Hello friends. I am posting to you from the relative comfort of my new digs. You like?

Ok, so maybe it’s still just a pile of boxes, but at least I don’t have to deal with roaches! Well, as long as you don’t count the one I had to send to roach heaven a handful of minutes after all my stuff was moved in. City Life Given #1: Everything is peachy keen until one of those gross greasy things crawls out from under the stove, rendering me into a screaming panicky girl. It was, shall we say, not my finest moment?

Though parting ways with a thoroughly-loved and memory-filled abode is always a bittersweet moment, moving itself seems to have gotten easier and easier over the years. City Life Given #2: Expect to move. A lot. I have no recollection of how I moved myself into and out of my first apartment (repressed memories). But the apartment after that, the transition was so smooth in spite of the fact that I still worried for weeks about it. And this third time, I barely had a chance to hyperventilate before all the things at Point A magically turned up at Point B and I got busy in my new role as The Roach Slayer. (Note: Being The Roach Slayer is not the same as being The Roach Guts Cleaner Upper. That is a job reserved for the truly strong of heart.)

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some important organizing to do, aka figuring out where to store my shoes. (No, I don’t think I have a problem. Shut up.)

Late last year, I picked up a new knitting project. I told myself it was something to keep me from despairing about the cold winter months ahead. In part it was, though in hindsight perhaps the despair wasn’t really about the cold months outside so much as it was about being afraid that I was already smack in the middle of the coldest winter of my mind. So I purled three together, yarned over, slipped stitches, repeated, and somewhere between the first row and wherever I left off, I found some happy calm place in my head to settle into.

I can’t remember when I stopped knitting and moved on to doing other things, but I came across this unfinished project as I was cleaning out my closet today. Let me preface what I’m about to say next by saying that I can’t stand to frog any knitting project. Taking those precious stitches apart and thinking about all the time and inflamed joints invested in constructing them is enough to keep me from undoing my knitting projects, no matter how hideous, useless, or not-up-to-snuff it turned out to be. But this project, it actually felt good taking it apart, watching it unravel, noticing that the most recent stitches were the loosest and noticing that the yarn was heavily kinked in the places I knit too tightly at the beginning. I knit my feelings into that yarn, this much is clear to me now. But after all is said and done, seeing the newly-wound ball of yarn that I now had again, I turn to starting anew and turning that yarn into something much more useful and beautiful than whatever it was destined to be in its previous life.

I’ll never tire of this. The WSH has been like a best friend. I have experienced every emotion from pure joy to heartstabbing sadness to complete awe here, and each lap I make is a journey down memory lane.

So I missed last week’s WIR. Guess that means I have to make it up in this week’s…?

Truth be told I’m just not in much of a blogging update mood lately. And while I’m usually one to believe that astrology is a bunch of bunk, I do follow horoscope for fun on occasion. Today’s hit the nail on the head:

“If you feel that your needs are going unmet today, it’s probably because your moods are shifting very quickly while the Moon is in your fickle sign. You may get exactly what you want, but your desires continue to morph from one thing into another. Fortunately, your friends and associates are pretty easygoing about your current restlessness now, so it’s unnecessary to hide your feelings. Keeping others informed about your process can help to build better friendships.”

An astrology-minded friend once noted that I was a true Gemini, my moods visibly shifting with Mercury’s position. On days like this, I’m almost ready to believe this is true.

But I know better and I’m not going to concede that it is what it is solely because of the way certain celestial bodies are aligned. Trouble areas and triggers have been identified, and the hope is that next week, or sometime soon, I’ll be back in posting shape again.

“I do believe in an everyday sort of magic — the inexplicable connectedness we sometimes experience with places, people, works of art and the like; the eerie appropriateness of moments of syncronicity; the whispered voice, the hidden presence, when we think we’re alone.”
– Charles de Lint