Lazy Friday

In the past four years I've only seen Mimi once or twice so we issued each other ultimatums: coffee now! She was living in the States on an athletic scholarship but has now moved back to Canada, which is awesome for all of us who missed her. And, lucky for us, she's not going back because of something to do with her student visa, she now gets detained and questioned at the border every time she crosses.

We talked a bit about life after rowing. It's one of the more cult-like sports out there because it eats all of your available time and you spend the majority of your waking hours with the same few people with whom you are simultaneously friendly with and bitter rivals, all under the grip of a dogma of massochism and pain. There's very little opportunity for people our age to do it just for fun. You're either hardcore competitive or you don't row.

When you first emerge from this environment, your life is suddenly a gaping hole. You have too much unstructured time. But then, gradually people who you neglected for years start crawling back into your life, and you pick up other hobbies and make new friends. Then one Friday night you will suddenly realize that it's just past midnight and you haven't checked your watch thirty times to stress about the hour because you no longer have to wake up at 4:30 am on Saturdays. That's a very liberating feeling.

And yet... I still kind of miss it. So does she. So do a lot of people we used to row with. I can't honestly say why.

After coffee I ran some errands, did a bit of geocaching and took a nice leisurely walk to check out a brand new yarn shop in Port Moody called Black Sheep Yarns. I needed some yarn and that was as good an excuse as any to make the trip, which I can sum up as follows:

Nice shop, gorgeous yarn, friendly staff. I spent more time there than I thought I would because I was having a nice time talking to them and I'll most likely be back. I bought a couple skeins of Cascade 220, which I guess isn't all that exciting but I'm a student on a limited budget so it's exciting for me.

As far as knitting goes I'm working on a couple projects right now, but going into the fall I'm feeling like I should have more wardrobe essentials, like cardigans and things, especially ones that won't take me eight years to finish.

So enter Liesl. The cardigan's made out of lace and doesn't require a huge amount of yarn so it wouldn't take a huge amount of time or money. I showed the pattern to the ladies at the yarn shop and they got kind of excited so I think I may have just turned myself into an enabler.

There are far worse things I could be.