Knit Sisters

A big hello to Westside PC, The Green Caipirinha, SuperMouth Beatty, and Blackberry Villa from me, The Red Mojito! May we knit long and prosper under our various new aliases, all thanks to The Blue Cosmo!

Westside PC, aka Diane, noted that my mother has refused to tell us any of her funny names. I suspect it’s because my mother actually is a superhero. So if she reveals her superhero name, well, her cover will be blown.

I’m basing this suspicion on my observations of her in the 70s and early 80s when she was raising two daughters, teaching 8th-grade English full time, running a household, seeing that we all got something to eat three times a day, and keeping up with contemporary literature and current events.

If that’s not super-heroic, I don’t know what is. Superman and Batman are both shaking their heads in wonderment still.

The Red Mojito started work on Tuesday at Woolcott and Company and is pleased to report that it was absolutely delightful. By definition, working at the shop means that I am surrounded by yarn and knitters. The Red Mojito in Wonderland.

This coming Sunday afternoon, I will be at the Woolcott booth at the Boston Knit Out, so come on over and see me now, y’hear?

A lot more than usual has gotten done on Icarus because—are you ready for this?—if it’s a slow day at the shop and there’s nothing else pressing, we are encouraged to knit during work hours.

I must have done something good in a previous life.

Remember that last skein of Alchemy Haiku?

Now it looks like this:

You cannot hold back the inexorable tide of progress! Especially with a swift and a ball-winder handy there at the store!

Icarus is now large enough to form a valley wherein the remaining yarn may dwell:

And, even more importantly, I am now ready to go on to the second chart!

You cannot imagine how eagerly I have awaited this day. Or, if you’ve been reading the blog lately, maybe you can…

Meanwhile, Alex is taking his big “General Examination” next Tuesday, so things are tense Chez Wax Wings ‘R Us. Under the circumstances, a certain amount of stress is perfectly justified.

Because basically, if you do a doctoral degree in any branch of history, one of the requirements will be that you pass an oral examination administered by a panel of four to five professors who sit in a room with you for two to three hours and grill you on approximately 250 books that you were supposed to have read in the previous five months.

This is the exam he has to take next week.

Under the terms of the Geneva Convention, this is actually classified as “unlawful torture,” but they slide it through on the grounds that it is “traditional.”

It’s traditional torture.

No one thinks it is actually educational, but—like Marine boot camp—it shows that you’ve got guts, by God. That you are the kind of soldier student who can go into a room with four or five dazzlingly learned (and occasionally sadistic) people and come out in more or less one piece two or three hours later.

You have to go in there—and here I can’t do any better than to quote a friend of my parents who was given to rather crude turns of phrase—and “show them that you’ve got more *ss than they’ve got teeth.”

(As an aside, don’t you secretly love that quote? Even though it…how shall we say? Lacks refinement?)

It’s just the tiniest bit daunting. In precisely the same way that the fifth ring of hell is just the tiniest bit daunting.

So let’s all wish Alex well. And hope that our household can get through the next few days gracefully, calmly, and with no futher skunkings. There’s not too much more, frankly, that the traffic can bear.

I have resisted the strong temptation to bury Icarus under the shed in the backyard and he is, in fact, thriving:

I’ve even been sweet-talking some of these hot straight needles in my free time. Ever notice how they are kept in a, ahem, honey pot? If you take my meaning, and I think you do…

He’s getting a little rambunctious, but then again, he is a big boy for his age.

The fact that there is still an entire skein of Alchemy Haiku to knit up—and it is very, very clear that Icarus will take nearly all of it—is simply not discussed Chez Wax Wings ‘R Us.

Alchemy Haiku haiku:
Yoo-hoo! Just when you
thought Icarus was ending…
here I am, baby!

Truly, there is only so much reality one can bear.

But I have good news! Oh yes, indeed I do.

This afternoon I begin working at Woolcott and Company, now under the management of Sean, who keeps up not only a store blog but also blogs for himself over here and runs a great store.

The excitement is almost unbearable. I guess standing outside the store for three days wearing that sandwich board that read, “Will work for yarn” actually paid off.

Woolcott is located in lovely Harvard Square, home of the famous Harvard Yard of Harvard University, that august institution to which parents shell out big, big cash-ola so that their kids can work hard and make a good start in life for themselves.

The flower of our youth, shown here buckling under the stringent demands of the Harvard workload.

In any event, when you are in the area, come over to Woolcott and see us!

Most importantly, however, I believe that this new job may mark the end of my yarn diet. Hallelujah!

Speaking of diets and going off of them, Sarah sent Alex these mouth-wateringly delicious cookies for his birthday:

Seemed like a good time to remind him that marriage means sharing all that you have with your beloved.

How does a person make cookies this good? To me, it remains a tantalizing mystery. Can I offer you a piece of advice? If my sister offers to make you some cookies, just say yes.

We are now moving inexorably into fall, and the final blooms of the summer won’t last long. This makes them even more beautiful.

As lovely as an autumn bride:

It really was a lovely day for a wedding. And doesn’t she look stunning?

At last, because I promised my friend Lorinda that I would (and because it really is entertaining), I took her “My Ten Names” quiz. The results were not uniformly successful because I have no middle name and thus am somewhat crippled when it comes to constructing funny names of this sort (Mom, hi. What were you thinking again?), I still have a couple of very good ones:

My Superhero Name, formed from my favorite color and my favorite drink:
The Red Mojito

My Futuristic Name, formed from my favorite perfume and my favorite shoes:
Lolita Lempicka Fluevog

Lorinda, being a good and decent person, did not include the classic “Porn Star Name” in her list, but since I am horribly corrupt, I can tell you that this one is formed by using the name of your first pet and the name of a street you lived on as a child.

Mine is “Wag Aspen.”

But I was blown out of the water by my friend Damon, whose Porn Star Name is “Winky Dor-Mar.”

Can anyone top that?

I saw the best knitters of my generation destroyed by
triangular lace shawls, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the interminable rows until dawn,
looking for an angry stitch,
angelheaded crafters burning for the ancient heavenly
sighting of the marker that comes two stitches before the end of the row,
who hollow-eyed and slightly drunk
and somehow always in the middle of a row sat
up knitting in the supernatural darkness of
crappy graduate student digs with an obstreperous cat and a loyal dog,
contemplating burying the shawl under the shed in the backyard…

…Icarus, in my dreams you walk dripping from a Eucalan bath
on the highway across America to the door of my cottage in the Western night.
And when I open the door, you are miraculously finished and blocked
and I can go back to working on Rogue.

(With sincerest and most heartfelt apologies to Allen Ginsberg.)

Have a great weekend everyone! Me, I’ll be knitting Icarus. But you knew that already, didn’t you?

Icarus is such a good boy! He just doesn’t give me any trouble.

Hey, is that a sneaky way of saying that I’m boring? Because if you want trouble, I can give you trouble. Just say the word…

Sadly, things that go smoothly make very uninteresting stories.

So this is a story about a dog,

and a terrorist,

Oh, whoops. Mistakenly popped in a picture of our cat. Well, it is an error anyone could have made.

and a woman who lived by herself in a studio apartment in a high-rise in New York City. This is a story about how their paths crossed and what became of them.

I was living in New York City on September 11, 2001, but I found I could not write about this on Monday. In the midst of all the political grandstanding and television specials and the genuine grief of those who lost someone dear to them in those attacks, the task felt both overwhelming and somehow wrong, as if I would be co-opting the ongoing grief of people who suffered direct, personal losses.

I was very fortunate: I did not lose any close friends or family members. But I did lose the same thing every survivor in the city lost—a sense of security and that peculiarly American sense of invulnerability.

In the days following the attacks, my friend Cindy’s little girl, who was four at the time, kept saying to us, “Did the Empire State Building fall down too? Are all the buildings going to fall down?”

What could we tell her? When you have just seen something massive and terrible that you never dreamt could happen happen, you feel you are suddenly in a place where anything could happen. Literally anything.

What can you tell a child then?

It was like dropping through a rabbit hole into some other reality. The suddenly silent city whose silence was punctuated only the roar of the fighter jets cruising up and down the Hudson. The acrid black smoke blowing in a steady stream out to Brooklyn. The fire that kept burning and burning and burning.

My failure to find anything to laugh about for weeks, a unique phenomenon in my life. Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead playing and re-playing on my stereo.

But this is a story about a dog. About how on September 12, 2001, I took a long walk in Central Park because it seemed to me that if I moved my legs, I could outrun the shocked, stunned feeling I’d had since I woke up. The futility of my exercise notwithstanding, the park was full of people walking dogs. They appeared to be the only people that day with any kind of grip on normality.

A dog must be walked, come hell or high water. Muhammad Atta or no Muhammad Atta.

As the early fall passed into the late fall, I thought more about getting a dog, turning the idea over more seriously in my mind than I had in the previous four years, a period during which I had idly considered dog ownership, but had skittered nervously away from the responsibility, preferring a life with light personal duties and few restrictions.

I also thought more about Muhammad Atta. The hatred I felt for Atta and his compatriots was rather frightening, even to me. It was ugly and poisonous, even if it was—at some level—justified.

Then right before Thanksgiving, I adopted Shelley.

She had been dumped somewhere in Queens and she still had a slight aura of wild animal about her when I brought her home. She wasn’t certain that human beings were entirely to be trusted or that the world was a safe place. She was, in this way, a very post-9/11 dog.

But after about two weeks of walks and coaxing and daily trips to the dog park, I was playing ball with her one day when, for the first time, she cracked a huge canine grin.

This is a typical expression, but I didn’t know that at the time.

She was a huge amount of work because she was young, she had no manners, and she was wildly energetic. I was living in a studio apartment on the 27th floor of a high-rise and since we had no outdoor space, she needed three basic walks plus one two-hour trip to the dog park every day.

After three weeks of dog ownership, I was both literally weeping with exhaustion and, paradoxically, completely in love with her.

In the past five years, Shelley and I have made two cross-country moves together. We’ve hiked in canyons in California and played in dog parks on two coasts. We’ve lived in five different houses. Everything in my life has changed since the autumn of 2001.

But Shelley has been with me through all those changes. She is the one constant.

I was taught in Sunday School to love my enemies, but I have to confess that I have fallen short of loving Muhammad Atta. But neither can I hate him with the kind of fury and conviction that I once felt. Because there is a way in which Muhammad Atta gave me this dog. He didn’t intend to do any good the day he flew that plane into the Twin Towers.

But indirectly he did.

Many terrible events have taken place since September 2001. But this is a story about a dog. And it is a story about how, at my house at least, the terrorists have not won.

Let’s all wish Sarah a quick and full recovery! I’ve heard that encouraging comments, along with frequent doses of echinacea, will have a sufferer back on her feet in no time.

Hope you feel better soon, Sarah!

Out here Chez Mad Dog, Icarus just keeps on keepin’ on:

Obstreperous dog included in photograph for purposes of scale.

I posed him with Shelley because I wanted to prove to you that he is a growing boy. Oh, and because over the weekend, the Knitting Muses whispered to me, “When your Icarus is as long as your mongrel dog, then my child, and only then!, may you bind him off and block him.”

I wanted to see how far I had to go, you see, and it looks like the answer is, “One mutt butt and a mutt head.”

Never say that knitting is not an exact science here Chez Mad Dog! Rigorous measurement protocols ‘r us.

Icarus at the piano: Darlings, I can’t tell you what a consolation music is to me…especially after the gross indignity of being draped over that reeking animal!

In addition to spending some quality time with Icarus, I caught up on my Rolling Stone reading:

Tangled up in pink?

A rewarding experience on the whole, I’d say. I learned once again why Bob Dylan is a genius (because he says so that’s why…), what the soldiers are listening to in Iraq (Tupac Shakur, may he rest in peace), what Pam Anderson and Kid Rock wore at their wedding (not much), and other issues of vital interest and importance.

Arguably the most remarkable article was about a guy named Daniel Pinchbeck, a leader and guru in the “psychedelic community.” You could read it yourself (it’s very well-written and masterfully reported), but I can save you the headache with this concise summary: Pinchbeck spends most of his time tripping on various hallucinogenic drugs and expounding upon his own incoherent, psuedo-philosophical system which includes apocalyptic predictions about the end of the world.

Dude. He is, like, so deep.

But that’s not what really interests me. No. No, no, no, no, no! What’s really interesting is how Pinchbeck reports that in one of his altered states, Quetzalcoatl appeared to him and delivered a message from God.

The message was roughly as follows: You, Pinchbeck, are a prophet and, furthermore, monogamy is an unnatural state for human beings, so in order to save the world, you are going to have to sleep around with various attractive women.

Huh. I’ll be doggoned.

Here’s my question: why is it that when Quetzalcoatl appears to a member of the “psychedelic community” with a message from God, the message is never one of the following?:

(a) You are not a prophet, you are an incorrigible slacker. Over time, God has noticed that you have made a habit of sloth, or, as He Himself would put it, “reaping not the fruits of human industry.” He demands that you improve your personal hygiene, get a job, show up to work on time every day, pay your taxes, go to your children’s school plays even though they have pacing problems, be loyal to your wife, keep your shoes shined, drink only in moderation, and quit smoking.

(b) You are a prophet, but God says that in order to prove your mettle, you have to give up drugs and join the Marines.

(c) God no longer engages in direct communication with so-called “prophets” from the “psychedelic community.” In the past, God found these communications were often unsatisfactory in the extreme and only left Him with a lot of extra work to do in the Retribution and Vengeance Department. In fact, there have been ongoing discussions between God and his top advisors about smiting today’s “prophets” and destroying all their goats and sheep. Recently, however, God has made His home phone number available to celibate, drug-free, vegetarian ultra-marathoners. The choice is yours.

Yeah, Quetzalcoatl never says any of those kinds of things to Mr. I.M. Tripping.

Curious, isn’t it? I mean, I’m just raising the question, is all. For further thought and such.

Funnily enough, my friend Tope and I were visited by Quetzalcoatl this weekend while we were knitting:

He told us that in order to save the world, we will have to spend more time knitting and eating chocolate.

It’s going to be a heavy burden to carry. But someone has to care enough about this crazy world of ours to do it.

Suitably enough, I learned from Alison Bechdel’s wonderful, though harrowing, graphic novel/memoir Fun Home, shown here harmonizing beautifully with Sarah’s handspun:

that in the circus, the sort of acrobatics that involve one person lying on the floor and balancing another in the air are known as “Icarian games.”

Check it out! Page three. I’m knitting a shawl called Icarus and reading a book which mentions Icarian games on its very first full page.

Just coincidence? Or does everything happen for a reason?

Um. Yeah. Probably just coincidence.

But what a cool synergy! Bechdel returns to the Icarus myth throughout her memoir as a way of elucidating her relationship with her father, but she says nothing about Icarus’s shenanigans in Vegas. A missed opportunity, I’d say!

My Icarus now forms veritable pink dunes when you look at him from the side:

I left the room for a minute and discovered this intrepid Marine storming the ridges:

Forward troops! If we gain ground tonight, we can be over Heartbreak Hill and onto the fourth chart by morning!

I’m really savoring every minute I have with this Alchemy Haiku, both because I love it and because I’ve decided that there will be no more yarn buying for a while. So the yarn I have (which is admittedly not what you’d call a meager collection, except when compared to my sister’s stash…) must be enjoyed to the fullest.

Happily, on the very heels of this soul-destroying yarn-diet decision, my friend Tope generously gave me some Rowan 4-ply Botany she got from someone who was destashing:

Tope is no great fan of pink, and, as you may have noticed, I am. And yes, my friends, frugal is such an ugly word.

Tope’s gift of the wonderful and discontinued Botany really took the edge off. There are actually four skeins, but two are shy.

Thank you, Tope!

Let us speak no further of this yarn diet. It can only bring us sorrow.

Meanwhile, Alex is celebrating his birthday this week, consistent with our tradition of stretching every birthday celebration out for at least seven days. Sometimes, if you are clever, you can get ten days out of it, but that’s rare.

Last night, Nasser, who asked that I inform you that he also answers to “Omar Sharif,” came over for a birthday dinner:

My good man, how does it feel to be a quarter of a century old?

Shelley received a rubber chicken as part of the evening’s festivities:

Mmm. Chicken dinner. Chicken dinner…

And Nasser checked the internet for helpful advice for men turning twenty-five:

The only consistent message was that a man of this age will generally be happier, more fit, and more successful in all areas of his life if he chooses the companionship of a somewhat older woman.

Fortunately, Alex already knew this.

Happy Birthday, Alex! And many more!

Before I recount my latest canine-related misadventure and my predictably slow progress on Icarus, I just want to point out that my sister’s cookie recipes are the absolute best and if you haven’t seen her post from yesterday, take a look and get that recipe!

She was always such a great baker—even as a small child—that I myself never bothered to learn to bake. What was the point really, when she was (and is) so much better at it?

Besides, I was always the kind of kid who’d get bored halfway through a batch of cookies. You know, making those little balls exactly the same size so they’d bake evenly and all that.

So I’d just take the rest of the dough and make one really, really big cookie.

That cookie would never bake. Or it would, but the others would burn up in the meantime.

Hey, come to think of it, maybe the same thing happened with the United States. About the time they hit Ohio, one of the guys in charge of carving up territory said to the other, “Listen, dude, if we make all these states the same size as New Hampshire, we’ll never get finished. Look at all this land we got left! We gotta start making these bigger.”

At the end of the day, they made one really, really big state and called it California. And that explains why California—bless its big, beautiful, alternative, West Coast heart!—has always kind of “baked at a different rate” than all the other states.

Here on the home front, Miss Shelley, shown here giving you the “junkyard dog” hairy eyeball,

has once again been defending her turf. Unfortunately for both her and for me, she is apparently unable to discern the differences between an intruder like, say, a groundhog—which she can dispatch with almost frightening haste to his hoggy reward—and one like, say, a skunk.

If I’ve told her once, I’ve told her a thousand times, “Shelley, Shelley, the skunk always wins in the end. They’re the casinos of the animal world.”

But does she listen? Does she listen? No. No, I tell you!

I don’t have to take this crap. I’m going outside to see if I can rustle me up some skunks.

Last night, we’re sitting on the sofa reading, Shelley is outside on one of her routine perimeter checks, and the cat is on the phone to Homeland Security reporting us for “suspicious behavior” and requesting that the apartment be bugged by NSA—typical quiet evening at home—when Alex says, “I think I smell a skunk.”

“Ha, ha,” I say. “I’m sure it’s just that I’m cleaning the oven and it produces strange fumes.” Since I’ve never cleaned the oven before, neither he nor I could possibly know what it smells like, but my feeble attempts at housekeeping are a topic for another day.

“No,” he says. “I’m pretty sure I smell skunk.”

Just then, Shelley bursts through the dog door into the back hall and starts writhing about on the carpet, encrusted with dirt, foaming at the mouth, and running at the nose.

Skunked. R.I.P., carpet.

I grab her, hustle her into the tub, and yell to Alex for backup. First we have to give her a conventional bath to get the mud off, then we have to repeatedly apply a mixture of baking soda, white vinegar, and hydrogen peroxide to her muzzle to cut the skunk spray.

This procedure is met with an unfavorable response from the canine unit.

By the end of it, it is difficult to discern if the situation is better, or if we have just spread the stench around. Our olfactory systems have burned out. This is a small, but significant, blessing.

But there is icing on this fetid cake! I take my hand off the dog for a microsecond and she hops out of the tub and shakes violently, showering the entire bathroom with water and whatever remains of the skunk oil.

Good times, good times.

I could only go back to Icarus once I was sure that I wouldn’t contaminate him.

Nothing was ever said about flying too near a skunk, after all.

Real progress is being made, but you have to be very, very discerning to see it.

How like life!

If you have any peanut butter chocolate chip cookies kind words to raise me out of my skunk funk, please pass them along. I assure you, they will be richly appreciated.

The night before I flew home from Denver, the clouds looked truly ominous:

Uh, Captain, that don’t look like flyin’ weather to me.

But the next day was clear and beautiful. After the flight took off, the folksy Chuck-Yeagerish captain got on the intercom and said, “Way-ell folks, looks like we’re anticipatin’ a smooth ride ahead all the way through to Pittsburgh. (I had a connection in Pittsburgh.) So I’m gonna turn off the seat belt sign now, and feel free to get up and move about the cabin!”

Famous last words.

The turbulence was so bad that the flight attendant informed me that we weren’t allowed to have hot beverages.

I said, “Well, then, have you got any Valium?”

Worse yet, there was a guy two rows behind me who was keeping up an exhaustive running commentary on everything going on inside the airplane. Not much actually goes on inside an airplane, as it turns out.

Commentator: Why, lookee there! Those little screens are coming down for the movie.

Other passengers: (Complete silence.)

Commentator: Guess we’re going to have the movie now.

Other passengers: (More silence.)

Commentator: Whoo-hoo. Goin’ over some bumps there! Heh, heh.

Other passengers: (Tense silence.)

Commentator: Just like ridin’ a roller coaster! Except up in the sky!

Other passengers: (Increasingly tense silence, much like the quiet that precedes a violent outburst.)

As Our Mutual Friend nattered on, it became abundantly clear why we are not allowed to take handguns on airplanes. It has absolutely nothing to do with hijacking.

I kept knitting:

The implications of flying with Icarus are not all that comforting.

Close-up he looks like this:

No feathers yet…

The Commentator kept commenting. I put my earphones in and turned my iPod up. Kept knitting. Tried to think about cheery things like how much I like knitting with Alchemy Haiku and how cool Icarus is going to look once he gets some feathers.

Eventually, though, we started our descent and I was forced to relinquish use of my annoying-fellow-passenger blocker iPod. About that time, the pilot came on again:

“Way-ell, folks, we’re goin’ through some little rainstorms here in Ohio and it looks like the ride is goin’ to kind of deteriorate from here.”

Deterioriate? It was actually going to get worse?

At this point, a small child two rows in front of me started screaming, “I want down! I want my Daddy!”

I could not have put it better myself. What an articulate and sensible child!

Two rows behind me, The Commentator kept commenting.

I thought, “There are people in the third ring of hell who would refuse to trade places with us right now.”

The gratitude I felt when those wheels hit the runway is almost beyond description. The Commentator must have felt the very same way because he announced in a loud voice, “Well, well, well, here we are! Back on good ole terra cotta!”

Way-ell, folks, that’s right. Good ole “terra cotta.” But at a moment like this, why sweat the details?

I’m really glad I made it back, too, because when I finally arrived in Boston, Lorinda had sent me contest booty:

Gorgeous! Thank you, Lorinda! It’s good to be a winner.

More happy surprises were in store. When I left, our sunporch looked approximately like this:

Behold and quake in fear! I am the Sunporch of the Damned!

Without so much as a gentle prod, in my absence Alex had transformed the Sunporch of the Damned into this:

Architectural Digest hasn’t called yet, but personally I’m impressed by the sheer magnitude of the effort.

Bravo, Alex!

It’s good to be back home. Terra cotta never looked better.

Words cannot express how much I wish I could claim that I came up with that pun, but alas, I cannot be so deceitful. Here in lovely Denver, Colorado,

there is a wonderful radio station at 101.5 on your FM dial (I do not know its call letters, but I’d put my money on KMRT) that goes by “Martini on the Rockies.”

Normally, I don’t have a lot of truck with commercial radio, but Martini on the Rockies is something else altogether. It’s as if you had a really, really cool friend who called you up and said, “Hey, baby, why don’t you come over and we’ll spin some discs?” But it’s on the radio. Available in your car!

Shirley Bassey singing Goldfinger.

Anyone at all singing Mac the Knife.

Elvis Costello singing Let’s Misbehave.

And then, just to keep you on your toes, a little Chris Isaak or Sarah McLachlan.

At least eighteen times an hour, the DJs work “Martini on the Rockies” into their patter. But to me, the joke never gets old. Every time, I think, “How unbearably clever. I wish I’d thought of that.”

Martini on the Rockies pretty much captures my whole sense about Denver. It’s cool and mellow and sophisticated and witty and beautiful. Here’s the view from my room:

I am considering taking up residence here. I shall change my name to Eloïse and order every meal from room service.

There are abundant fountains,

prairie dogs that are disturbingly tame,

city parks that look like this,

and creeks with exploratory children:

It’s nothing short of idyllic. I really have no complaints. If it weren’t for significant sentimental attachments back East, I might see if they’d hire me on at the hotel or the archive and simply stay.

This research is good, and Icarus is coming along (though he misses his life in Vegas):

Beware! If you fly too near the sun, you’ll end up in the suburbs of Denver.

As they say on 101.5 FM, a martini is not a drink. It’s an attitude. What a cool (although almost totally empty and meaningless) thing to say!

Martini on the Rockies. Dry. With three olives.

Cheers!

As you may have noticed, I really enjoy being on the road. I’ve always liked it. When I was in my twenties, I had a job that involved a lot of travel. I liked it then, I like it now.

Okay, maybe not the plane rides, but everything else: the red convertibles, the new sights, the cacti, new yarn shops… I even like living out of a suitcase. I like it because it cuts my clothes and shoe choices to a bare mininum so that it is very easy to get dressed in the morning. (Yes, I realize that I have just revealed that under normal circumstances, I have a hard time performing the minimal task of dressing myself in the morning, a task that even low-functioning individuals are expected to master. Try not to bring that up too often and when you speak of me, speak kindly.)

It’s true that I do miss

Alex

and

Shelley

but on the other hand, as long as I’m out here, someone comes to my room every day and cleans it. I hear that’s how they do things in heaven.

And did I mention that I don’t have to cook?

Of course, some of the food and libations that you can get around the casino are not only not “home cooking,” they are downright dangerous. They sell margaritas by the yard here. I asked the bartender exactly how much margarita is, ahem, in a yard of margarita and he replied, “Forty-eight ounces.”

The guy next to me at the bar said, “Heh, heh. I like to drink a couple of these to get kind of relaxed.”

I said, “Funny you should mention that, because I like to drink of a couple of these to get kind of hospitalized.”

But back to my original point: there is, however, a downside to being on the road for a long stretch of time on your own. And that would be that you start to go just the tiniest bit insane.

Just the tiniest bit.

You know you are slipping over the edge when you start engaging baristas at Starbucks and cashiers at CVS in long, inappropriately involved conversations because you are so starved for live, human interaction.

Thankfully, knitting can come to your rescue. When I started to get a little weird, I just hopped in the car and cruised over to Gail’s Knits on Sahara. This is the place to be when in Vegas. Not only did Gail set me up with a fine little travel bag for Icarus, but she put me onto some Cascade Fixation:

Sarah, take note. I now have a respectable bag for my portable knitting.

Even better, though, I was welcomed into the little group of knitters who were hanging out at the shop. It was a better corrective than Prozac. And in such good company, I made considerable progress on Icarus:

Hello, I’m Icarus and I am notoriously difficult to photograph.

Revitalized and rehumanized, I drove back to the Strip in a much better state of mind. All thanks to the fine knitters of Las Vegas! And I gotta hand it to them, these people knit in temperatures that routinely reach 105 degrees. That’s some serious commitment to the fiber arts.

On my drive back, I saw a Chevy truck with a special Nevada license plate that read, “Nevada: Rich in Art.”

Huh.

Let’s play a game, shall we? I will say, “Nevada,” and you say all the words and phrases that come to your mind in the next 60 seconds.

Did “rich in art” make the list?

Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Back on the Strip, I made it down to the Palace of the Mighty Caesar:

Rich in art. Or whatever you’d call that.

And leaving no Vegas stone unturned, I caught the Bellagio Fountain in full eruption:

Drought? What drought?

Alas, the time has come to leave Fabulous Las Vegas, but I will certainly never forget all the fine people I have met here and the good times I have had.

Viva, my friends.