SassyBlonde

Take a moment and check out ChemoCaps-- a charity which donates hats to chemotherapy patients, all handknitted and donated by knitters from literally anywhere and everywhere! I'm sending them a cap this week and hope to be doing more work with them in the future. Check it out!

If you're a knitter, RUN, do not walk, to your nearest Borders and buy the new Stitch N' Bitch book, Stitch N' Bitch Nation. Yummy funky patterns and great anecdotes, and over 50 patterns in this one!!

When I was on my orchestra tour last year, the Stitch N' Bitch book kicked off a knitting craze of Biblical proportions. By the end of the tour, my friend Alexis and I had taught 20 people how to knit, with a total of 34 scarves, two sweaters, 5 hats and a blanket to our collective credit. Amazing!!

Geeks of the world rejoice! You too can have Princess Leia Buns, and it keeps you ears warm at the same time. Good grief.

Also, have you ever wondered how traffic lights work? Check it out! (This just answered one of my all-time WTF questions... wow, I need to get out of the practice room more.)

Both found over at clicked.

Boo Berry is going to be totally proud of me: today I started knitting my first pair of socks.

At this point I must apologize to Boo for leaving the copy of the starter sock pattern she offered to loan to me at her house like a total moron, which I only realized when I started packing stuff for this trip. I figured as I packed that I would just have to suck it up and finish my sorely neglected shawl, but by the time we reached the Alabama state line on Sunday I realized that a.) I am never ever buying a black car again because there is no conceivable way to keep it cool when driving through 103 degree temperatures in full sunlight, and b.) large fuzzy yarny objects do infinite damage to said cooling process on a personal level. Therefore, I struck out today for Knit Nouveau in Homewood in search of sock yarn and needles and used my Books-A-Million gift card to score a sock book in hopes of improving my odds of avoiding heat stroke on the drive home.

Newly acquired hanks yarn in hand, I returned home with a rosy outlook and full intentions of getting something started before we leave for my grandparents' house tomorrow, and proceeded to unwind the first hank and wind it into a ball.

Now this is where things went terribly, terribly wrong.

You lovely knitters out there know of the existence of such things as yarn-ball winders, which I mostly blithely ignore and hand wind my erstwhile balls (Dancing Dragon can feel free to take a snipe at that one-- I would.) This becomes a problem with fingering weight yarn, which is light and delicate and has a tendency to crawl all over itself in the unwinding process, so by the time my husband took a break from practicing I had yarn strung hither and yon, to and fro across my parents' family room. He entered the room and skidded to a halt just shy of clotheslining himself on a strand looped from the rocking chair to the couch, and quirked an eyebrow at the frothy pinkness adorning every outcropping.

"Don't. Ask." I said as I doggedly chased trough loops and returns with my toilet-paper-roll shuttle, winding and cursing. He chuckled and went back to tooting and I eventually got the mess sorted out, just in time for my mom to come home and look at me as if I had lost my mind.

At this point I had cast on and was off around the track of my double pointed needles, which, if you've never seen a knitter work with them, look kind of like you're wrestling a baby porcupine. She moved on and in a couple of minutes I had a nice respectable start to my cuff. By the time of this post I had worked out the trick of starting the heel flap and voila, the picture you see above. Maybe by the time I get home I'll have a pair of nice new pinky-purple socks on under my Danskos. There's someting to be said for 16 hour car trips, right?

Yeah, so my mom is driving in today and my house is still kind of a wreck. So what did I do all day today? Played around at Stitches East with Boo Berry and the crew. Oh, the credit card trauma. Rock, rock.

Now I go forth to conquer stinky refrigerators and shower scum. See y'all later.

Most of you who know me outside of this blog, and some of you who don't, either know or suspect that I suffer from depression. For a while now I've been struggling with a way to talk about it here, and Meg's Knit and Fight the Black Dog series over at Pierre the Yarn Snob has given me a perfect opening. She has been waging a war of awareness against mental illness, specifically depression, for a while now, and her courage and frankness about her battles really are a touchstone for those of us out there who are fighting the same battles. One of the worst parts of dealing with this disease is how it perpetuates the need to keep it secret, keep it personal, and put on a game face. I'm very good at all of the above, but I think it's high time I shared some of this struggle with you. In the spirit of her series, I have something to say myself.

Hi. My name is Sassy, and I am a Sad Friend.

I am at war with myself. It is and has been a long, pitched and bloody conflict. I use those particular metaphors because that is how it feels from the inside to be a person who deals with heavy duty clinical depression. I say this because it's a totally different perspective than what "normal" people think it would be at first glance. What other people think of as having a bad day, or a sad day, or a "down period" really doesn't cover it.

For some people, the Black Dog jumps them in the heat of the moment out of nowhere, but for me it crept up when I wasn't looking and slowly insinuated its way into my everyday life until I didn't know any different. In point of fact, I never have been able to put a finger on when it started for me. I can remember a shadow over me as far back as middle school, which is about as far back as I can clearly remember, and it's been my constant companion ever since. There are times when it hides in the corner, curled and sleeping with only a cracked watchful eye on the proceedings, and there are times, such as lately, when it stands growling over me with paws on my chest, threatening to squeeze the life out of me. It's always been there. It's just a question of to what degree.

For the past couple of months I've felt it looming over me, getting closer and closer and more and more present. (It's not the first time it's pressed on me like this, and I'll work through it like I always do, maybe with some pharmaceutical help.) It's like standing under a blimp. You know the sun's up there. You can see it shining on everyone else, but you can't seem to see it and even though you run over to where you should be able to find it's warmth, you're never quite fast enough to outrun the shadow. Things become foggy under there. Hazy. The anxiety and sadness turn into a nearly palpable mist that shrouds you thoughts, your will to action, your attitudes and interactions. For me it's like being in a car stuck in neutral in the middle of a fog bank. You can't seem to get moving in any direction except where gravitational forces take you and even if you could move, it's impossible to plot your course. At this point small steps are about all I can manage, and steps which have no deadlines, consequences, and accountability are usually the best course.

This is were the knitting comes in: I don't know how many times I've just pulled out my Sock Ziploc (or whatever project I'm toting around) and simply disappeared into my bedroom of my comfy chair or my hammock to just knit and escape. Escape from people, from deadlines, from whatever is preying on my mind and shutting down my functioning brain. After a while, my mind becomes a little more grounded and less noisy and the path becomes evident once again through the fog.

I've gotten past my shame at being depressed. I'm beyond the idea that being sad is something I should feel guilty about. However, this doesn't necessarily mean I'll be peppy company, which makes me even sadder. I love my friends and I don't want to always be the Strong Sad in the room. But right now I just can't seem to manage anything else.

Why am I telling you all this? Because I want you all to know what's really going on behind the smile on my Sad Friend face. If you're at a loss for what to do, read Jenn's post for some really good advice. For those of you too concerned (or whatever else) to read Jenn's admonishments, let me just say this: this is not a passing cloud that will go away next Tuesday, but neither is this a suicidal rant. I don;t need to be "cheered up." I don't need to "get out more." I just simply need time and quiet and quiet strong friendship to restore my soul's balance. The kind that will sit with you in sorrow without judgment, lend its presence quietly so you know you're not alone. (I have good friends who know how this works, and I'm more thankful than I can say for you Heidelah, Muse, and Sister Sassy.) I have more to say, but I'll save it for another time. Thanks for listening.

Oh, ho, hum. Or rather, Hi ho, hi ho. Exactly two weeks from today, the bus takes off yet again for another orchestra tour. This time, it's the dog tour, the Christmas show, and people, there will be knitting.

At this very moment, in my living room in the Knitting Trunk, sit fourteen neatly packed Ziploc project bags, complete with their required materials and instructions as well as my new needle set and knit-knacks bag, packed for travel. I don't think I've ever been so happy about socks and scarves and hats and sweaters in the making. (All of these projects and the unfinished ones I'm already working on have been duly cataloged over at Ravelry, for you knitters in the know and having invites-- I swear to God Ravelry may be the new YouTube for me.)

See, for those of you who don't see me on a daily basis, knitting kind of translates for me into what other women think of a spa days or weekend vacations.That being said, I can only do it when my to-do list is carefully balanced or I have no other choice. In this case it's a little of both: when my to-do list is too long, I get anxious and fret away my precious free time trying to whittle away at it. When it gets short I get restless and start to make work for myself to compensate. When I have no choice, such as on bus travel performance tours, it's a perfect medium: I'm simply forced to accept what I can't change and happily churn away at the project in my lap, like a child in time-out.

These tours are like vacations for me in some ways-- I'm not really responsible for where I sleep, where and when I eat, what my schedule is, or anything else but getting on the bus on time and playing my clarinet. It can be really freeing once you get past the crazy people that inevitably make up a percentage of your traveling companions, and a good set of headphones make the world an infinitely brighter place, as does a place in the stage manager's van from time to time to escape the voices of braying assholes who complain too much. Pop in the iPod phones and soon all you have to worry about is where you should turn the heels of a sock and what on Earth the hero or heroine of your audiobook will do to get out of that mess.

There are socks of every description begging to come to life, beautiful scarves and hats, and even a gorgeous sweater in the queue. I wonder how many of my colleagues will want to learn this time? Last time we had sixteen out of forty clickety-clicking away, so anything's possible. I'll try to get photos up of the progress, but don't expect a lot of disclosure-- there are Christmas gifts in line, so there will be gaps until after the holidays.

moar funny pictures

Once again, ICanHasCheezburger provides the perfect commentary. I promise I'll get back to posting interesting things, and in fact have about fifteen posts waiting in the pipeline, but right now I don't know whether to sneeze or scratch my ass, so bear with me.

One of the reasons I love buying things from Etsy is that I've met so many incredible creative people, most of whom are just good folks to boot.

A week or so ago I ordered some sock yarn from White Oak Studio, their TVYarn in her Buffy The Vampire Slayer colorway. When a little package showed up on my doorstep yesterday, I was super excited, because I thought I'd have to wait to see it until I got back from the tour in a month. When I tore open the envelope, I mentally added this little gem to my stash, to be knitted into a pair of socks for my mother-in-law (who's a die-hard Buffy fan), and lamented that there wouldn't be enough to make me a pair too. Well, I needn't have worried-- when I opened the bag, there were two sets of yarn instead of only the one I ordered, and a sweet note from Jana in happy handwriting saying she'd decided to send me two.

I sat and giggled to myself like a little girl. In today's day and age, it's so rare to find a person who gives so easily, much less a seller. I almost literally skipped into the office to show D, who laughed and smiled in turn at my smile. It's the small things that make the world such a happy place, I guess.

One of the good things I've been able to do this past month is knit until I pass out. Honestly, I must have completely lost my mind, because I have become even more knitting-obsessive than I've ever been before.

Having a bad day? Work on a sock. Hate the people you're playing a show with? Don't talk, make a few rows of that scarf happen. Antsy? Intarsia.

The upshot of this is that those benighted bedamned socks? Finished. Finally. I swear to GOD I thought I was going to lose my mind.

You have to admit, they are fabulous, no? (Ignore my enormously fat ankles.) The moss stitch looks great even though it was a pain in the ass. And OH. MY. LORD. I love the way they feel. Soft and fluffy and happy and guaranteed to make you forget you still have three hours of lessons to teach before you can go drink something.

And just to prove that I have indeed lost my mind, my celebration solution was to start an intarsia scarf. I know. I'm crazy. But this is why you love me.

So here's the thing:

I've missed you guys.

I've had some pretty heavy things going on in my life this year, things which basically have changed the face of my entire existence in one way or another. And I haven't really felt comfortable talking about that here, in public, for anyone and everyone to read. More importantly, there are very good reasons why I can't and shouldn't.

And frankly, it's killing me.

Because if you're still reading this, then I've probably known you, or had you as a reader, for long enough that you're probably wondering what the hell happened to me.

Because if you're still reading this, you're probably one of the people whose opinions and love I value enough that I'm going to need your help in the next year.

Because frankly, I need an outlet more in-depth than Twitter and less personal than Facebook.

So here's the other thing:

On March 1st, this blog is getting a makeover. I'll be moving it to a new server, shaking up the layout a little, and converting it to a new CMS, though the site address won't change. The ranting and raving and silliness will stay the same, only there will be some things that I don't want to share with everybody, some things that I may need to share and say, but only within certain circles. I'm tired of keeping it all pent up and I've done that for long enough.

If you're still reading this blog, and you're been a loyal reader or friend or even a long-time lurker, email me at (sassy{at}sassyblonde{dot}net) with the title of this post in the subject line or comment on this post and request an access key. I'd love to have you in the circle.

Til then, I'll be cleaning house and doing some renovation, and I'll see you on March 1st.

UPDATE: So, snow and circumstances being what they've been around here, I'm going to have to ask you guys to wait around a little longer, which actually ends up being appropriate for a lot of reasons. I've gotten all your emails and comments, and if you can hang tight for a few more weeks, I'll have the next phase ready on April 1st.