Best Quote I Heard All Day
Tom Cruise only makes one or two film appearances a year. A baseball player can be the hero or the goat one-hundred and sixty-two times a year.--Dave Winfield

If I need to tell you who Dave Winfield is, then perhaps you have lost sight of the fact that I am a Yankees fan.

Most certainly not a Tom Cruise fan, for sure. Give me Jeets or Johnny Damon any day. Yeah, yeah--I know--he was an (urp) Red Sox guy last year. But we all knew he was a Yank at heart.

Thank you all for your thoughts about my friend, Peggy. It has not been an easy week for me;however, one thing that we shared was our love of baseball and the Yanks. Her entire family wore Yankee caps at the funeral. Through my tears, I had to smile at that. Peg would have been laughing her ass off.

Go Yanks! Red Sox suck.

I know the Wolvies don't quite get my love affair with baseball. But that's OK. It's in the blood.

I can't help it.

Packin' Iron (and Needles and Yarn and Fiber and Some Dishes)
Don't you hate it when you pack things up nice and orderly for an impending move?

And then realize that the one tool/book/skein that you want to use/read/knit is packed?

Finagle's Law of Dynamic Negatives at work again.

No, this is not the stash. Just sundry weaving stuff. Scary, eh? It goes tomorrow on Norm's truck.

I thought about working on the Wedding Ring shawl this weekend, in the midst of beginning the week-long move two miles down the road. Actually getting out the gossamer merino, casting on and letting it rip, to coin a perhaps unfortunate phrase. And then, horrors.

It's packed. Damn.

The dilemma? I know which box it's in because I marked every box carefully. So.

Shall I open it? My steely resolve to keep everything together until I unpack is wavering ever so slightly.

In the meanwhile, there is some knitting going on, in small quantities.

Stoopid Simpleton Shawl
I had to do something. I was absolutely desperate. If I knit one more sock, it was going to be death by double-pointed needle impaling.

We're back to the Feather 'n' Fan option. I'm using the Folk Shawls pattern, although I added an extra pattern repeat, just to make the cast-on that much more mind-numbing. Because you see, this one is worked across. So there are 400+ stitches from the beginning. Really a stole rather than a shawl. To me, a stole is a rectangle.

If I were Mari Lynn Patrick, I'd use this bit to decorate a decolletage on an ill-fitting V-neck. How-some-ever, it's going to be a nice, utilitarian shawl. Something I can wear with jeans. Besides, I can do it without thinking while I think about other things.

Chasing Rainbows
If I buy anything at Rhinebeck, it will be more of this in a different colorway.

It's wonderfully grape-y.

I need to check Black Bunny Fibers to see what Carol has cooked up in her dyepot lately. Between Chasing Rainbows and Carol, I've been doing a lot of worthwhile spinning these days. Once I move and get settled, I will definitely be warping that loom. This warp is half completed.

Note to weavers: I got the Yarn Barn weaving catalog the other day. Some very nice things therein. A bit pricy but nice. I'll keep buying my weaving yarn from WEBS, though.

Offline and Out of Touch
Perhaps. Cablevision will be at the new place on Wednesday to install all the TV, phone and internet stuff. Here's hoping it works on the first go. In any case, the movers will come next Thursday to haul out the furniture. Corinne, Mike, Liz, Jenn and her boyfriend Norm and yours truly will be spending the next week moving boxes over to Oxford Rd.

I'm surprisingly conservative when it comes to my lifestyle. I'm a creature of habit and for many years, I didn't accept change very well. Certainly not moving. I'm a nest-builder.

Some of you who have known me for a long time may remember when Jimmy and I built our house up in Budd Lake in 1998--Loopy certainly does. I told him, the only way I'm leaving here is in a box. Don't ask me to move again.

Joke was on me. He left, not me. But after all the upheaval in the past five years, I've become far more flexible than I ever would have believed possible.

What I need is: family, friends, fiber, music, books and love. That's it. Those remain constants. The rest? Whatever.

So as I am toting boxes next week, once again my rare and handy life changes. And the way it's been going lately, it's most certainly for the better. And yes, I have another date tonight with JT. That's who's making it much better.

Talk to you all as soon as I get back online.