i am spending a lot of my time at the moment literally pacing. i find myself walking aimlessly around the house, running my fingers over the spines of books, picking up things, putting them back down. sometimes i stand at the back door and look out over the deck, watch the cars swish past, the birds flit around the trees, wonder if i am ready to let this all go. i still dont know what’s happening in relation to my immediate future, but suffice it to say i have a very important skype happening on monday june 1. i will know more after that. but to say i am a jittering bundle of nerves is putting it mildly. it is a very difficult place to be in, contemplating one reality, living another, trying to prepare for both. i will be glad when it’s decided, one way or the other.
in the meantime, i am trying to stay focused on this reality. i have lots of work to do but i took some time out this weekend to head down to the nation’s capital, Canberra, for the annual festival of fibre at the old bus depot markets. i havent been for a couple of years, and god knows i dont need any more yarn, but i did really need to get out of town, and i really needed to have some fun, to be around people.
so i was very happy to have a little go get car pull up in my driveway saturday morning containing pru and fiona, and off we set on our little knitters road trip.
we wound our way up onto the southern highlands, stopping at burrawang for lunch in the pub
and then meandering down the federal highway
past the usual lake george with no water
which prompted the inevitable discussion about when was the last time anyone had seen water in it, actually, and the irony of it being home to the canberra sailing club at one point.
i do love that moment when you hit the crest of the highway and see canberra’s rolling hills and black mountain tower appear, i always think how strange it is to see this ‘city’ emerge out of the pure countryside to claim national capital status.
we bypassed the usual sights to head straight to the leafy suburb we were staying in, which also happens to have a yarn store.
there might have been pre-market purchases here, i cant really remember. there was coffee and cake next door before we checked into our apartment, and later that night we met up with margarita and lyn for drinks before dinner.
i talked margarita into trying a virgin mojito with me but i think she was unconvinced. then we met sue and rob for dinner at abell’s kopi tam malaysian restaurant, where we ordered everything off the specials board, including these beautiful stuffed zucchini flowers
and spicy sticky pork ribs and chili garlic seafood and a green duck curry and the most amazing beef rendang with roti. it really was all spectacular, especially the finishing touch, a toasted coconut and pandan pancake.
delicious. we rolled back to our apartment and into bed, and then set off again early in the morning for more canberra hipster food
and drinks, in jars, of course,
then we hit the markets.
i dont think there was many yarn vendors as usual and probably only three of any real note for me, but i did get what i wanted
some gorgeous red and black alpaca from glenora weaving, some lovely blue and grey sparkly sock yarn and some delicious grey merino/silk from fibrewebs, and a surprise, 800 metres of unbelievably soft alpaca/silk/cashmere from some unknown stall in a beautiful natural creamy grey.
we didnt stay for long, it can get overwhelming there once it gets busy, so we were out by lunch time and back on the road. we stopped at goulburn for lunch with the obligatory tourist shots
(really, who does this? who builds a massive concrete merino in the middle of nowhere?!) and then i drove the rest of the way home. we stopped at moss vale, because we had spotted this little shop on the way down: made by others. it was well worth the stop and i picked up a few little things to send to the US as care packages for my lovely new jersey friend who has lost a family member this week.
i have been very sad for her, and sad not to be with her and her family who have been like family to me, and sending emails and little gifts seems like not nearly enough. the distance between where my heart is and where my body is is very difficult at times.
but the weekend away helped. it was so great to spend time talking and laughing and eating with clever, supportive, women. it really was one of the best knitting weekends away i’ve ever had, and reminds me how lucky i have been to make some great friends through knitting.
i woke up a bit unwell on monday, so i’ve been home for 2 days. when i could get off the couch i decided to rationalise some knitting projects, and ripped two that i was not feeling the love for, the linebreak shawl in the gorgeous shibui staccato
(great yarn, wrong pattern) and the hap for harriet in the beautiful red koigu lace
i’ve had some misgivings since i started and also there was a mistake at the beginning and im not the sort of knitter anymore who can live with mistakes, so it’s gone back into hibernation until i can think of something else.
today i wound up one each of the alpacas
the red and the black are for a set of hat and mitts each first off (with enough left to join the second skeins for scarves perhaps) and the cream became something i started ages ago in madtosh lace but ripped as well, nancy bush’s stones and stripes from wool people.
straight away i knew it was perfect. the yarn is like cream in my hands, and this will do just nicely for another US winter.
finally today i have gotten back to work – i had some good news last week when i was awarded another grant, this one from the American Association for the History of Nursing for a project looking at minority mental health and nursing in the US, which means if i am not in atlanta i can extend my planned archive trip from september into january. that will mean archives at harvard, the rockefellers, back at Penn, and then at the National Library of Medicine and National Archives in DC.
we have had our edited book proposal accepted by springer and have started work on that, and now i have been invited to submit a monograph proposal to a series on critical nursing history for johns hopkins university press and i have been working hard on that this afternoon
1000 actual new words written already. we will see what happens with that. i sent my atlanta application to my book editing colleagues in the US so we can do a practice skype interview later this week and one of them wrote back and said ‘OMG kylie when do you sleep?”. i think that was generous, but it did make me think that maybe there’s a reason why im not sleeping at the moment.
maybe there’s a couple. maybe i just have to reconcile myself to pacing in the middle of the night for a little while yet. i could always get up and knit!
k xx
