I read the Yarn Harlot blog, which is written by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee. She also writes books on knitting humor and I’ve enjoyed her writing since, I don’t know when — I guess since she was on the Knitlist and posted short items there. She’s always seemed to be to be a person who thinks a lot about life, the universe, and everything, and finds the absurd and the joyful in it.
So, when the tour for her new book was listed and I checked and saw that she’d be giving a talk at Borders at the Annapolis, Maryland mall, I marked my calendar and waited patiently. Last night was the night. I figured they’d be a crowd but my husband worked late and we only got there thirty minutes before the event started. We purchased the books and got signing number 173. One of the women there said that she’d heard that when the phone calls confirming the event started to come in Borders realized that they’d better do numbers for the signing. Since I was 173 and more than a few came in after I did there was a large crowd.
The crowd filled practically all of the space available on the second floor of the bookstore. But the wait was pleasant as we all oogled each others knitting projects and shared tips and hints on various patterns and yarns. There was a pretty good mix of young, old, and all in between as well as a mix of sexes and racial backgrounds. In other words the usual non-demographically defined crowd of knitters.
The talk was very interesting. First, she spoke more on the inability of anyone to define knitters as in ending the phrase, “Knitters are ____” with a word or phrase that would work for every knitter. She then went on to talk about how knitting and its repetitive nature allows us to enter a theta state that is good for reducing stress, giving us access to our creative side, and many other good side effects. Some of this information on brain wave states was from a study done with Buddhist Monks before, during, and after mediation. The researchers specifically mentioned knitting as a way to achieve this theta state but also stated that it was unreasonable to expect people to carry around emergency knitting in order to reduce stress. This got a big laugh from the audience as most of us had brought our knitting with us to avoid the stress of waiting for the event to begin.
As you can see, I managed to get my copy of my book signed and a photo of Stephanie and myself holding each other’s sock-in-progress. I can’t believe she was still friendly and approachable after signing for nearly three hours.
If you get a chance to go to a talk by Stephanie, make the effort, it’s well worth it. I’m certainly glad we went. It was a great evening with wonderful people — they were all knitters — what more can be said.
Charlton Heston died. I got to thinking about him as the obituaries were rolling out in the news. I think have to thank him for spurring me to read. I remember seeing The Ten Commandments at the drive in. My mother and her friend and all us kids would go. We get in our pjs and have brown paper bags full of popcorn and cups for sodas (we had the big bottles not individual cans or bottles so cups were required). I remember not falling asleep. As the oldest child in our family, I lived in fear of those plagues of Eqypt for a long time.
After The Ten Commandments, I went on a reading binge of all the biblical novels I could find. I think I probably read just about anything by Thomas B. Costain that I could find either at home or on the library shelves. There were other authors and other books. When I hit on The Eqyptian, I side-tracked into a lot of books on Egypt, the pyramids, the legends and the Pharaohs.
Finally, took a picture of my April coffee cup. I’m back to a big cup. This one holds about 14 oz. My March cup was smaller about 6 oz. which meant making far more frequent trips to the coffee pot. So, I decided to find another big cup. Of course, I’d cut down from a pot of coffee a day to about 1/2 a pot. Everyone keeps telling me how bad coffee is for one — stresses the system, makes you nervous, on and on and on…. I’m sure you’ve all hear the drill.
Well, it’s a new month. I do have an April cup but haven’t had a chance to take a picture. In fact the past week has been a whirlwind of business. Last night around 1AM so maybe I should say this morning, the new April issues of 
