This week has had its good points and its bad points. The bad is, naturally, the most spectacular. Seattle got a lot of rain this week, and its impact on the drainage system was compounded by the fact that the rain knocked the last leaves off the trees and into the sewers and blocking them. There was a lot of flooding of roads, including Aurora, which is one of Seattle’s few north-south thoroughfares and coincidentally the one traveled by the bus I take downtown on my morning commute to work. A couple of idiots plunged into a nice big puddle, got water in their engine air intakes, and stalled or even broke their engines. The upshot of all this is that this bus ride, which normally takes me 15-20 minutes, lasted more than two hours on Tuesday morning and made my commute 3.5 hours long. I was not a happy camper.
On the other hand, I got to whine about it a lot, even in class on Wednesday when we had a group whining session, and no one could top it. (Nicolette wasn’t there, or I’m sure she could have topped it; she comes from Tacoma every day.) Another nice thing happened in class on Wednesday. My friend Alita, who is knitting a baby blanket on circular needles, asked me to help her pick up a dropped stitch. The ironic thing is that she’s been knitting for a couple of years and I only a couple of months, but I happen to have picked up enough dropped stitches that I felt confident in helping her. It turned out that she hadn’t dropped a stitch at all; instead, she had gotten her work turned around and knitted back the other way, so that she had two extra rows on one side. I got to show off a technique which I had read and used for the first time just the day before: picking up stitches before unraveling, so that you don’t have to worry about unraveling too much. It’s brilliant! I enjoyed looking like a pro, even though it’s only because I’ve made enough mistakes already to know how to fix them.
Oh, and the only mitigating aspect of The Bus Ride From Hell was that I knitted most of the foot of my second sock, and I finished it that evening. It’s a perfectly matched pair, not bad for my first two socks.
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