Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Send in Wesley Crusher

One of my all-time favourite episodes of Star Trek: TNG is on right now. (The Naked Now, a.k.a. the episode where Tasha Yar and Data do it.) I should be writing the conclusion to my conference paper, but am not. I think that I may actually take the writing offline, as I suspect this might be one of those instances in which I might get more done if I write by hand.

[Four Hours Later] I have written approximately four sentences. Only one of them might be any good.

A few months ago, we held a wake for bad yarn at our knitting guild meeting. I brought a ball of yarn with me that had such bad energy attached to it that I couldn't knit anything with it. It's a long story: the yarn was part of a sock kit that I purchased because half the money was going to a breast cancer charity in the States. The kit did not arrive when the dyer promised it would; she apparently underestimated how much time and how much dye was involved in dyeing the 100 skeins she'd taken pre-orders for, so much so that it took nearly ten weeks past the date she said she'd ship my kit for it to arrive. Needless to say, I was prejudiced against the yarn before it even got there (I moved from my apartment into my house during these ten weeks, so there was some concern that I wouldn't even get the yarn). Once it did get there, though, I found three knots in the skein, and numerous errors in the pattern. All in all, it was a pretty awful knitting experience (made even worse by the fact that it was something I was trying to make for my mom). So I packed the yarn up, brought it to the wake, and sent it off to whoever wanted it.

This month, the lady who snagged my yarn brought it back in the form of a beautiful Cookie A sock. It was good to see that it had gone on to a better home, where it could actually be something other than a ball of yarn that made me clench my teeth every time I thought about it.

Time to get back to work on the paper, though.

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