I had a really nice morning this morning.
I’d been drying up, writer-wise. When that happens, a change of scene is often a good idea for me, so I took my netbook (have I mentioned I love it?) to the coffee shop, got a big ole plain cup of coffee and wrote for several hours on Screw Skinny, Get Fit. God, that felt good.
I notice I get a lot more writing done when there’s no wireless (the place is a t-mobile hotspot but I didn’t want to pay for that). I may disable wireless during writing hours and draw more serious boundaries between research time and writing time.
I also did some necessary shopping before I came home and found a cheap winter coat, which I desperately needed.
Shopping was a funny experience today because I wore a sweater I’d made a couple of years ago for the first time this year. It’s a gray sweater with dark purple ljus (those dots you see on Nordic sweaters), and a modified We Call Them Pirates pattern around the yoke. It’s one of those subtle things where you don’t realize the pattern is skulls and crossbones at first. It has become a fairly popular design among the hip knitter set. (Usually the only thing hip about me is the ampleness of my slacks…)
Why would this sweater make shopping a funny experience? Well, the internet-connected knitters come out of the woodwork to comment on it. First in the coffee shop, I was asked if I made the sweater, as the pattern looked familiar. I said that yes, I’d shamelessly stolen the chart from Hello Yarn. Then, when I went into a department store next to the coffee shop, two twenty-something sales people and three older ladies all commented on the sweater, the pattern and asked if I’d used Elizabeth Zimmerman’s Seamless Yoke Sweater as the template for the actual sweater design (I had). One of the older ladies expressed delight that “youngsters had taken up knitting” (at 40, I’m not sure I count as a youngster, but anyway…) and that she liked seeing people knit unique creations.