Yeah, well.

This blogging thing is kinda hard work sometimes. I used to think in status updates and blog posts, and now I mostly don't think in any technological form at all. I still waste time on the web, and have been enjoying my first audio book (after all, why not? I loved being read to as a kid), but mostly my life is pretty devoid of its public presence. I think it's natural. I know that friends and family don't want to dwell on Rick's absence, and talking about him is much of what I want to do, so instead I talk TO him, and spare them (and you). I never realized just how much of my social outlet he was - work was much of the rest of it, and now that they're both gone, I don't really talk to people much. I always knew I was a hermit at heart. ;-)
The thing I figured out recently, why I can’t wrap my head around the fact that Rick is gone for good, is that it was so ordinary. I felt like the earth should have shaken, or tornados and hurricanes should have raged, or something. I think we go through lives with this "it won't happen to me or my family" attitude, but OF COURSE it will. It makes me wonder if, in places that are not the US, where we’ve insulated ourselves from death, if death really is ordinary. I mean, it’s part of life, we all have to do it, but it was such a spectacularly awful thing that it really feels to me like there can’t be nice days without Rick, and the whole world should have stopped and mourned with me. The fact that everything just went on, except for our little lives, is so strange and unreal, you know? I wonder if everyone feels a loved one’s death like this, or if in places where people aren't so insulated, where they are more attuned to the whole life cycle of things, they say, “Well, that’s that. I’ll miss him, but I have to weed the garden.”

Anyway. Enough now. I have come to the conclusion that I couldn't bear to work on any of the knitting from "before", so I started some new things. (Oooh, lookit me, I'll use any excuse for startitis.) For a few weeks, I couldn't even knit at all, but my hands needed to do something, so I appliqued. You know, because nothing goes with a long, 100+ for-days-heat-spell like appliqued snowmen. This is as far as I got, because the siren song of new knitting called, and I answered.



Here is the knitting. This is a seriously long term project, since it is done on smallish needles with sport weight yarn and is knit back and forth in one piece. Lawdy I have got to get skinnier if I want more handknit sweaters. Anyway, it's B-Side, by Laura Chau, in the Elsebeth Lavold Silky Wool that Joan sent me.


(Colors are so far off in this photo as to be almost completely unrelated.)

Finally, this is not a project, but a cool thing. I have a DARTH VADER TIN. Yes, it's true, I am the coolest space nerd out there. There is no one cooler/nerdier than I. My supercool nerdiosity is the greatest.