So many words, so little time

Life is barreling forward, as it likes to do, without any regard for my feelings about it. I have tried to explain to life that this is rather rude, but it just stares at me for a brief moment, then blurts out, “So anyway…!” and proceeds to continue rattling along at breakneck speed, as if I had said nothing at all.

Things have just been relentless lately. It’s been the kind of quarter where one Drama piles on top of another, where noise and rush and Crazy just swarms like ants on a neglected piece of chocolate left on the floor.

Things are breaking (like my ovens and the minivan’s windshield). Things are rotting (the roof) (because nothing says ‘getting ready for winter!’ like discovering dry rot in your roof – awesome! let’s sing another round of the Happy Homeowner Song, LA LA LA LA LA!).

Work is bat poop crazy. Just…insane. Which on the one hand is, um, well, nuts, and sometimes I feel like standing on my desk and screaming, “WILL YOU ALL JUST PIPE DOWN A DAMNED MINUTE AND LET ME THINK ABOUT ONE (1) THING AT A TIME?!?!?!”

But at the same time, I’m much happier in that kind of environment. I thrive on challenge, and on being challenged. I need to be off-balance, to have heavy demands placed on me, to have high expectations – to have people looking at me expectantly, saying confidently, “Tama can figure this out. Tell us what’s wrong with this. Why is it doing that, and how do we make it not do that any more times? Oh, by the way – four people have spent the last two months trying to figure this out and really didn’t get anywhere. Think you can have it done before we run tomorrow?”

Where most people would be howling with frustration, I find it exhilarating; the constant onslaught of Stuff That Needs Figuring Out Immediately keeps me brilliantly entertained.

My brain spends most of its time in Park. It’s kind of cool to actually run it through all its gears.

And of course, I also have BART. Good old BART. Where would we all be out here in the Bay Area, without BART? Our very own mobile Petri dish, where every imaginable disease comes together in a glorious symphony, and we can all rub elbows with each other and contract The Crazy, in ways small and large.

My latest BART story: Last week, I sat amid the tumultuous ruin of peace, steadily knitting on my Halloween tam. It seemed that by some common will, every other soul on the train was determined to be heard in one way or another – shouting Baby Daddy Drama into their phone, yodeling news of the day to each other across the aisles, shouting to comrades far and near, blasting their music through earbuds that utterly failed to keep the beat within the personal space of the listener.

Having spent the majority of the ride twisting back and forth between her five companions, airing opinions on everything from politics to religion to Young People Today™, the lady across from me fell into a brief moment of contemplation, watching as I twisted yarn back and forth. Then suddenly she leaned forward, tapped me on the knee and, as I popped my earbuds out of my ears and assumed a posture of listening, demanded to know if it was legal for me to be knitting on the train.

{insert expression of huh-wha-now? here}

Seeing that I was not catching her drift, she began telling me that seeing as how it was illegal to knit on planes, she assumed it was likewise illegal on trains, and that she was very, very surprised to learn that it was not illegal for me to be wielding such dangerous weapons with such careless abandon, in public.

I gently informed her that actually, knitting was once again allowed on planes, blah blah blah TSA blah blah blah discretion of the screener yadda yadda.

And I did not point out that the Young Person Today™ slouched in the seat beside her had, at that very moment, a knife tucked into the sock on his left foot. Which I had only noticed because as he had sat down beside her, I was pretty sure I’d seen the hilt of…something-not-gun-but-definitely-weapon-ish…jammed into the waistband of his underwear…which naturally was way, way above the top of his jeans, which were damn near around his ankles.

Somehow, I rather suspect that my #3 circular needles and folding scissors are the least of the BART security team’s worries. Just sayin’.

Speaking of…I finished this on the ride home this afternoon.

It’s stretching over a plate now, which is amusing the Denizen no end.

Also, I am going to have to fight Danger Mouse for it. She has been circling it all night, looking for an opportunity to make off with it and squirrel it away in her ever-increasing hat-stash.

She’s also after this one, which I finished a while ago.

This is Rabbitch’s “Pining for the Fjords” from about a million years ago (she doesn’t have any in her shop at present...I also have a couple other things of hers from Stitches in my stash, one of them a fingering weight in ‘cornsilk’ [I think it was] that was purchased even though I had sworn with many solemn oaths that I was NOT going to buy ANY MORE fingering weight yarn, pretty much ever, seeing as how I already had enough to shawl the entire Eastern seaboard but then this blue was just so…compelling…and I had to buy it).

And then I made…a hat. With stitches.

Many stitches. And I did that thing where you do a turning row? And that other thing where you knit two together and yarn over all the way around, so you get that picot edging thing after you’ve turned it and tacked it down.

And then I made too much i-cord on top and stitched it down kind of flower-ish on the top. Randomly. I thought.

Didn’t notice until after I was done tacking it down that my “random” looping thing was pretty much always an over-under thing except that one (1) of the crossings is over-over.

And since I’ve noticed it, it now drives me nuts so I’m going to have to un-tack and re-tack it, in proper over-under fashion. Argh.

…and now I’ve just realized I have nothing to knit on the train tomorrow. HORRORS.

Talk amongst yourselves, people, nothing to see here but a crazy woman throwing stash yarn around at an hour past her bedtime…