Databases were like that for me, once; I woke up one day and said, "It's time," and cracked open my books and studied up and about two days later, I realized at least three-quarters of my fear and doubt went away the moment I transmuted worry into action.

"Cable knitting? But I don't know how to do cable knitting..."

I said that for six months, actually. It's rather pathetic to admit that, a couple of weeks ago, I woke up one day under a strangely fluffy and rational cloud and said, "Hmmm, I bet there's an explanation of the theory behind cable knitting somewhere on the web." Thirty minutes later, theory in hand, I had a pattern sketched out and was ready to start knitting.

The first time I tried it, I was - disappointed, almost. When you boil knitting down to its basics, there are two stitches (a knit stitch, and a purl stitch) which are opposites of each other. What is a knitted stitch when you are looking at it on the 'right' (the publicly visible) side of the fabric is a purl stitch when you look at it from the back. Grab a sweater and look at it sometime. If it's ribbed, compare the 'right' and 'wrong' sides, and you'll see what I mean.

So, after ten minutes of reading, the mystery of cable patterns were lost. You might not know what a cable pattern is from the name, but you've seen it on sweaters: intertwined, swirling ropes. I think I expected something complex, difficult; it proved to be quite the opposite.

To make the stitches stand out, they need to be the opposite of the background. The standard way is a solid purled background, with the cables done in a solid knit stitch. Each cable should be an even number of stitches wide, and the frequency of the turning is determined by the width of the cable. A cable that's six stitches wide means that there are two strands of three stitches each, revolving around each other, and a turn should be executed every sixth row.

Like this, actually.

That's it. Opposite stitches. Even numbers. The width of the cable tells you how often to turn. If I could've blown the difficulty of this particular concept any further out of proportion, let me know.

The plans: finish the blue scarf for me. (Yes, gasp, choke, I'm doing a project for myself for a change.) Start up work on scarf-present for a friend; as soon as the yarn arrives, finish up scarf-present for another friend. Take that ball of yarn that's been sitting on my shelf for something like six years and make the modified tam o'shanter I've always wanted. (Yes, the prospect of going somewhere that may potentially be very cold for New Year's has me thinking in unusually practical terms. Don't worry; this sort of train of thought never lasts.)

* * * * *

Been thinking a lot about friends this past week, and especially these past few days. Most of you don't know her, but Susan, my college friend from Hendrix, has been seriously hurt in a freak accident. (Not to be confused with Suzan-with-a-Z, who is married to Brian and lives in Atlanta.) I can't say she's okay, because she's not; what do you say to someone who has survived a horrific, freakish accident but who now faces a daily fight in physical therapy to regain the ability to do many of the things she did before her accident?

Nothing, I suppose, except bitterly funny jokes about how whacking her fiancé with the bone-stabilizing pins in her right hand is a sure-fire, guaranteed way to win any argument.

Neither of us ever bothered to say "It isn't fair." Maybe because some things are just too obvious, and too painful, to ever warrant saying.

* * * * *

It seems like every time I wander into a knitting shop, someone - a person who works in the store or a fellow shopper - ends up confessing to me that knitting is 'therapy' for them. I've always found this need for confession somewhat odd, and I've always wondered how knit 'therapy' works for them.

Most knitters I've met use knitting as a comforting, repetitive way of gaining time to think through whatever's bothering them at the time. For me, knitting is more of a Zen exercise; my mind goes calm and blank, and when whatever makes me, me, returns from wherever it goes, the ball of yarn is much smaller and the pile of finished work is a lot greater. It's not about time to think, it's about an absence of thought.

My wrists will usually ache a bit and my fingers will need a flex or a shake, but sometimes the time out of mind is just enough for things to reshuffle and settle themselves. Sometimes, when I come back from wherever it is I go when I knit, the purls are a little larger than the problems were.

I figure it's worth the cost of yarn. Good thing, because I'll blow through the last of the blue tonight.

Since someone asked, yes, it's another Rowan yarn. Their yarns are just luscious. This is the same company that did Kidsilk Haze, which can only be described as the dark European chocolate of yarns. The blue scarf is made of yarn from their "Cork" label: 95% extra fine Merino, 5% nylon. My next project will be made from the Kidsilk Haze, and yes, the yarn is just as fine and thin as it looks in the photo, and yes, I am insane. Thanks for noticing.

No, we're much more interesting when events both bizarre and unexpected happen; we're at our most unique in the microseconds when we realize that life has just completely and utterly deviated from whatever predetermined plan we thought we were working under.

Most of my friends know that I have broken my right wrist twice, and most of them know that I broke it the first time while trying to fly a kite on a rainy day. Fewer know the story of the second break, despite the fact that it's a much more interesting and amusing story.

For several years now, I have chosen to wear high-index glasses with small frames to help disguise the fact that I have pretty significant vision problems. My distance prescription of -4 falls under the header of "moderately myopic," but my problems are compounded by vastly divergent astigmatism prescriptions for each eye.

The end result? Without my glasses, I have double vision.

Why does this matter?

Because, once upon a time, I was attending a summer camp, and had to sleep on the top bunk. Since I fall under the category of "needs her glasses to find her glasses," I was afraid to put my glasses on the top bunk with me, so I set them on my desk before climbing up to go to sleep each night. That meant each morning, when the alarm went off, I would toss off the covers, crawl down the ladder, turn off the alarm, and then grab my glasses.

Raise your hand if you don't see where this is going, ladies and gentlemen…

There was, yes, a morning in which I tried to climb out of bed without being fully awake. It was followed by a moment of piercing, brain-chilling clarity, approximately three microseconds after I realized that my double vision had led me to misstep. My right foot had slipped off the ladder, and I was on my way to performing an Olympic-level swan dive…in the space of about six feet.

I'm pleased to state that I did the best dive of my entire life; such a pity, though, that there wasn't water at the bottom. I at least had the sense to try to straighten up in midair, in the realization that landing flat on my back was probably going to do a lot less permanent damage than crashing down to the tile floor at an angle.

I thought so hard about landing flat, to save my back, that I completely ignored the fact that, once again, I was making the same mistake I'd made as a fifth-grader: I'd thrown my hands back behind me in some futile attempt to break my fall.

I'll spare you the details of the landing. It wasn't pretty. But I do remember being vaguely amused at the sight of my right wrist, which quickly swelled up to the size of a softball. I lay there, very much like I'd done after the first time I'd broken that bone, cradling my right wrist in my left hand and finding some sort of bizarre, sardonic amusement in the fact that I couldn't move my right hand.

Suffice it to say that everything that hit the floor first came away with a bit of damage. I ended up with an egg-sized lump on the back of my head, a cranky lower back, and damage to my left elbow and right wrist.

After being carted to the hospital, being fitted with a brace and lovely, lovely painkillers, I was sent back to camp. Had the morning progressed normally, I would have gotten a shower immediately after getting out of bed; given the abnormal progression of the morning, when I returned to my dorm room around noon, I was in more dire need of a shower than I had ever been before in my life.

It was then, yes, then, that the comedy of errors began. I undressed and stepped under the shower of water, and quickly realized that I was going to have some serious problems completing this shower. Specifically, I found myself with a new nemesis: the shampoo bottle.

I had two bum arms: a rather wrecked left elbow and a fractured right wrist. I could hold the shampoo bottle with my left hand, but I was incapable of turning my right wrist to open the bottle. I realized that I could open the bottle with my left hand…but I couldn't grasp the bottle with my right hand to do so.

I stood under the spray of water for about three minutes and just bawled. Then, inexplicably, I started laughing—because it hit me that I was standing there, completely naked, in a shower, unable to open a bloody bottle of shampoo.

A couple of minutes later, I braced the shampoo bottle between both forearms and lowered it below waist level, where I clamped my knees around it. Bottle secured, I used my left hand to slowly pry the bottle open and catch the enormous squirt of shampoo that came out. I then proceeded to give myself the most pathetic one-handed shampooing ever seen by mankind.

Once I'd gotten it figured out, the conditioner bottle wasn't nearly so difficult.

I dried myself off, wrapped myself up in my bathrobe, and went back to my room.

It was time to dress—but first, my wrist brace went back on.

It was then I looked on my desk, and truly looked at my pile of clothes, and realized that getting my hair shampooed was one feat, but there was a far more difficult task still ahead of me:

The bra.

Yes, ladies, how does one put on a bra with one bum elbow and one bum wrist? The traditional method is to slide one's arms under the shoulder straps, and then to reach around to hook the clasps from the back.

Things started to fall apart right around the words "reach around." So, once again, I stood there for several minutes, contemplating the inherent silliness of brassieres. Even in my thinner days, I was never less than a C cup; there was absolutely no way I could appear in public in the Deep South without wearing one…and I was far, far too proud to ask for someone else to hook my bra for me.

So I sat down at my desk for somewhere around ten minutes, trying to figure out a way to actually get dressed without a) doing further damage to already-damaged limbs or b) calling for help.

I eventually accomplished the task by hooking the bra together before attempting to put it on. I then used my less-damaged arm (my left) to pull the bra over my head. Finding no other way to do it, I wormed my arms under the straps (ouch) and then used the only device at my disposal—my teeth—to nudge the straps most of the way up onto my shoulders.

A few minutes later, I finally managed to get myself dressed.

Immediately thereafter, I took my first dose of pain medication—quite possibly the most welcome pill I have ever swallowed.