Dither dither dither BANG!

With less than two weeks to go, yesterday I began making preparations for my plinth sitting. The process was ridiculously simple, and utterly erased all the stress I had been carrying about the event. Which was good, because I had been worrying, and procrastinating, and then worrying about the procrastinating for weeks.

Turns out there were a lot of things getting in my way of feeling happy about being hoisted to the top of a tall column of concrete, and sitting there for an hour, knitting. You wouldn’t think there’d be much, but the list was actually pretty long. I’ve had a good stretch of time now to come up with things to be unhappy about.

Despite being over-the-moon excited when I got the news, the bloom about the affair began to fade shortly thereafter, when I realized I had an hour to fill and had to make some plans. First I began to fret about the plans; the expense of them, their hassle, and their do-ability. Eventually the plans, or rather the lack of them, began to loom larger than experience itself. After a few weeks of this I had managed to all but talk myself out of going. If you’ve written lately asking about my plans, and I haven’t written you back, this is why.

Yesterday, line item by line item, I changed everything on that list that I could, adjusted some of my own expectations in the process, then made a few calls, and sent a few emails. When I was done I realized I had me some plans, and the only thing left to do now is show up. I hope you will too (Saturday, 19 September, 1-2 pm in Trafalgar Square) because according to Woody Allen, just showing up is eighty percent of success, right there.

After a little research on portable PA systems, and having watched the truly spectacular equipment fail of one poor plinther (no link; she’s suffered enough humiliation) I’ve given up on being heard by the people below. I’ll be wearing a radio mic (you’ll be able to hear me in the live stream) and I’ll be recording a podcast (that I’ll produce after the fact). I’ve ordered a spiffy new lapel mic, which will leave my hands free to knit something big, in recycled wool, on enormous needles. Thus, after weeks of dithering on the plans for this plinth thing, some pretty awesome things came together over the course of a couple of hours. I’m really all set.

I had a little crow about that in the Green Room (the private Skype chat that has become the office water cooler for a handful of creative souls, scattered across the planet). I shared the link to my new giant knitting needles, and the really wonderful phone call I had had with Rachel, the woman who makes the needles, how happy I was to see the plinth plan coming together at last.

And one of my Green Room buddies said, “But you know how it goes. We fret and worry and feel like horrible empty vapid holes and then BANG comes the lightening and everything falls into place. It is our way.”

So it seems.

This little shop is new in Carmarthen; it’s been open just five weeks. Tonia and I stopped in on Saturday to have a look around, and noticed at once how bright the corner of Jackson’s Lane was, now that the black and red facade of the old sex shop has disappeared behind a cheery new exterior. We had a nice chat with the owner, and she laughed when we said, “Knitting is the new sex!” just as if she’d never heard that joke ever before.

The shop currently stocks just a few lines of yarn, but there are plans to add more as time goes on and I am really looking forward to watching them grow. Though I have enough yarn and fiber to last a decade, and can find whatever I want online, there is just is no substitute for a real, honest to goodness LYS. Welcome to the neighborhood, Knit and Natter!