I don’t know where I’m going until I get there.

I did not set out to take a long hiatus from the podcast, or the blog for that matter. It just sort of happened. The way you sort of forget to call your parents, and life gets busy, and then one day you realize it’s been three months since you talked. And it’s June.

I’m glad I managed to pop in before the end of the month, as June is a good month for me, typically. I was born in June, and while I don’t really care what goes on during the twenty nine utterly insignificant days that aren’t my birthday, on the one day that matters, I make it count.

This year was noteworthy for a number of reasons. I have never before experienced the birthday song, played just for me, by Felix (or anyone for that matter) on the accordion, while sipping my morning tea. It was delightful having a friend here to celebrate, and celebrate we did, with wine and song, and cards and presents and phone calls all day long. Even my kids remembered. It was a good day.

My birthday also happened to coincide this year with the end of two very large projects. This is one. Go look. Then come back. It took a full month to build that baby and, again, the road I traveled to get there is not the one I thought I was on at the beginning of the process. I didn’t set out to build a whole website. Honestly. I was just going to tweak this one a little, add a shopping cart, and be done. A week, I thought, at most. The trouble with me and web design is that I don’t even know what I don’t know. Ya know? It took a few weeks to learn some of what I didn’t know, and after that, building a website specifically for the purpose was the obvious solution.

The other enormous project put to bed this month has been six months in the making. Well, six years. And six months. This one right here. Go look. I’ll wait for you. This joint project with sound artist Felicity Ford (aka my friend, Felix) also evolved over many months into something I couldn’t have envisioned way back at the start. A Knitter’s Manifesto is a collection of some of the essays I’ve written for Cast On through the years, as well as some new work. I stepped up to the microphone at a real, live, honest-to-goodness, state-of-the-art, professional recording studio (where I had a bad, bad case of microphone envy) and you better believe the audio is clean. Felix collected the ambient sounds of my little corner of Wales during her February visit, and then the week of my birthday she came to visit again, to mix the final cd master, and create some of the the Artist’s Edition ephemera, and celebrate.

Though there is, naturally, lots more to share and tell, I didn’t actually set out to write a blog post tonight (which seems to be shaping up nicely as a theme through this post) and I’m feeling the lateness of the hour. It’s actually the middle of the night, and I’ve finished my tea and there will be no more, as I’ve used the last of the milk. So I’m going to bed. I know we’re due a good long catch up, and I’ll fill in all the details in a podcast early next week.