CrumpArt

Today I nearly lost my teacups. And my marbles. It was the last day of two weeks worth of stocktaking at work*. I had no energy left and missed several trams. I ended up getting to work 20 minutes late. During the day, I found out that one of my coworkers had to flee Bosnia when she was five, with her mother and two week old brother. Not many people I know can, or would want to, claim that their luckiest moment in life was when the sniper didn’t shoot them.

After work I had plans to go to a yarn night — meeting with Australian Country Spinners (Patons, Cleckheaton, etc.) advertising agency to clue them in on the whole knitting thing. I left work at 5. The information man at the tram stop stuffed me around and I ended up not getting off the tram where I was supposed to in order to catch a connecting tram. I wasted half an hour. Then when I finally did get to Carlisle St in St Kilda, I realised it was the wrong end and I’d have to walk for about a kilometre to get where I was going. I was half an hour late that time.

Then, I intended to head back into the city for a coworkers going away drinks. I got off the train at Flinders St Station, walked up the steps, and realised that I didn’t have one of my bags. I went back down to the train, jumped back on for a minute, realised the train was not taking passengers and couldn’t find my bag. And just as I went to get off, the doors shut. And wouldn’t open again. I was stuck, alone on a train that was retiring for the evening.

The train started to move. I hoped it would stop at Southern Cross Station, but it didn’t. I panicked. And realised my phone was in the missing bag. I panicked some more. I contemplated pulling the big red emergency door release button, but the thought of dying while trying to cross the surrounding train tracks was a little too terrifying, and around that point in time I realised there was an emergency intercom. It didn’t seem to work at first, but I finally got in contact with the driver and did a fairly convincing job at sounding calm. Thankfully he was going to the North Melbourne train depot, and not the one at Werribee… He helped me off the train when we pulled up, and let me search all the carriages for my bag. I found it on the last pass through. I thought it had only had my current knitting and my phone in it, but when I searched inside, I found the bag of knitted teacups that I’d taken along to the knitting night. I hadn’t realised quite how much they mean to me until that moment. I almost cried with relief… although the tears could have been for other reasons. Did I mention that I’d been busting to go to the toilet for about half an hour? The ten minute walk with the driver back to the train station platforms from the depot was tough.

I finally made it to the city. My friends had waited for me and I had a couple of beers while being reminded exactly how funny and awesome they really are. I cried laughing at one point.

I finally walked through my back door while listening to Lithuania by Dan Bern. I found a package on my chair.

My Pay It Forward gift** from Lesley at Bird Ahoy.

As I was taking the photos for this blog post, another song started. One I downloaded for my now extinct podcast way back when. Sunlight, from thesquarerootofeleven. “Somehow, somewhere, sometimes sunlight seems to come my way” seemed like the perfect title. I cried again.

All the shit that happened to me today? Not even worth worrying about. I’m loved. I have wonderful friends, a beautiful partner, a family who would do anything for me. I get incredible packages in the post from people I’ve never met. I’ve never had to flee from war. I’m not the junkie whose blood had dripped over the floor and sharps disposal in the odd public toilet I had to use on Collins St. I’m alive.

And I have my teacups.

*Although I now have to go in for a few hours tomorrow to finish up some stuff.

**The Pay it Forward thing works like this: I was one of the first three commenters on Lesley’s Pay it Forward blog post, so she sent me a handmade gift on the proviso that I would do the same thing with my blog. I’m not going to make it the first three commenters though — I’m gonna take advantage of this to do some comment fishing. The names of anybody who comments on this blog post until the 20th of February (Melbourne time) will be put into a hat, and I’ll draw out three names at random for my Pay it Forward gifts — remember that you’ll have to follow through on the paying forward too. So get commenting!

That’s a personal philosophy. One that I’m extremely good at following.

A couple of days ago I gave Vetti her birthday present.

And while it was her birthday a couple of days ago (happy birthday!), this was actually the present I intended to give her last year…

It’s an artist’s book made up from the proofs I made while creating my r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r etching in first year uni, based upon the poem by e.e.cummings.

This year’s present is not finished yet. I had some technical difficulties the other day. I promise it won’t take me a year to resolve them this time around…

In other, similar news, I think the philosophy of lateness is hereditary. My parents dropped by today with this (along with a bunch of stuff to help with the crappy cold I’m currently nursing). Our Christmas present from 2007 — a new DVD shelf hand made by my dad. I loves it.

(Please note: since the photographing, the DVDs [this is the shelf for TV shows] have been arranged in their correct order, and the empty shelves have been prettyified. An important step.)

…hey m1k3y, have you seen these? Quite fun.

I’d set aside this print a month or two back for someone who was interested in buying it, but they never followed through. That kind of thing is a bit frustrating, but it happens from time to time, and you’ve just gotta deal with it.

Now though, I’m glad for the situation, as it meant I was able to enter it into this art prize that I stumbled across on the internet the other day. I sent off my forms and digital images by express post yesterday, as the cutoff is today — I hope it arrives in time. I’ve also recently entered the Moran Contemporary Photographic Prize, and am entertaining ideas of whipping up a self-portrait for the Archibald Prize. I’m not one to shy away from aiming high.

I discovered a new podcast — GeeksOn — a couple of weeks ago when reading the Whedonesque blog. I’d only planned on listening to the Joss episode, but I thought it was so great that I immediately hit the back catalogue and started downloading all the other episodes that looked interesting. It was so awesome when I got to tell Mr Crumpet that I’d found a cool geek podcast before he had.

Now, I’ve always known that I lean to the geeky side of things, but because I’m not really a gamer or huge Star Trek fan or big-time coder and whatnot, I assumed I was fairly “normal”. And as is the case every time I start thinking I’m normal, something sucker-punches me and I realise that I’m really, really not. I’m obsessive in so many ways that it’s almost ridiculous. I’m a yarn geek. I’m an art geek. I buy science books for fun reading. I only ever use the camera in full manual mode. I know what frell and frak and dren mean. I use internet speak and phrases in real life and assume that people will know what the hell I’m talking about, instead of taking me literally when I say “I fell down in the comic book/yarn/art store.” My very favourite kitchen knife is named Vera. My Global vegetable knife is named Saffron. My Le Creuset dutch oven is named Zhaan, because it’s big and blue and beautiful and makes plant-based foods. My little Le Creuset multi-function pan is named Aeryn, because it’s strong and adaptable and gorgeous. I’ve named the big red electric litho press at uni Willow, because it’s powerful and awesome and makes magic. Along similar lines, my spinning wheel (which is a geeky enough thing in itself…) is named Fred, after Winifred Burkle. I make Firefly badges. And it doesn’t end there.

So me. Big, huge, massive, proud geek. Which is why I went squee! at this link the Mister sent me.

Geek factions unite!

I have one month of school holidays left. That means I’ve been on holidays for three whole months. I feel like I’ve barely had a break at all, and I have so many things left to finish before I go back…

I have made some headway though.

I finished these awesome, awesome, wonderfully comfortable pants for work the other night. We have to wear all black even behind the scenes now, and even though I’m from Melbourne, I have very little black in my wardrobe. Some simple fisherman style pants seemed the way to go. These are made from the Burda pattern 8315.

I love them very, very much and have plans to make several more pairs to wear to school.

For mindless knitting (my favourite kind — I use knitting as a way of zoning out) I’ve been working on Stefanie Japel’s Cozy V-Neck Sweater, re-mathematised to be made from stash DK weight instead of the chunkier weight the pattern calls for. One of the great things about top-down raglans knit in the round is that you can try them on for size during the knitting. I’ve started the ribbing for this now, and am about 5cm into it. I’ve put it aside for the minute because the yarn comes in massive 200 metre skeins, which I have to wind by hand into balls because I have no swift or ball winder (hint hint), and I didn’t have time the other day to prepare another skein before leaving the house. So I picked up this.

Free yarn.

20 balls of free yarn.

20 balls of the most beautiful, lovely, squishy, soft, green free yarn.

It was a thank you gift for attending an ideas/information night put on by Patons. I was going for the fun. I had no idea there would be free yarn. Score! It’s turning into Stefanie’s Puff-Sleeved Feminine Cardigan.

And finally, the birthday presents have already started rolling in! And this one is the best kind of present anyone can give me. A friend needed to buy a gift for someone else, so they specifically bought something from my Etsy store as a gift to me. Totally awesome and thoughtful and kind and lovely.

I sent this off to the unsuspecting recipient today.