The Five Year Old Sleeps Tonight...

And the 39 year old isn't far behind her...

Long frickin' day! I'll go into it in a second, but first, I'd like to thank ALL of you for all of your words of support during my 'life sucks' temper tantrum in the last post. For everybody who said nice things to try to make me feel better--it totally worked, and I'm a little embarrassed and very grateful. Thank you...thank you for reading my blog and thank you for being nice people and just thank you.

Now about this long frickin' day...Seriously--and it all started last night.

Last night, I was trying (fruitlessly) to clean the kitchen, cook dinner (those gourmet frozen pizzas with 'safeway' on the label) and maybe get Arwyn a bath, when my best friend called. Now this is going to sound cold, but she lives alone--very alone--and often when she talks, she's just rehashing her day the way you would with a spouse, or a child or someone who had to share space with you, and just like with a spouse or a child, sometimes your eyes glaze over. And thus it was with me, so when she said, "...and I need to knit a shawl for my sister's wedding so could you help me pick out a pattern tonight..." my alarm bells were sleeping peacefully, and didn't hardly ring. They should have.

Shopping with Wendy is a nightmare. Looking through my patterns with her was like that same nightmare, but in my own home and featuring my own sacred texts as a centerpiece. "I want this, but in a different color. But...I like this pattern. But in a different color. Can I make it in a different color? I hate working with this yarn. But I like this pattern. But in a different color. But it can't go over my hair--I don't like the tie on this one though. So what do you think? But I don't like that. Does this yarn come in silver? Because I like this pattern, but not in the bronze." For forty-five minutes this went on, and with every repetition of the theme, one thing was becoming painfully clear. This would not be me, telling her how to make the shawl (an alarming prospect in itself--remember, I teach for a living...it would be like bringing insurance home to sell to your children) this would be me, MAKING the shawl. Because this is the same Wendy that I wrote about earlier, the one who knits from the right needle to the left needle through the back loops while throwing the yarn, and while, it is all very zen to not bother her with details when she is making something like socks or a scarf with no pattern (that she knows of) and no pictures (that she knows of) where she can't see how her knitting changes the inherent look of the pattern, but, remember that above conversation? Imagine that same conversation, for three months. Except, instead of "Can I get it in a different color." It would be, "But it doesn't look like the picture. But I can't knit different. But it doesn't look like the picture. Why doesn't it look like the picture? I don't understand what you mean by 'through the back loop'--why would that change anything?" Ad Nauseum. I'd snap like lounge lizard--seriously--you'd see the headlines Insane Woman Kills Best Friend with Whoopty-12 Needles, Proceeds to Knit with Entrails. The carnage would be indescribable, and I'm just not into spending the rest of my life in a rubber room with no sharp pointy objects, so, yes, I did the passive aggressive thing wherein I took on a task I wasn't really asked to do, but passively-aggressively bullied into, and now I'm bitching about it without confronting the perpetrator of my misery. You're all welcome--I'm more sorry than I can say.

So after going to Michael's (and I've become enough of a color-slutting yarn-snob that this felt like the final insult) to discover (just as I predicted) that they didn't carry Lion Brand Glitterspun (Julie, I can hear you barfing from across the continent) and that we had to special order it, I stopped for a snack for Bryar's soccer team, came home, and fell promply asleep in front of Numbers. And I thought that this would be the end of the bad part of the weekend.

This morning, Mate and I were laying in bed, Kewyn between us, watching the weekly Scrubs marathon, and I was thinking, awesome... Bryar's got two soccer games, I've got time to go weigh in...we might be able to clean house in between...and, holy shit... "Mate--it's nine-thirty isn't it?"

"Yup."

"Kewyn's supposed to be at gymnastics right now."

"Shit."

I weighed in--turns out I'm still fat. We went to Bryar's soccer tournament. They got their asses kicked through two games. (Poor coach--middle of the second half of the second game he goes 'It's official girls--we're getting killed!') We've got one more game tomorrow, and then we have time to confront the larvae on the celing before they drop into my mouth as I snore. Like I said--the five year old ain't the only one sleepin' tonight.