Dish Rag Tag!

Here’s yesterday:

11:30 am — call home from work to make sure the Dish Rag Tag box has not yet arrived, even though the mail usually comes around 3 – 4 pm. Leave instructions to call me at work if it does.

1 pm: Arrive home from work

1 pm – 5:30 pm: Check the mail every 10-15 minutes. It’s raining. Prepare all the box contents and knitting needs for immediate use as soon as the box arrives.

5:40 — Two boxes on my wet front porch! It is a measure of the love and commitment I have for you, my fellow Cotton Commandoes, that I did not immediately rip open the OTHER box, which was my Yarn Pirate Booty box for August!

5:55 — After opening the box, reading the instructions and revelling in the lovely dishrag and goodies from Dj,

go to computer and log into “Dishrag Tag”. Click, “I have the box!” Cast on for dishrag.

6:10 — Frog dishrag after realizing it will be too small. Find another set of needles in a larger size.

6:15 — Cast on again. Make a couple changes to the pattern, which is a new one to me (yes, yes, I should probably have test knit it first; but Dj’s dishrag was so lovely that I wanted to keep the specialness going, so I changed my mind about my pattern at the last minute!).

6:30 — Decide one of my pattern changes is not going to work and frog again. Size is better, though. Husband is calling me for dinner. Tell him I’ll be there shortly and cast on again.

6:35 — Under duress, eat dinner. Prepare to go to a movie, “Hairspray”; plans made before the mail was so late. Pattern slightly too complicated to knit in the dark, so will have to finish after the movie.

7:00 — arrive at the movie theater. “Hairspray” is sold out. No consensus on the other movies. Decide to rent a movie instead and go back out in the rain. Hooray, I can knit during the movie at home!

7:15 — complicated rental movie selection process follows. No consensus here either.

7:35 — each of four family members picks out a movie and we’ll duke it out when we get home.

7:50 — pick up and start to knit cast-on dishrag at home. It’s starting to rain really hard, and there’s lightning.

8 — “Happy Feet” is put in the DVD player. The computer is turned off as the lightning is striking almost continuously.

9, 9:10, 9:30 — lightning/thunder cracks VERY close and the power flickers. Every time this happens, the TV turns off. Someone doesn’t want us to watch TV, I guess.

9:45 — The Preteen gets a phone call from a friend who is stranded at the roller skating rink due to flash flooding in the streets. The friend just wants to tell her all about it and gab, because what else can the friend do while waiting for conditions to improve? The Preteen is not allowed to talk on the phone after 9 pm. The Preteen gets off the phone after several increasingly pointed reminders of this fact. The Preteen sulks for the rest of the movie.

10:05 — movie ends. Only a few rows left of the dishrag. Take dishrag upstairs as my husband is now cruising all the TV channels.

10:20 — finish dishrag after experimenting with the last couple rows and frogging the last bit a couple times. Open Yarn Pirate Booty box and pet the yarn. Collapse in bed.

Today: get up at 7, pack and seal box, ‘tag’ the next team member — then read my email and realize she won’t be home when the box gets there, thanks to the vagaries of the USPS. And the post office lobby is closed today (I thought it was open shorter hours to use the Automated Postage Center, but not on Sundays). Sigh. Ah well, it will be what it will be!

Here’s the dishrag, shortly to be on its way!

I like how the variegated yarn worked with this pattern.

It’s still raining and chilly. [Edited to add: this was actually the weekend of our big flood in SW Wisconsin/SE Minnesota.  The post was written before I saw the news, and before I went outside and saw all the cars stalled on the boulevards and lawns where the water landed them, and all the trees down.  Thank goodness we didn’t go to the movie; the road that the theatre is on, was under two feet of water by bedtime.]

Here, for your cat/knitting viewing pleasure, is a shawl-lolcat from this morning: