Football Season Begins!

I am sorry to have abandoned you. I've been stitching. A great deal. And now I am getting ready for the Season of Stitch Ass. I wonder sometimes if I love football for the game itself or for the necessity of sitting down all weekend which means I'll pick up a needle.

At Friday stitching, my nemesis was there. She's always there, but we had a particularly humorous round this week. This woman is 70something, disabled, and has an opinion on everything. Not an opinion really, THE opinion. If I say something is black, she will, with great authority, declare it white. This week someone mentioned she had a couch she wanted to give away. Nemesis told them to put it on Freecycle. Having recently joined Freecycle, I thought Craig's List might offer her an easier way to go--no joining up, one and done sort of thing. She said, "No! Don't put it on Craig's List! They are under investigation right now." Of course that investigation doesn't have anything to do with giving stuff away for free, but that didn't matter a bit. She would have none of it, even though many of us have had plenty of positive transactions on Craig's List. Later, we were talking about M*A*S*H. I have this silly little story about Alan Alda. It's like a parody of name dropping. I was once a seat filler at a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie premier. At the post film reception, I was talking to some other seat fillers when Alan Alda, who was standing behind me, swung around with arms akimbo and elbowed me. He apologized to me, very nice guy. So I tell my Alan Alda story.

First she calls me a name dropper. Come on, does that story make me sound like I'm friends with Alan Alda? I was a seat-filler. I'm pretty sure I know my place in the hierarchy. Then she asks for the deets. When I say it was a Hallmark film, she says, "I won't have anything to do with Hallmark." Which is just awesome. Kind of like when my students were writing papers and using the phrase, "uncalled for behavior." The "uncalled for behaviors" students wrote about included homosexuality, the Tiananmen Square massacre, and Saddam's invasion of Kuwait. Both are such a bizarre application of phraseology. The kids clearly thought that their mother's or teacher's reprimand described The.Worst. And for some reason Hallmark deserves to be shunned. I'm not sure I understood her critique. But I do know that I was somehow tainted for attending a Hallmark Hall of Fame premier. I'm an agent of the devil.

I do try to keep a sense of humor about it. After all, I get out a lot more than she does, and my life, from what I have been able to gather, is a lot easier. But it can be a little frustrating to have her hijack every conversation, hold forth loudly on every issue, tell experienced knitters how to best to achieve their knitting goals. I'm jealous of the people who can turn off their hearing aids.

Above, Scared Silly BOAF called for fabric and threads. Don't you love how the yellow looks like it's going to stand out and scream for notice, and the orange sort of absorbs it and instead the yellow is just a harmonizing note? On the Tree of Life Window, I'm trying to put in a length of floss every day so that I can get through all that backstitching.