Dreams deferred

Way back in grad school days, my knitting buddy Cecilia and I used to have several recurring discussions in our (many, many) emails. One of them was "how much money would we have that we don't now have if we didn't knit?" (Answer "better not to think about it, and probably not much anyway, because if we didn't knit we'd do something else.")

When I was working at an insultingly low-paid job and she was working on her dissertation, we had a memorable exchange over the question, "If you had a thousand dollars to blow on fiber-related purchases, what would you do with it?" I don't have the exchange anymore (or if I do, it's buried in the 11,000-email "Cecilia" box) but I remember dreamy lists of full sets of Clover DPs and circulars in all sizes, sweater quantities of Noro, and other luxuries. On the budgets we both had at the time, though, there was no way. The whole discussion was firmly in the realm of fantasy.

Fast forward seven years.

A few weeks ago, I sold my spinning wheel. There was a lot of emotional baggage attached to that spinning wheel and looking at the pile of $20 bills that replaced it was an odd experience. They seemed... icky, somehow. The space in my closet where the wheel used to be looked strange. It was, and is, very weird to think of it as being really gone.

I think I sold it on a Thursday, and so the next day I used some of the money to pay my babysitter. The rest I put in the bank, with no particular earmark. Then I thought, well, I'll use some of it to buy things I've been putting off buying. And I did. I bought a new pack and play for Avtalyon, so that he doesn't have to be sleeping in our room (and waking us up all night) until Iyyar outgrows his crib. I bought a new umbrella stroller to replace the one we left in Israel with my SIL. And I bought a new high chair for Avtalyon, so he doesn't have to keep bonking his head on the wooden chair back behind the booster seat he's currently using. All told, a couple hundred dollars.

I still had quite a lot of money left though--after all, I sold a DT Lendrum with lots and lots of goodies. And so I decided to spend it on unjustifiable acquisition of yarn. All of it. I did some math and I actually have bought the wheel's worth of yarn, because I bought some yarn before I sold the wheel for about as much money as I spent on the baby items. It's not all here yet, but when it does get here I should really take a picture. It's pretty impressive. I've got the sweater's worth of Noro, and another sweater's worth of purple Kauni; some new books; some spinning fiber, a big box of Brown Sheep millends and a huge pile of sock yarn. I also, of course, got some presents for Cecilia.

What happens to a dream deferred? Yup. It explodes. Out of cardboard boxes, and all over the floor of the knitting room.