The Return of the Ding

Odd summer. I don’t know where to start, so maybe I just won’t pick a starting point. We’ll jump in right here, right now, and we’ll catch up as we go along.

First things first, I won another contest! This lovely yarn, being modeled appropriately enough by our new friend Stone Turtle, came from Turtlegirl76. I was one of the many winners in her Heart Walk Donors’ Drawing. She did all of the hard work, and I got this gorgeous yarn. Not a bad trade-off. I think it’s going to become the center panel of Tenney Park.


“Wait, what? You mean you still knit? It’s not just a yarn collection out in the garage?”

Yes, as it usually does, knitting production slowed over the summer this year. It wasn’t for lack of trying; I did knit. I worked on Papeline for several weeks, stretching into months. When I finally got the body seamed together and worked the neckline, it was too small. This might have been casually related to me being too big. The jury’s still out on that one. Not debatable, the neckline was much too dinky. I think this was due to my gauge changing drastically between flat and circular knitting. I need to yank out that section and do something else, but I haven’t decided on the course of action yet. Finally, the arms are tight, really tight, because I have muscular arms for my size and…look, maybe it’s time to concede that I knit the wrong size, but I’m not ready to give up on it entirely just yet.


Thinking that knitting a great big tube sounded pretty good after the Papeline disappointment, I cast on for the Summertime Tunic. Back in July. Yeah, this is how far I’ve made it. It turns out that silk sort of tightens around Addi needles and cables in a particularly stubborn way, so it’s not easy to get into a grove and knit round after round. There’s a lot of shoving of stitches. I refuse, however, to stop knitting it, because I’m afraid that my gauge will change if I put it aside until next spring. I’m also a tad worried that I’ve knit the wrong size again, but I’m telling myself that this is not important right now.


Doc and I talked about “need-to” knitting versus “love-to” knitting a couple of weeks ago, as we both have a collection of each type, and the obvious point hit me like a screwdriver to the face. (That story’s coming soon.) I’m only going to get slower on the “need-to” projects, because my “love-to” itch isn’t being scratched. I have to have both, even if it seems like the “love-to” project is going to take time away from the “need-to” project.

Feeling good about this new direction, I went out to the garage and stuck my hand in a basket, drawing out a ball of this camel-blend yarn that I impulse-grabbed at Tuesday Morning last year. I saw a scarf at Forever 21 last weekend that looked lovely, cost about ten bucks. “I could make that scarf, and it’d be even better. Sure, it’ll cost more than ten bucks, and it’ll take me more than an hour to make it, but it’ll be camel instead of acrylic. Plus, it’s guaranteed to not be too small, because it’s a goddamn scarf. Confidence booster. I can’t lose, Doc.” We studied the stitches, which turned out to be simple K3,P1 across on all rows. I don’t know what it’s called, but it makes a neat rib. I’m now alternating between this and the Summertime Tunic, with no guesses about which I’m going to finish first. Probably this one. It feels good, and I’m having a good time knitting it. I sometimes forget that those are two important things.

The Morning News

"Hey, Winston! HEY WINSTON! Are you awake?"

"Not really, no..."

"Wanna hear a SECRET? A super-SPECIAL SECRET?"

"I'm kinda, you know, sleeping right now, and there's only a few minutes where we get to be on the bed before Suzanne and Accountant Boy go to work, so..."

"But it's the BEST secret EVER! Pleeeeaase? Please ask me what the secret is! C'mon!"

"O.K., but then can I go back to sleep?'Cause sometimes a guy likes to nap in the morning, and you're kind of loud, and..."


"I am NOT loud! I'm joyful! Everyone loves my exuberance. So can I tell you the greatest secret EVER?!?"

"Uh, sure?"

"...you're my best friend..."

The Joy of Making Doc Laugh

I don't know what they were talking about, because I was at the other end of the garage talking to my neighbors. Half of me wishes I were there, but the other half enjoys wondering. Sometimes the mystery is as good as the reveal.

Where Do I Put This Jacket?!

From: SuzannaBanana
Sent: Wednesday, July 06, 2011 11:06 AM
To: Doc
Subject: Reverie del Taco

I had a dream last night, a dream too involved for me to thumb-type it out. It’s already fading from memory, but here’s what’s left.

I’m backstage at some event, a dance or club, or maybe the EE Ball 1997. That seems about right, since it was at The Gift Center and this looks like an antechamber I passed on the way to the ladies’ room. The room is small, with primed but unpainted sheetrock and beige office carpet. There are clothes racks, a box that used to hold t-shirts, and a couple of chairs. People are queued up, presumably to drop off their smoky garments to be dry cleaned while they go back out to the darkened, noisy club. There are two girls working at this makeshift dry cleaner, and they are dressed like extras from an episode of Law and Order, any episode of Law and Order where Brisco and Curtis have to go to what Dick Wolf imagines a rave would look like. Plastic skirts, four or five asymmetrical pony tails each, purple lip gloss. The line isn’t moving, because everyone in the line is too intoxicated to figure out how to move.

I am holding the jacket from Accountant Boy's favorite suit, the silvery olive one that he wears to summer weddings. I walk up to one of the girls and ask, “Where do I put this jacket?” She stares at me stupidly. I look down at the white folding chair in front of us, which has another sport coat draped across the padded seat. “Look, I see other jackets, and I’ll put this one with them, but I need to know that this is where they go. Is this where we are supposed to put the jackets?” She blinks at me, then starts talking to her friend. I ask everyone else in the room, but it is as if they are unable to process the words I’m saying. It’s not that they’re ignoring me. It’s that they cannot comprehend what I’m asking, as though they don’t speak my language, so they stare at me after I say something, then just turn in another direction. I am so frustrated that I begin to cry.

The scene shifts subtly, and now you and I are the ones working. I get the impression that you’re wearing some type of Be-Dazzled™ bra top. It’s got dark sapphire “gems” all over it. It looks lovely against your skin and with your hair. I am wearing something similar, but I can’t remember what it looked like, other than that we look a bit like cocktail waitresses at the Stardust.

I am still holding the jacket, and I ask you where it’s supposed to go. You keep responding in a way that isn’t a completely relevant answer. “Where does this jacket go? THIS one? The one I’M HOLDING?”

“We take in jackets. That is a jacket.”

“WHERE DO I PUT IT?! Am I not asking the question correctly? O.K., Suzanne, be clear and concise.” I stop and take a deep breath. You look at me intently, ready to try to listen and understand. I say, in as slow and measured a voice as I can muster, “I am holding a jacket. I would like to put the jacket down. Where do I put the jacket?”

“We clean jackets.”

“DOES IT GO ON THIS CHAIR?”

“There is a jacket on the chair.”

“But do I put THIS one there, too???”

“You are holding a jacket.”

This scene is interrupted, thank God. Two guys come in and drop a very large suitcase on the floor in front of us, the kind that zips open from the side, like a trunk. There is a pile of cloth tied into a long, crooked roll in the middle of the case. Something wriggles under the thin canvas, and at first we think that it is a person. We look up at the men as they walk away. “Hey, you can’t leave that here!” They keep walking. When we look back down at the suitcase, the canvas has changed into long bolts of silk in tropical colors, saffron, lime and blood orange. The wriggling continues, then a tiny, tawny dog pokes its head out from under the fabric.

“Chihuahuas! Look at that one! He’s a little badass!” The little badass Chihuahua steps out a bit further from under the silk and looks up at us. He has big ears, big head for his body, and enormous eyes, but he doesn’t look weird for it, not alien. He’s clearly a puppy, but he’s already got some pretty good muscles on him. He stares up at us with cheerful defiance and wags his tiny tail at us. We laugh, delighted at his bravado.

And then I woke up.

The Plan

Twelve days...twelve days...twelve days...

The 100th running of the Bay to Breakers is happening on May 15th. I've been training for it for weeks, with a little more than one more week to go before I have to rest in preparation for race day. I'm worried, readers. Excited, but worried.

Bay to Breakers and I have a stormy past. The first year we entered, AB and I finished in just over two hours. That's an average of about 3.8 miles an hour, even with the slog of the 11.5% grade of the Hayes Hill and a "mandatory" stop at the bison paddock so that I could take pictures of them. Even at that pace, I bruised my toenails so badly that two of them fell off. We had not prepared at all for the event. My running shoes were too short, and neither AB nor I had run more than a mile or two at one time. We hadn't done any training on pavement. He could have finished faster, but he slowed to keep pace with me, and I struggled to keep pace with him.

The second year, we trained a little harder. I did more cardio at the gym, and trained with weights twice a week. AB did at least a couple of full miles on the treadmill. We still raced together for the first few miles, but I encouraged him to run ahead at mile 6, and he gratefully sprinted away from me. He finished at 1:32, and I finished a few minutes later. We felt great.

And that's when things went horribly wrong. "Let's walk back along the race route and see all the floats." I knew what AB really meant was "let's walk back along the route because I want to see the party that's going on behind us." I often think that AB thinks he missed out on a whole lot of the college experience by meeting me when he was so young. We didn't go to keggers, and we never went to Cancun. We studied, and we had jobs. We were responsible adults, which feels like a synonym for "boring" in retrospect. I feel bad for him, bad that the opportunity to experience the Spring Break culture passed him by. So, when the opportunity to be among drunken revellers presents itself, I sometimes cave in to his wistful suggestions.

So we walked back a couple of miles, and then a couple more. We ended up all the way back at the panhandle, stepping around people passed out on the grass and urinating in the street. What we'd neglected to factor into the plan was that these people had been drinking for several hours by the time made our way back down the route. Some of them had been partying for the entire weekend. It wasn't as interesting as he'd hoped it would be. It was actually kind of gross. "You wanna walk back to the buses, or catch a cab? Remember, the bus line is back at the park, so we'd be walking in the wrong direction to wait in line for an overcrowded bus full of sweating drunks." When presented like that, the obvious choice is to get a cab, right? We thought we'd walk up a few blocks to the Haight and hail one. Easy. We felt smart.

Who would have thought that it would be impossible to get a cab on race day, with fifty-thousand people jammed into the park or passed out within a mile of it? People with forethought, that's who. The cabs stayed far away from that half of the city that day. Well, we didn't know. So we kept walking, thinking eventually we'd see one. We were not carrying phones for some reason, so we couldn't call a dispatcher. Walking, walking, walking, periodically pausing at bus stops in case we'd found a line that didn't go near the park and wouldn't be full. Dozens of packed buses lumbered past us. More walking. Eventually, we came down to Van Ness and started to see cabs and half-full buses. "Well, we're so close now that we might as well keep walking, right?" We agreed on this, not realizing that we were still two miles from our car. I don't know if it would have made a difference if we had known. We were marching for the pride of marching at that point. We laughed merrily at our own stupidity as we skipped across streets and past confused tourists. "I think we took a wrong turn somewhere! Do you know which way we go to get to the race?"

We got back to our car at the Metreon, turned the heated seats on and drove home. When we got out of the car, we realized how much damage we'd done. Everything stiffened on the drive home. AB's legs would not straighten out, and my foot felt like someone was hammering a railroad spike through the right edge of it. We hobbled into the house - him hunched over like he had a hernia, me hugging the wall and hobbling - and fell on the couches, unable to get back up for the rest of the day. I had to hop up the stairs on one leg, because I couldn't put weight on my foot. Later, sitting at my computer with my leg up on another chair, I used Google Maps to plot out the hike we'd done. The race is 7.5 miles. We'd covered more than seventeen miles on foot.

Still, that was my best run yet at 1:38. "Next year, we're going to CRUSH this thing!"

For one of us, this turned out to be true. AB finished the race in 2009 in under 1:30. I took considerably longer, in part because it was hot that day, but in larger part because I didn't have him to pace me. We'd decided to run the race separately right from the starting line. I was proud of him, but very disappointed in myself. Things went awry that summer, with Daisy moving, my job ending, and the house needing so much preparation before it could be rented again. I got out of the habit of working out, and eventually stopped going to the gym altogether.

Last year, we registered and paid to race, then slept in. Our excuse was that we'd just taken Molly in and didn't want to leave her at home, but the truth was that we'd done absolutely nothing to prepare for it. I hadn't made any effort to stay in shape in almost a year. I was in the worst shape of my 30s. It was depressing. "We'll decide tomorrow morning..." We stayed in bed with our eyes closed until 9:30 the next day, neither of us letting on to the other that we were awake. Once it was too late to make it to the race, we got up and went to Starbucks. "NEXT year, we're totally doing it."

And that's this year.

I've been running at least twice a week for a few weeks now. I bought a treadmill when my beloved chick gym abruptly closed, and The Amazon's been giving me running goals each week. AB has also been running, and doing the Insanity DVDs. I did my six miles last night and, while it wasn't as good as I wanted it to be, I'm not feeling at all bad today. I'm running on the road tonight, so that race day won't be the first time in two years that I've tried it. It'll be good, no matter how I finish. I keep telling myself that it's just one event, and that my REAL goal is to finish and not be crippled with sore muscles or plantar fasciitis for weeks afterward, and that's true.

But still. I want to crush this thing.