner with a co-writing regular one night. Because of all our hours spent together on Zoom, I kept forgetting that this was actually my first time hanging out with her in person.)

So today started at 9 AM with the usual morning co-writing session, and I hit some of my daily tasks there. I managed a bit of another task over lunch, too. And here I am blogging! So I'm feeling pretty virtuous about it all.

I finally had that date with myself at Waffle House, thus fulfilling that weird craving I'd developed during my housebound time. I don't think I've ever had a craving for Waffle House before, not once in my entire life. But something about the combination of this Twitter thread and knowing I wasn't allowed to go created a fierce longing for hashbrowns and coffee. Well, for lunch today, I damn well went to Waffle House #1072, and I had hashbrowns (with sausage and cheese) and coffee. And the waitress was exceedingly friendly and welcoming and complimented me on my facemask bling. And, like I said, I even got a little writing done despite there being neither A/C outlets nor power.

I went to not one but TWO craft group meet-ups. At 11:30 AM there was Casual Crochet in the Park with Andee Graves, an event associated with the Longmont Yarn Shoppe. It will inevitably move back out of the park and into the shop as we move into winter. Not yet, though. The weather today was absolutely gorgeous. Then, at 4:00 PM, there was Wine & Wool Wednesdays at Maverick Fiber Arts in Lafayette. (The "wine" part involves a visit to the bar at the Brewing Market next door. It's not absolutely required. No one will scoff if you get a coffee drink instead. I tend to get this beer.)

I don't think I've ever attended both groups in a single day before, but I was going to do everything, darn it, and see all the people, and work on something like four different projects spread out over three different fiber crafts, and...

Well, no wonder I'm tired. Which is why...

I had a nap! And it was glorious. But then I woke up and realized I hadn't blogged yet, and I wanted to blog, so I figured, let's see if there's just a little more words-on-paper-and-pixels left in me. And there was! Huzzah.

I was going to go on with this blog post and describe all the different knit, crochet, and tatting projects I've got going, but once again, this post is long enough already, so I might as well save it for tomorrow.

You know, at some point, I should make a post that's substantively about actually writing. As opposed to posts like this one, which only mention writing in a glancing sort of way. But, hey, I've got a lot of catching up to do, and there is more in my life, it turns out, than just writing. Hence posts like this one.

So the thing about the novel is, it's a NaNoWriMo novel. As such, it's got certain features that are making it a challenge to edit.

Way back in the day, when I was more active on the NaNoWriMo forums, there was a particular category of "advice" that popped up at the beginning of the month. "When you're reaching for 50,000 words, every word counts," certain contributors would say, "so make sure you spell out every contraction and every acronym! Write 'do not' instead of don't, 'Personal Identification Number,' instead of PIN. Be conscientious about this and you'll hit 50K in no time!"

This would invariably make me *facepalm*. I mean, fine, if you think of NaNoWriMo as a game, there's nothing wrong with wordcount-padding strategies to help you win it. But if you think of NaNoWriMo as the motivation to finally write the first draft of an eventually publishable novel, why in heaven's name would you send your character to use an Automated Teller Machine on campus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology? Why would you strew your first draft with litter when you'll only have to clean it up at the revision stage? I mean, yes, first drafts aren't perfect, sure, and sometimes you do babble out any old thing as a placeholder for those names or details you'd rather not break your current flow to research. But that's a different animal than deliberately inserting crap that A. you know is crap, and B. serves no purpose other than to pad your word count!

Look, I compose my drafts on 4thewords. Every day is NaNoWriMo when you've got monsters to battle. The interface counts words as they are typed, rather than words I commit to saving, and yes, I will take all sorts of advantage of that. I will happily babble and keyboard-smash my wordy way into a story idea. But that babble is actually serving a purpose. I think out loud on the page; that's the only way I find out what I'm thinking. If the babble weren't genuinely part of my process, if it weren't serving my art and my career, then I might as well win my monster battles by copy-pasting Wikipedia entries for all the good it would do me.

So. Those are my holier-than-thou thoughts about NaNoWriMo. So you can imagine my chagrin when I discovered that I, too, was playing the game of Wordy For Word Count's Sake back in 2006. And, y'know, I'm pretty sure I knew that's what I was doing at the time. Maybe I wasn't omitting contractions or spelling out acronyms, but I was definitely--just for instance--having my protagonist list the songs on favorite albums, or having her say in quoted dialogue something that she'd already told the reader via first-person narration. I was absolutely padding my wordcount with crap that I knew was crap and that served no purpose in the draft or to my process, except inasmuch as my process was "win NaNoWriMo."

And now it's my job to clean it up.

Thanks, past me. Thanks awfully much.

In other news, the granny square afghan continues apace. Here, pictured above, are the squares I've begun or finished, laid out according to the pattern's directions for assembly. I think there's a metaphor in there for assembling a second draft novel out of first draft scenes, but I don't really feel like going into it. Dealing with the novel itself is hard enough as it is; I don't need to deal with it on the meta level as well.

Hello from a fairly satisfying Monday! The sun is shining, the paving is dry, and I just went for a big long street-and-trail skate. Looped around 28th to Elmer's Two Mile to Goose Greek to Foothills to Wonderland Creek and home again. It took nearly the entirety of the album Best of Blondie.

I'm coming off a pretty damn good weekend for poetry. One came home with the kind of personal rejection that makes an author walk on air and smile foolishly for the rest of the day. The editor responded, at paragraph length (and not a short paragraph, either), with an in-depth interpretation of the poem, teasing out meaning I had not consciously put in there (but wished I had, because damn, that's some clever stuff!). We are talking exegesis here. Another poem came home, from a different market, with an offer to buy. (I said yes, of course.) No contract yet, so details later, yadda yadda yadda. I shall reveal more when I can.

So. One amazingly thoughtful personal rejection and one acceptance. That's a damn good weekend.

There has, meanwhile, been more quarantine cooking and quarantine crafting. John's missing his California Pizza Kitchen fix; he found a copycat recipe for their Kung Pao Spaghetti, and we gave it a shot last night. (Sans chicken, of course.) It got all the thumbs up from this household. The recipe calls for a whole pound of spaghetti, so we figured there would be leftovers. There were no leftovers. There would have been if we had possessed any self-restraint whatsoever, but we did not, and so we ate it all.

Next time we will make half the recipe, just out of self-defense.

The effect was not unlike that of Pinch of Yum's Rainbow Pad Thai. The sauce is very similar. Veggie broth, soy sauce, chili paste, sugar, vinegar. The main difference was that it was thickened with cornstarch in the bowl rather than with egg in the pan. I'm thinking next time I might try the egg method; I find that the flavor and texture of cornstarch is just a little too front-and-center. But obviously I had no real complaints. NO LEFTOVERS.

Meanwhile, I dug up and finally finished this lap blanket, pictured above. I started work on it some three years ago or more. I'd just made one for a Boulder County Bombers silent auction following the Gingerbread Lady's Ribbon Afghan pattern, and I thought it would be nice to have one of my own. This time I'd substitute a half-double stitch for that one chain stitch that separated the blocks of double-crochet from the blocks of single, see if that resulted in a smoother effect. It did, and I liked it, but somehow I just never got around to finishing it. Well, it is now finished. Finished and warm and soft and cozy.

That done, I investigated another couple bags of acrylic yarn someone gave me--this is a thing that happens when one crafts out in public; other people offer one yarn when they want to winnow down their stash. I have yet to learn to say no, mainly because I keep thinking, "I'll make it into another patchwork afghan!" Well, time to get busy on that. That bag of brightly colored balls of yarn you see in the photo next to the lap blanket is getting turned into a bunch of granny squares, more or less following the Crayola Colors Afghan pattern in Women's Day Granny Squares #8, which was on my shelf for some ungodly reason and seemed like a good place to start.

Crocheting granny squares is not a bad way to spend time waiting for a Puzzle Pirates voyage to get under way. Did I mention I'm playing Puzzle Pirates again? Yep. Logged on this afternoon after my work was done. Promptly won a bunch of Easter Egg furniture in an Ocean-wide competition that happened to be going on at the time. When it comes to Rigging and Navigating, I've still got it.

Anyone to whom that actually made sense, drop me a line. We should pilly.

So here's the Friday Fictionette I was supposed to post for June 19. It's called "All Creatures Great and Small," and it is, at least partially, about puking. (That's by way of your content warning. You may not want to read it while you're eating.) It's also about the creation of teeny, tiny, cute yet disgusting monsters after the manner of a particular fairy tale.

Today's work day went almost exactly as planned, down to taking five-minute spinning breaks out on the patio in between 25-minute sessions of writing. I'm spinning a lovely half-fleece of "black" (really a very dark brown) CVM lamb. At least, I think it's CVM. I used to have this written down on a card that I kept with the fleece, but the moths ate it along with a shameful amount of wool.

When I discovered the moths had gotten into it--this was last year when I was cleaning out the office closet at the old address--I went into Emergency Wool Rescue Mode. The first step of Emergency Wool Rescue Mode was wash it all right now. The second and subsequent steps were to allow it to freeze, then allow it to thaw, repeat until sure all moth eggs have been destroyed.

Despite the emergency washing, the wool still feels greasy. But it's nice. Lanolin is good for your hands, after all. And each flicked lock seems to stretch like taffy as I draft it into the twist. It's pleasant and easy work, and very rewarding as the yards and yards of thin single ply wind onto the bobbin.

We've been spending more and more time out on the patio since bringing home the deck furniture. John and I had breakfast out there together, along with our usual post-breakfast state-of-the-household chat. Then I brought the spinning wheel, fleece, and carding combs out, and they sat beside or on the table all day, ready for me to come out and take each five-minute break. When the five minutes were up, I could easily hear the Pomodoro Timer's "get back to work" whistle through the open office window. Neighbors passed by and waved, smiled, commented on the weather. Lawn mowers sent their buzz-saw serenades up into the sky, where small planes doing airport pattern work occasionally echoed that song back down.

Despite the heat of the summer, it's cool on the patio, cooler even than in the house. It's a very nice place to be--at least until the mosquitoes start their twilight hunt. I may start taking more of my work out there.

On the occasion of Shuttles Spindles Skeins's monthly spin-in-and-knit-in, I brought home my spinning wheel and fiber stash from our rented storage unit. Some of the fiber appears to have sustained new moth activity, so none of it's coming into the house until I've had a chance to evaluate, treat, and adequately store each individually. Until then, it stays in our storage closet in the parking garage.

Exception #1: My portion of the brown fleece off Sheepfeathers Farm's "Daphne" seems to have escaped the moths' hunger entirely. I pawed through it and found no visible eggs, "confetti" debris, or broken fibers. Still, it was stored close to the other fibers, so it gets put into several gallon-sized resealable bags, and they go inside a lidded plastic bin of their own.

Exception #2: What is left of the half-fleece of black lamb's wool (probably CVM) after I discovered moths in it last year, I've felt confident assuming it's clean of moths now. This is because at the time of the moth discovery, I went into emergency anti-month action. All the bits that had been chewed on got thrown into the compost. What remained, about three-fourths of the original amount of wool, got washed in very hot water. Then it all went out on the balcony to dry and then to freeze and thaw repeatedly at the mercy of the incoming winter. Then it all got put into a big black plastic bag, which got aggressively tied closed. As the bag had no holes in it that I could find, I presumed the wool clean enough to take to the spin-in without endangering others' fiber.

Discovering moths in fiber that I'd last touched months or even years ago is doubly distressing. First off, I paid good money for that wool, I maybe already put good effort into washing it and spinning it, and I had plans for its potential. That potential has now been trashed, or at least significantly curtailed. Secondly, it feels like a rebuke: "If you'd only washed and spun and knit me sooner, instead of procrastinating like you always do, this wouldn't have happened." (The parallel with long-neglected writing projects is an exercise left to the reader.)

Taking action helps. Spinning a good ten or fifteen locks of the black lamb at the spin-in tonight, that helps. Bringing the fiber home and enacting a plan to treat and store it all correctly, that helps too. Deciding that I will spin Every! Single! Day! helps, too, but is probably overly optimistic of me. I haven't actually practiced the piano since bringing the bench home from repair. But I could if I wanted to! And now that the spinning wheel and drop-spindles are home, spinning is a possibility too.

Bunch of other things came home: more sheet music, a couple boxes of T-shirts and jeans waiting to be turned into quilts, all but one of the musical instruments, and a couple of boxes of Random Things. I'm daunted by how much is still in there, though. When we were in the throes of house-moving, we promised ourselves we'd clear out of the rented storage unit in six weeks. But it took us six weeks just to feel like we'd put enough stuff away to justify bringing more stuff into the house. So we're behind schedule on it. So what else is new.

But the spinning wheel is home. So is the majority of the sheet music. These things make me happy.

Oh, good grief. It's Monday. When did it get to be Monday again? (About twenty-three hours ago.) Oh, shut up. (Well, you did ask...) I know. But shut up.

Today involved fun with plumbing. Also fun with address changes and bill-paying. It involved a bike ride to the bank to deposit checks, and to Sancho's for pozole and tamales. It involved a brief nap with a book. It involved solving the last available level (so far) on Two Dots, and gawking at the toucan. ("Of course it's a toucan. Two can..." My husband is a genius.) It involved extra recording for AINC and, simultaneously, tatting a lace edging of my own design.

In other words, this was a boring day. What does one blog about on a boring day? One is stumped.

Here, have a tatting pattern. (Have a whole tutorial.)

First Trefoil:

• R1: [5 double-stitches (ds), picot(p)] 3 times, 5 ds. Close.
• R2: 5 ds, join to last p of R1, 3 ds p, [2 ds p] twice, p, 5 ds. Close.
• R3: 5 ds, join to last p of R2, [5 ds p] twice, 5ds. Close.
• Lock-join to base of R1 to close the trefoil up at the center.

Turn.

Danglies:

• Leave about 1/4" thread, then begin Dangly Ring (RD) with a join to last picot of R3.
• RD: 6 ds, p, [1 ds, p] three times, 6 ds. Close.
• Leave about 1/2" thread.
• Repeat RD.
• Leave about 1/4" thread.

Turn.

Continuation Trefoil:

• Like First Trefoil, but join first picot of R1 to the base of last RD.
• At end of Continuation Trefoil, lock-join to the 1/4" thread between last RD and R1.

Turn.

Alternate Danglies and Continuation Trefoil until the lace is as long as you feel like, improvising connections as necessary when adding more thread. (Now that I think about it, it would probably look better if you started with the RD that connects to R1, so you don't have a trefoil on the end with only one dangly. Oh well. Next time.) Attach creation by the central picot of the R2s to the hem of whatever you've a mind to edge with lace, I guess. I don't know.

Tatting is weird. It's a pleasant thing to do with my hands when they are not otherwise occupied, but I generally have no idea what to do with the results. I don't typically wear lace or jewelry. None of my possessions are currently crying out to have lace edging attached to them. I'm not a "lace everywhere in the house" sort of gal.

I do have some roller derby related ideas. I'm about to retire a set of bearings from my outdoor wheels, and one can tat any number of motifs around a round object. I've also been trying to doodle up a tatted roller skate shape. If there is already a pattern for such a thing out there, Google has not yet helped me find it. Either it drops "roller skate" out of my search terms, or it assumes that by "tatting" I meant tattoos. Alas.

Thus, a boring day comes to an end quite boringly. Tomorrow: Excitement! Of the literary variety! Or so I hope.

Waking up on the train Wednesday morning the 31st, I had that dream again, the one where I go home and discover a pet that I'd totally forgotten about and been neglecting for years. As you might imagine, it's a dream full of guilt and self-recrimination. But because the pet is always alive and healthy, or at least mostly healthy, it's not too late to do something about the situation. So there's guilt, but there's also relief, a sense of undeserved reprieve, while I scramble to make things right.

Great timing, brain. If you're going to give me a kick in the subconscious about childhood aspirations and responsibilities, why not deliver it on my way to New Orleans, so I can maybe do something about it while I'm there? (Do what? I don't know. Go through my boxes in the attic. Go visit teenage haunts. Something.) But no, you had to drop it on me as the train arrived in Denver. Great.

Sometimes the dream invents a pet for the sake of giving me guilt over it. Once, I dreamed that a miniature horse was waiting for me in my old closet in my childhood bedroom. I opened the door, and there it was, just standing there, patiently waiting for me to feed it.

Most often, though, the dream is about a real pet I took care of throughout my childhood, an albino parakeet whom I had from ages eight to fifteen or so, and whom I had unimaginatively named White Wing. That's who the dream was about yesterday morning:

A too-small birdcage, maybe two feet by one foot by eight inches tall, crowded with quiet parakeets of all colors. One of them is White Wing. I had forgotten about them, hadn't fed them in ages, and this isn't the first time I forgot about them too. I hurry to give them food. I don't have the proper food I used to give them, just this bag of small sunflower seeds that my parents picked up. It's labeled for budgies, but the dark blue one with black accents is mildly sick soon after eating. I resolve to get the proper food as soon as I can.

White Wing is an especially appropriate focus for the dream because there was a period of time when I did neglect her. It was totally understandable: I had just been diagnosed with leukemia and whisked away to the hospital. I wasn't at home to take care of my budgie. But I wasn't even thinking about it until I came home and she wasn't in my room. Apparently someone told my parents that there was a chance I could catch something from her, or from the mites she might be carrying, while my immune system was suppressed, so they moved her to another room and cleaned mine very thoroughly. I had no idea they were doing that; I was busy being bored at the hospital, wondering when they'd let me go home.

(Note to self: There's probably something here in the dream about gratitude owed to my parents. In certain ways this visit home was fairly trying, which made it difficult to remember gratitude and appreciation.)

Having White Wing in the next room over, where I couldn't hear or see her without consciously going to her, rather than in my room where her activity was a constant part of my life, made it easy for her daily care to slip my mind from time to time. I'd remember late in the day with a sudden oh shit! And yes, I'd feel guilty about spending less time with her than I should.

So she's permanently etched in that part of my subconscious symbols lexicon. There are other associations that this visit would have reawakened, but I don't have the energy to go into them right now. They are not happy associations, and I don't want to deal with them at the moment. Besides, this post is getting long enough as it is. So let's stick with the "neglected responsibilities from childhood" theme for now.

(By the way, did y'all know I have a website all about dreams and dream interpretation? I have been neglecting it for far too long, too. The public dream journal is probably chock full of link spam by now. I need to clean out the database and give the whole site an overhaul.)

Anyway, every time I have this dream, I think about what I valued during my childhood that might have fallen off my radar. Am I making good strides toward the writing career I always envisioned having? I was fascinated by lucid dreams and out-of-body travels back then; when's the last time I tried to have a lucid dream? What about my religious/spiritual identity, practices, observances? Discovering Wicca meant so much to me around that time, but this year, being at my parents' house and also exhausted (or lazy), we didn't even observe the Winter Solstice.

Things like that.

Sometimes, even if I don't have good answers, I can honor this dream in a symbolic way. I can't necessarily reclaim a sense of spiritual urgency or suddenly get a book published overnight, but I can participate in some other activity I enjoyed during the White Wing years. For instance, I used to cross-stitch a lot when I was in and out of the hospital. It was something to do with the long, boring hours lying in bed. I worked any pattern or kit Mom brought me: teddy bear bookmarks, fleur-de-lis, streetcars, all manner of Christmas ornaments.

I did much less cross-stitch through high school and college, though I still found patterns from time to time to work as gifts: Witches Stitches' "Star Maiden" for my sister-in-law, an illustrated Prayer of St. Francis for Mom. But when I picked up knitting about fifteen years ago, it usurped cross-stitch entirely.

Well. Today, I started a new pattern: "Hurricane Tracking Map: Cajun Style!" by Leslie Wristers. I bought it at The Quarter Stitch during a visit home some eight to ten years ago--probably ten or more, come to think of it, as Katrina hadn't happened yet. But I never touched it until very recently, in early November, and even then all I did was go to the store and buy cloth and thread for it.

But I made the first few stitches on it tonight.

Look, younger me! I am cross-stitching again! And it's a New Orleans-themed pattern, too! I haven't forgotten you, I promise.

"So I didn't go work at the farm today," I told my friend. "I'm going easy on my right ankle. Rolled the dang thing during practice yesterday."

"Oh, that sucks."

We were at First Monday Spin-in at Shuttles Spindles and Skeins, which is one of Boulder's two main yarn and fiber shops. I had formed great intentions this weekend to actually get some spinning done. But what with the ankle quasi-injury, I didn't want to pedal a spinning wheel. So I brought my current sock project to knit on.

I removed the ice so my friend could see how puffy and swollen it was. She agreed that, yes, it was definitely visible, especially when compared to my uninjured left ankle.

"Yeah, and what sucks worse? It was not the result of epic roller derby violence. It did not even involve skates. It was just... me, getting tired and klutzy toward the end of a set of sideways tire-jumps. As part of our off-skates fitness/endurance work-out. I just landed, and the ankle rolled over, and so did I."

"Well," my friend mused, "no one has to know. You could tell them you were saving a drowning puppy or a burning kitten."

"Right. I twisted my ankle jumping through tractor tires to save a burning kitten. Which our coach set on fire. To motivate us. Because that's how bad-ass roller derby really is."

...not that anyone would buy it. I mean, there is no chance that WFTDA insurance would cover that kind of exercise. Also, I'm pretty sure our coach's membership in the anti-kitten-burning coalition is up-to-date. Still, it sounds a lot more exciting and heroic than "I landed funny and fell down because I get clumsy when I'm tired," doesn't it? Watch. I'll demonstrate:

"What happened to you?"

"KITTENS. ON FIRE."

*awed silence*

There you go.

Which is about it. Neither the story nor the scarf are finished. However, significant progress was made on both.

Most of the progress on the story happened at the Moonlight Diner, a sort of 50s/retro-themed greasy spoon on Tower Road near Denver International Airport. Their food is... OK. Well, it's either acceptable or abysmal depending on what you order. Steak and eggs ordered "eggs over easy and steak as rare as you're allowed" became eggs over medium/hard and a steak that had only hints of pink in the center and was dry and tough like leather. On the other hand, the taco potato skins are absolutely loaded and yummy. And they play a mix of oldies and 80s on their stereo, which is fun, but--what's up with 80s music being the new oldies? I'm only 34, I'm too young to feel old, stop trying to make me feel old!

Anyway, the quality of the food was of no import yesterday. I had already treated myself to Popeye's Fried Chicken for lunch. (New Orleans homesickness ahoy!) All I wanted never-ending coffee and a place to work on my story for three hours. Also wi-fi to check on the status of Southwest Airlines flight 502. I was there to pick up the marvelous Cate Hirshbiel, of course. Have you met Cate? Blog, re-meet Cate. She continues to be awesome.

So by the time her plane was due, I'd written the first five scenes. Of 13, of course. And by the time she called to say she'd got her luggage and was ready for pick-up, I'd spent the last fifteen minutes just gabbing with the waiter about, oh, stuff. Y'know. Driving in the snow, how video games can prepare you for real life situations, how people get very confused about tipping etiquette because it's so hush-hush in polite conversation, how airport security constantly strives to surprise us with more stupid where you'd have thought they couldn't possibly fit more stupid, how trains can be nice if you like trains.

As for the scarf, I knit on that at the Spin-In until my hands were done with knitting and I was ready for bed. Then I went home and crashed, hard.

Today I have until about 3:30 to work on the story some more. We'll see how far we get. The scarf has a new deadline of next Spin-In, when we'll leave our projects at the store to make a big show-off presentation for customers to ooh and aah at.

And tonight it's All You Can Eat Sushi at Japango with John and Cate and Avedan! Yayyyy!