The Blogging Begins ...

Well folks, it looks like I have a new obsession ... thanks to Ravelry, I've now intensified the knitting obsession. Seriously, I'm sitting in lab right now, with a w.i.p. pair of mittens in my bag, waiting for a break in the research to knit.

Of course, Ravelry isn't entirely to blame for this knitting obsession. If I could pick one person to blame for ~90% of this endeavor, it would be the one, the only, the other heinous bitch Kristin Briney (Schmitt?).

I met Kristin as a freshman at DePauw University. After a somewhat disastrous first impression (on my part), she put up with me long enough to become one of my best friends ever. We left home for Christmas break with a goal - she would learn to knit, I would learn to crochet, and we'd do a skill swap during Winter Quarter. True to our word, each of us studied up on a yarn skill, and we imparted the other with our newfound knowledge. Knitting stuck, crochet didn't.

During my sophomore year at DePauw, I took a month-long course in knitting. It was fabulous, really. The entire month of January 2003 was devoted to knitting - we'd knit in class during the day, and then have swatches to knit as homework. We went around to yarn shops in rural Indiana to pick from the loveliest of yarns. It was fabulous.

Now, since I had knitting homework as well, I often had to travel with my knitting, leading to an infamous incident that almost defines who I am to a number of my friends. One blustery winter night, the DUCKS Quiz Bowl team was heading back from a tournament in Michigan down I-69. As we headed over a bridge, a gust of wind hit the side of the monstrous 15-passenger van, causing us to hit a patch of black ice, and slam into the median of the bridge. I went face first into the passenger's side airbag. Now, we didn't know this at the time, but when airbags deploy, they often leave a haze in the car that kind of looks like smoke. It looks so much like smoke that someone actually screamed that the car was on fire. In a panic, we all jumped out of the car and started running to the side of the highway, off of the bridge. Halfway through my run, I started thinking ... "Hmm ... we might be stuck up here tonight, and we might need to pay for a hotel room. And my wallet is in the car ..." So I ran back, grabbed my backpack and started booking it across the highway. Apparently, a ball of yarn dropped out of my backpack and into the car, but was stuck to my backpack, leaving a yarn trail flopping in the wind while I ran across the highway. My heart pounded as I ran across the highway. While trying not to fall in the middle of I-69, I reached behind me, grabbed the trail of yarn, and ripped it with my teeth, thus freeing me from my wool tether to the 'burning inferno' of the van. The story is much longer than this, and includes another almost accident in the back of a pick-up truck, a broken sink, a van full of a church youth group, and some ghetto-ho Livi dress up time, but I'll save that for later.

After surviving that harrowing near death experience, I decided to dedicate my life to my true love - research. Yeah, right. No, I pretty much ended up in grad school because the job market sucked. And I did want to teach undergrads, which pretty much requires one to have a PhD. So now, I find myself toiling along during the day, doing research (which I hate, at least 90% of the time), and waiting until I can come home, curl up on my couch, and knit late into the night (3 am last night, for example). Then, it's off to bed and the cycle repeats.

I'm not an expert knitter by any means, but I have gained an intuition about knitting over the years. I'm a big fan of modifying patterns, or melding two patterns together. And that's what I'm up to now - melding the Easy Mittens pattern from One Skein Wonders with the Nakiska pattern from Knitty, to make some fabulous mittens for my friend Alissa's 25th birthday.

Now that I think about it, I probably shouldn't have brought my knitting with me to work ... vive le distraction!