It’s Alive!

I decided around 8 p.m. yesterday during the NCIS two-fer while knitting on a shrug that I might actually live. This is opposed to Saturday and Sunday when a quick death seemed preferable to drowning slowly in my own snot. Not a dignified way to die, let me assure you. Being found suffocated by your own snot and lying under a mountain of used tissues is second only to being found dead and half eaten by your own cats in humiliating death tableaux.

As with all colds, there is little to do except sleep, drink plenty of fluids, keep the Vick’s company in business, and wait. The common cold is nature’s way of telling humans that despite all of our medical advances, the wee virus is still in control. Should we mock viruses too loudly, they have the ultimate revenge in the ever euphemistic stomach flu. Never has one phrase so inadequately described one’s suffering as “stomach flu”.

What I hate the most about this type of illness is that it zaps my desire to do anything but lie in bed and contemplate how much longer I think I have to live. I long for a cold that makes me sick enough not to feel guilty about not studying or not working, but not quite sick enough to keep me from reading or knitting.

Even worse, this bout with a cold has prevented me from getting someone to try on the Lady February sweater I have been knitting to make sure the arm holes are large enough. This project has been quite addictive. I love the yarn I am using – Mountain Colors Twizzle in the Alpine colorway. The pattern is clever and achieves that lovely balance between challenge and ease that makes a project addictive. This project has made me neglect the Pleiades socks, the Christmas knitting, my Adamas shawl, and the mystery projects. I have knit it in spite of the knowledge that I might have to rip it back to the arm pits. I have not cared. I have cared about infecting my knit friends with my cold.

Actually, it isn’t really my friends I have worried about, but the fact that a knit friend who infects the knitting group and all their children by proxy is considered lower than low. Such a person risks being pelted with stitch markers, having their balls of yarn unraveled, critical patterns shredded, and projects mysteriously ripped back and reknit incorrectly in such a way that it takes the knitter the better part of a month to get the project corrected. I am afraid of the power of the knitting group.

So tonight I will sit and knit alone on a Christmas gift. I will think of the knitting group and long to be there.