Random Acts of Synapse Firing

Had a nice exchange of emails with my friend Wanda recently. She who is married to the equally talented Ed. We discussed the sad fact that there are not hours enough in the day to do everything that we want, and that I am not the only person who wishes that he were able to work his gifts upon wood and provide us with niddy noddies.

I told her:
I understand that conflict between where your heart and hands want to go, creatively, and what pays the bills. This is why I work in an office and do not confuse my job with my passion(s). And it is why I will probably never have a “career”. I get a lot of satisfaction from a job well done, and I’m thankful that my parents taught me to give good value for what I’m paid. But the best moments of my workday are often those that I spend sitting in the break room with my knitting, visiting with coworkers who have come in for another cup of coffee or something from the snack machines. *That* is where I live.

Dad had a Shopsmith [ginormous table saw] and a workroom that he built on the back of our carport. In fact, he turned the carport into an enclosed garage, did almost all of the repairs on the washing machines in the laundromat that he owned, and grew roses along the driveway. Mom was a skilled needlewoman but not as prolific as I am. And I have inherited both loves. Dad taught me a bit about whittling when I was 10 or 12, and I wished that I could have inherited his shop when he passed.

When I have a house of my own, I want a shop out in back, where I can build shelves for my studio and bookcases and window seats and all that good stuff. I love the feel and smell of wood. It’s a slower medium than fiber; it’s at times like this that I wish we lived to the great age of the Biblical patriarchs and their families. Can you imagine how many FO’s we’d accumulate on Ravelry if we lived to be Methuselah’s age? Flickr would crash, that's for sure!

And I told her:
I know what you mean about piles of paperwork instead of files. For someone as organized as I am when I’m at work, the disarray at home is frequently disheartening. Our office went paperless about a year and a half ago, and I only recently connected the dots and realized that I could do the same here at home. That will require the purchase of a scanner, which is not high on my list of priorities at the moment.

Here is a link to an article that brought happy tears to my eyes. And another one that made me look at myself and cringe. And because of my comment on one of his articles, I have a new knitting friend. [Hi, Kristen!]

I just got my report for the week from Sitemeter. A hair over 11,000 hits, and over 13,000 page views. I think this time last year we were creeping up on 2,000 hits. I wonder if there’s a way to check? It seems that there is: 234 total visits for the month of April 2007; 709 so far this month. It doesn’t give me the cumulative total as of last April, but I’d only been blogging since late July 2006, so it couldn’t have been much.

Wow. Thanks, y’all. It astounds me that roughly thirty people read this blog on a daily basis. Most of you between 8:00am and 4:00pm, with another bubble at 7:00pm. I have this little vision of knitbloggers huddled around their keyboards, typing with one hand and a bowl of ramen noodles in the other.

Today at work I will be able to print off my pay stub for this Friday. And I will get to see how much damage Uncle Sugar has inflicted upon my deliciously generous bonus. I have a tithing envelope, and I have my checkbook, and I have stamps. I will write out that check before monkey mind starts howling about all the neat stuff we could have if I didn’t pay the tithing on that extra cash. Or on any of it, for that matter. The ward clerk will no doubt be amused to open an envelope with a Happy Birthday stamp and a two-cent stamp on it. But hey, sometimes I just have to concede that I serve as comic relief in our ward.

I spliced the last two small balls of Denim Silk together and have joined them to the working yarn for [Almost] Cozy. Which leaves one more ball and two intact skeins and a really itchy case of finish-itis. We are going to be crazy-busy at work today, as the primary scanning operator is taking a field trip with her kid’s class. So my backup and I will be doing all the scanning. Fortunately, I can do a lot of it from my desk between phone calls. But I am praying for a day of light mail volume, and not the deluge which I suspect awaits us after two days of not-much-mail.

I think it’s safe to assume that blatant chocolate abuse and vast quantities of cherry Coke are both on the agenda today.

Time to forage some breakfast and sneak in a little knitting before I hit the road.