christmas gifts in the car

It's Knitting Day.

As noted previously, I finished The Sock - sock one of two for a friend for Christmas. I'm going to rip out the toe and reshape it because it's really pointy. I must say that I don't fully agree with the Knitty sock primer's opinion of toe shaping.

After the sock I joined a new ball of yarn and knit some more of the poncho. But on Thanksgiving, after casting on and knitting up a bit of a mini-sweater ornament (which is a WAY fun and quick project!!), my wrists hurt so bad that I told my family not to allow me to knit for 24 hours so that I wouldn't injure myself beyond repair. Thus, I didn't pick up any knitting again until Saturday.

Saturday in the late afternoon I got some more of the mini-sweater finished as I sat in the car in the middle of a snow-covered field that USED to be a parking lot. Last I knew, it WAS a parking lot. Obviously I was wrong, because after I had driven halfway across it, I got stuck in the extremely thick mud that was under the snow. I know this sounds completely dumb - couldn't I tell that I was in a field and not a parking lot? The answer is NO. There was absolutely no indication that the pavement-covered-with-snow turned into grass-covered-with-snow. I went with what this landscape had been for the twenty years I had known it...and was mournfully incorrect in my assumption.

Thus, as I waited for a tow truck to arrive to winch me out of the mud, I knit.

Of course, based on my car luck in the past week, I'm sure you guessed that the removal of my car from the mud was not quite as simple as it should have been. You see, tow trucks only have cable that goes out to 50, maybe 75 feet. My car was about 50 feet shy when you completely extended the 75 foot cable. Even when the tower added all the chains he could find in the shop, it wouldn't reach since I had somehow managed to get so far across the mushy field, upon which none of the tow trucks could drive without also getting stuck in the mud. Finally the tower ended up bringing over his own 4-wheel-drive huge pickup truck and pulled me out. However, as I found out yesterday when inquiring from his boss, he wasn't supposed to use his own vehicle, so it is highly likely that the destroyed back bumper that was left due to the ripping of the tow-chain across it will not be covered by the towing company's insurance, as I had been assured on Saturday night. Splendid. I also managed to majorly screw up my alignment while attempting to back out of the mud. The steering wheel now shakes so much that it'll make your arms go numb if you're not careful.

The lessons from all of this, I suppose, are a) Don't assume anything is how it used to be b) Don't take a person's word for anything - ALWAYS read all legal material, and ALWAYS inspect every document that you agree to sign for any sort of liability clause - even on the back of the document even if you didn't know there was a back of the document AND... c) Always carry knitting wherever you go - you never know when you'll need it to kill time or calm your nerves.