I live in Fire Town

Thursday was a wild night. It was Heather’s birthday, which led to a lot of drinking with the work posse. I didn’t make it home before my radio show, which I did completely plastered. I pulled it off, but still, it’s a really bad idea, and against the rules besides.
At about 12:30, half an hour before my show was over, I got a call that the Cannery Cafe was on fire. I could see an immense conflagration from the windows of the station, a mile away maybe…
It hit me in my fire spot. I started playing the same song over and over again, pacing and irrationally needing to leave the building. I couldn’t get out of there til 1 am, but then I hopped on my bike and rode down to see the buildings burn.
Terrible.

A lot of people are out of work right now.

I really have to travel to blog.

I have been to several locations looking for somewhere with functional internet. I am looking forward to have a connection in my home again. grrr.

Today, red-violet is my favorite color, in as much as I have a favorite color.
Leg warmer in Blue Moon Fiber Arts Socks that Rock colorway Prove It All Night (and yes the name of that colorway did influence my decision to buy this yarn.)
I have two skeins, so these legwarmers will be long and take a long to knit.
The bag is a patchwork bag that I made recently. I have been sewing with intent to sell. Once the internet is back I will give etsy a spin once more, with Mark as my “business partner.”

Yesterday I sat down and taught myself to graft shut holes in knit fabric.

I have done kitchner of course but grafting has never felt intuitive. I am going to graft and graft and graft until I can do it with my eyes shut. I always make promises like that but sometimes I really do keep them.

For example, two nights ago I found myself standing on a street corner in a storm, drunk on cheap red wine, with water blowing sideways into every pocket and pore (wearing cotton no less), heading to Safeway for cigarettes. I did not complete that mission. I turned around and headed back up the hill to my house. Sometimes I do what I say I am going to do!

warming back up

I quit smoking.
It has been 5+ weeks since I made the decision to do so and quit (although I had a 7-cigarette relapse), and much of my energy since then has gone into finding new habits to fill the neural pathways that Tobacco built.
Exercise has been key.
And I decided to start blogging again! I liked blogging, you know? But I convinced myself that I had no time, no time for the writing, for the photo processing, for reading other blogs. No time for maintaining those relationships that I had spent several years developing.

I even turned off the internet at my house!

And so, after a while, I felt like I had been away from the web world so long that I couldn’t come back. But that just ain’t true!

I am still not in the habit of writing again; I am just making my back home by sniffing the path for the long-ago-devoured bread crumbs, but you gotta start somewhere, so before I head home to watch the commentary on the Runaways movie with Opal (she has seen it twice already, but Joan Jett is alive in that girl’s heart…) I am going to post a few photos that were taken since I posted here last.

(It’ll give me some practice using the new flickr set-up too.)

One from Alice:

One from Opal:

and me signing off!