Last time you got the people.

Now you get the stuff.

This is partly the last of the MAS&W wrap-up, partly sequels, partly… I dunno, I don’t have to categorize everything, do I?

For starters, I did some shopping.

Remember how I bought these at NHS&W?

Remember how I said that I will never not buy kid mohair locks from Buckwheat Bridge if I’m lucky enough to have the chance?

Yeah. Two weeks later, there they were at MA and I went back for more. A lot more of the exact same… plus a few others.

All grist for the batt-making mill, but I also have an idea in mind for those two specific colors, the teal and the - what would you call it? - I think of it as a midnight violet. Maybe I’ll even play with it a bit during the Tour de Fleece - we shall see.

I also bought some undyed locks in a range of marvelous natural silver-greys:

I can’t believe I didn’t get any of these for me - they were a personal shopping commission for my friend Sarah, who needed something soft and shiny and silvery-charcoal-y to fill a gap between pale greys and blacks, something that would work well with pygora. If I’d specifically petitioned the universe to invent something perfect to order… this is what it would it would have come back with. And nobody had to do any inventing - I just strolled in and there it was; it’s only the loveliest kid mohair on the planet, and it was right there in a big bag, and I just plunged in my hands and pulled out an enormous double handful and said, yessssss this is it plz kthxbai. Done.

Speaking of grist for the batt-mill… I also picked up some banana silk:

Loving the colors and the shininess; jury’s still out on the blending texture. It’s slippery stuff and it keeps trying to sneak out under the drum when I’m not looking; I don’t trust it. It is NOT the boss of me - but I’m not the boss of it yet either. A good flicking helps keep it in line, but that gets a bit labor-intensive.

Still… ooh shiny, ooh purty colors, ooh keep working with it.

The one other thing I bought - again a planned purchase - was a spindle. At long last, after many months of coveting, I have a sweet little Turkish Delight to call my own.

I’m not sure exactly why I waited so long, except that for some reason I had an odd feeling that this was a spindle I needed to buy in person rather than on-line. So as soon as I could get away to AmyBoogie’s booth I made a beeline for the Jenkins box and rooted through and checked out every single one there… and as usual the spindle I came away with was not the one I thought I wanted. I thought I was in love with the Bolivian Rosewood, and she had one and it was indeed very lovely - but when it came time to say “this one and no other” it turned out I was referring to

It completely charms me that he marks them this way, and that he also signs each one on the edge of the arm.

And how does it spin? It spins like… it spins like… well, really, similes are pointless and silly, because it spins like a Jenkins Turkish Delight, and what could be more enchanting than that?

Here endeth the purchases (I was good!), but here beginneth the gifties. I love my friends, and this is why. Actually, I lie - no, it isn’t. But… it couldn’t hoit.

There was more mohair. Patrick had mentioned to me at NH that he was having some locks dyed in a deep wine-red. Sure enough, so he was, and at MA he brought me some.

What is not to love about that?

Don’t know yet whether these will fall into the maw of the batt cave or become a project in themselves; we will spin no wine before its time, and these need to marinate in the stash for a bit before I’ll know what I want them to be.

This doesn’t:

I know that LOOKS like two pools of molten caramel, one of them with cream swirled into it… but actually it is baby camel. Below, 100% baby camel; above, baby camel semi-blended with silk, 50/50. These were a gift from Cathy-Cate, and looking at this picture made me realize that I have got to head up to the stash RIGHT NOW and add these to my Tour de Fleece basket. I don’t care what they’re going to be - I just need to spin them. Because, seriously - why postpone joy?

But wait… there’s more.

Not only did I shop for Sarah, I received something from her by special courier - Lynn brought generous samples of Bowmont fleece to play with.

Saving these for a lock-by-lock treat. I love me some fine crispy crimp.

Last but by no means least, Jesh has started experimenting with bottom whorls. When I saw a picture of this first work-in-progress prototype I told her it had to be MINE… but I didn’t expect her to present it to me. I didn’t even have to steal it from her bag! She just GAVE it to me!

All day Saturday I carried it with me and spun on it wherever I went, and wherever I went it evoked the same reaction: WHATISTHATLETMETRYOMGWANT.

The whorl is ingeniously assembled out of a pair of coordinated drawer-pull cover pieces - kitsch made magically un-kitschy.

The spindle is tiny (why do I ALWAYS forget to put something in the picture for scale? - anyway the whorl diameter is maybe 1-1/2″? something like that) and light and beautifully suited to the kind of laceweight games I love to play. Alas, I didn’t get to keep it long - it had to go back to the shop for further development. Jesh was trying out a new glue, or something, and we learned the hard way that either it hadn’t fully set or it just couldn’t quite hold up to the sweltering heat of that weekend. Well, that’s what you get for being in on the ground floor when something new is still in development… you end up bereft of your new toy while Ms. Perfectionist continues to perfect it. It’ll be worth it, mind you, because she’s also making some slight adjustments in weighting and balance that will make it even better. And then… then I’ll get my baby back and I sure hope she’ll have plenty of material to make lots of little brothers and sisters for it, because I think it could become a hot seller.

I always pretend I don’t care what a tool looks like as long as it works well - and in fact it’s no pretense that if a choice must be made I’ll choose function over form every time. But it’s not a BAD thing to have an excellent tool that also happens to be adorably cute, is it? Such are both these small spindles in their entirely different ways - the Jenkins Turkish Delight and the Jesh, um, I don’t know what its name is so for now I’m calling it Drawers-in-a-Twist.

That’s it for the MA loot, as such, unless you count the fact that thanks to my diabolical plan of Tom-Sawyering Jesh into doing so much of my spinning for me, by the time I left for my slow careful trip home I had ALL the singles spun from my Romney sock batts. These are the ones I mentioned last time, the ones I called “Petrel,” the ones I made for me. If you think you’re seeing a touch of that Buckwheat Bridge teal in here, then you think right and you’re not seeing things:

(Dang color balance. Real color is somewhere squarely between those two.)

As soon as I decently could after getting home and unpacking, I set myself to plying…

… and finishing…

… and now I have a geeky thrill’s worth of 3-ply sock yarn, 375 yards or something, that I only wish I had time to knit.

Here endeth this phase of Blog BACKlog.

I had big plans for filling in the other columns - the regular bACKlog and the Right Now updates, but I’ll have mercy on you and limit those to short-cuts for now.

Right Now: I Coulda Beena Contenda; I Am a Contenda

In the Right Now Department, two items.

1. I didn’t like to mention it while I was still struggling with it (doesn’t do to scare the customers too much), but now that the problem is solved I don’t mind telling you that a week or two ago Club Tsock #3, “Two Cassandras,” was really kicking my sorry butt. I had this very fancy high-flown concept for one section of it, something to do with tangible metaphors for the forces of history and divinity, for irony and reversal, for free-will and destiny, for curse and blessing; something that I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt could be rendered into a visual/textural interpretation; but there was a huge gap between concept and realization, a precipice on whose brink I stood feeling like an idiot - couldn’t figure out whether I was a chamois or a lemming. I’m on the other side of that gap now, though I still can’t tell you whether I leapt it or bridged it or flew over it or got shot across it from a cannon (hmmmm, where’d those bruises come from anyway?). It was a design gap, not an execution one - the result is challenging to think about but not difficult to knit. I was going to run on at some length here about the philosophical and metaphysical implications of the way I defined the problem and chose the solution… but I’m sure you’ll be relieved to hear that I waited a little too long to write it down, and now all that pontification has quietly evaporated from my head like last night’s dreams. I can’t remember a thing about it. But I’ll have pictures soon.
2. ON YOUR MARK.

   The Tour de Fleece starts tomorrow, and I am as ready as I know how to be. Got my team logo decal on my cup-holder (thanks, Kelly!). Over the past couple of days I’ve cleared some decks and done some rearranging and organizing of stash and tools. Last night saw a Ply-a-Thon of outstanding singles - I’ll show you the yarns next time - and a clearing off of storage bobbins and a choosing of fiber; the night before saw a Card-a-Thon of mildly epic proportions; today I pulled apart the CPW and scrubbed out the business end of its tilt-tension mechanism but good…

   

   … oiled everything that could be oiled, and reassembled it all in working order…

   

   … and there it stands, champing at the bit, pawing the ground, straining every nerve for the sound of the starter’s pistol.

   GET SET.

   At its feet, the first wave of candidates.

   

   Clockwise from top left:

   Abby luxury batts in Peaches; my own blend of BL and silk; three selections from David at Southern Cross Fibre: Polwarth roving in Sunburnt Country, luxury batts in Kangaroo Paw, Polwarth batts in Koala. As I mentioned earlier, I’m going to add the baby ca(ra)mel/silk. On mature reflection I’m probably going to pull the two batches of 100% Polwarth for marination purposes - I don’t think I want to spin them without a plan, especially not when I’m going for a personal speed record. The others - I don’t know yet what the YARN is going to be but at least I do know what KIND of yarn I want to make out of them - so they’re good choices because they’re all conducive to smooth drafting, and they’re all things I can just blast off and spinspinspin till I drop or run out.

   Tomorrow, then. Me and my CPW. Each of us like a giant refreshed, ready to Suck Less. Bring it on.

   BACKlog: Right to Privetcy

   I would like to state for the record, please, that I am not fond of privet.

   I recognize that properly tended it makes for a useful hedge, in a good-fences-make-good-neighbors sort of way. But it annoys me. I don’t like its insinuating ways. I don’t like the smell of its blossoms. I especially don’t like the smell of its blossoms when it trumps the scent of honeysuckle, as inevitably it does. I consider it a cruel joke that these two bloom at the same time, almost as cruel a joke as the olfactory conflict between Scotch broom and lilac.

   What I really hate, though, is the way it grows, when untrimmed, to second-story-window height in no time at all, really - a matter of mere years of neglect - and becomes a dense impenetrable forest that spreads its leventy-kazillion nasty little blossoms all over the neighborhood with a special emphasis on my driveway, where on day after day of the recent monsoon (I swear it has been raining for at least 12 out of every 9 days for the past two months) I find them piled thick and deep in a drenched layer that completely covers my car. The only thing worse than a metric ton of tiny privet blossoms is a metric ton of tiny waterlogged and rotting privet blossoms.

   The stuff’s indestructible, to all intents and purposes, so there really isn’t much specialized skill involved. It’s just not that hard to take a strategic trimmer to it a couple of times a year, is it? Really, is that so much to ask?

   Yup, I hate me some severely neglected privet, hate it a lot. Hate hate hate.

   Especially when it’s in my own back yard.

My thanks to those of you who tried to let me off the blog bACKlog hook, but… there are some things that really need to be documented. So I’m going to go for sort of a hodgepodge for a while here - some from Column BB (Blog BACKlog), some from Column B (BACKlog), and some from Column RN (Right Now) - until such time as I (A) feel kind of caught up, or (B) get sick of trying to catch up.

You may place your bets now as to which will happen first.

So let’s see - the oldest thing I owe you is a couple of final wrap-ups on Lauren’s wedding and the Circle Jacket, including some vague how-to (see? you wouldn’t want me to skip that stuff, would you?), and that must legitimately wait a little longer because I haven’t yet seen all the pictures from Lauren’s end, what with her being just a little busy, what with the new marriage AND the house renovation AND the end of the school year AND the pregnancy. (Like how I threw in that last bit, all casual-like and everything?) But I do think we’ll get there pretty soon.

Meanwhile, the next oldest main-top event languishing in the hopper is from almost exactly a month ago - MA S&W.

Others covered most of that ground pretty effectively while I was still struggling with the after-effects of my Close Encounter of the Mattress Kind, but I have a few pictures and thoughts to add. What I do NOT have pictures of is the batts I made for various people, because, well, the mattress episode kind of knocked out my plans for taking same before presenting them. (They’re really hard to photograph, too, but the mattress excuse is my story and I’m sticking to it.) The Mood Indigo sock batts I already showed you…

… were of course a birthday present for Dan, along with one of my “Painting on Velvet” batts in black with purple and gold. (Yes, I called it “Assyrian Cohort.” You knew I would.) There was also some birthday BL/silk for Marcy - I’ll be making this one again so there will be other opportunities to show it to you, and the same is true of the other “Painting on Velvet” batts I made for Jesh and Cathy-Cate. (Jesh blogged hers, actually. And I think Dan did the same with his.) That’s part of what I needed the darker silks for.

Anyway, what I consider wholly remarkable about these batts is not the batts themselves - though I admit I was pleased with them - but the way they brought out my inner five-year-old. For the rest of the weekend I made a complete nuisance of myself to these four unfortunate souls whenever I encountered them (which was pretty often, as we tended to hang out together, shop together, schmooze together, etc.), pestering them to show off their batts. “Hey, didja show her what you’re spinning?” “Hey, didja show her what I made for you? What, you aren’t carrying it? Want me to go back to the booth and get it?” “Hey, didja tell him where that fiber came from?” “Hey, didja didja didja huh?”

I think it’s safe to say that this sort of behavior did nothing to uphold the vaunted dignity of Tsarskoe Tsocko.

I think it’s safe to say I didn’t much care. I was having fun and I was showing off (and they were very kind and tolerant). So there.

Other than that, what is there to tell? It was Cummington, and Cummington is always (yeah, this was my second time, so I am almost entitled to say “always”) a golden weekend to look forward to and to treasure in retrospect. Cassie and Juno were sorely missed, by me at any rate in a you-can’t-go-home-again sort of way. But in defiance of my expectations, even with them (alas!) not there… Cummington was still Cummington. In some ways more so because I was so much less green about who and what was to be seen there.

For instance - remember this picture from last year?

That was taken in front of the Merlin Tree booth, and little did I understand then what that meant, let alone realize that the gentleman in the kilt was none other than Dave Paul himself. This year, better-informed, I made a beeline for the nice man in the kilt, and had a long and lovely chat with him about Canadian Production wheels and cup-holders and long-draw and other spinny matters; tried out a Hitchhiker, too, while I was at it.

What a difference a year makes.

So let’s see, what else?

There were lambs.

Lunch time. All together now: AWWWWWWWWWWWWW.

There was a yurt, right next to our tent:

It was cool and pleasant in there, even during the hottest part of the day. I particularly like this decorative detail on the inside:

There was a brief abduction scare:

Nice lady was so enthralled with the asp on Cleopatra that she grabbed up the prototype, leg and all, and ran across the way with it to show her friends.

Mostly, there were friends. (And there was Stuff, but I’ll show you that next time.)

Dan brought Strider with him - bless ‘im, he schlepped him in from the car on both days, and set up next to the booth to spin and accept congratulations.

From his parents, among others, whom it was really nice to meet.

I took a little spin on Strider, and a very charming fellow I found him.

He was not the only handsome wheel present, however. I had brought my 24″ saxony, complete with custom cup-holder (hey, did you know? they’re making them with optional slots now so you can fit a mug with a handle), and Jesh very obligingly did some of my spinning for me.

Oh hell, one more, because I love my pretty wheel.

I think Jesh loved it too. Lucky for me it wouldn’t fit in her pocket.

Here’s a bad picture of AmyBoogie showing off an advance copy of her new book, all inky-stinky from the press! This is old news to those of you who have bought it since then, but it was pretty exciting at the time and it’s still pretty exciting now.

Here’s an even worse picture of Dan and Lynn debating the relative merits of potential warps.

Here’s Marcy trying to decide which of several beautiful alpaca blends is most calculated to induce a swoon in Sandi Wiseheart.

Here’s proof that Cathy-Cate came to our booth in person…

… and so did Kathe:

Both sporting beautiful handknits whose names I now disremember.

I don’t remember what two out of these three are gazing at so intently…

… but one of them sure doesn’t look any too interested in it.

And here again….

… of Jesh, Jen, Kathe, and Cathy-Cate, which would you say is least enthusiastic about being photographed? (How many guesses do you need?)

Jesh, incidentally, was wearing her beautiful Hyrna Herborgar shawl, made in 72 hours:

She was also carrying her first handspun/handknit sock:

Ahem - let’s take a closer look at the stitch definition on this bad boy, shall we?

Jesh was also wearing a necklace that matched the stoneware whorl on some of her spindles (including the one I stole from her a while back).

Which reminds me - it’s hard to believe now during the present monsoon season, but here is proof that once upon a time there was a thing called sunshine.

Saturday night, due to a crazy comedy of errors of the You Couldn’t Make This Up variety, a bunch of us ended up having dinner together in one place while Marcy and Lynn and MamaCate had dinner in another; we hated splitting up the party, but I can’t deny that we had a riotously great time. You may already have seen this picture on Dan’s blog (taken by Kathe, I cleverly deduce, since she isn’t in it):

And that was just the beginning of the evening.

Jennifer is still determined not to let on that she’s having a good time as long as I’m the one wielding the camera…

… but Kathe isn’t imposing any such embargo on herself. She is, however, apparently pretty shocked by something Dan tells her -

- which may go some way toward explaining the subsequent determination that sometimes one beer at a time just isn’t enough:

I, um, don’t remember much after that.

But it was a great weekend. Mattress or no mattress.

Column RN; Stuff I’m Working on Right Now

• I’m in training for the Tour de Fleece, as a member of Abby’s team, Team Suck Less. One-Day Challenge Goal: spin a mile within one calendar day.
• I’m working like a demon on Club Tsock #3 - which is appropriate because we’ve just come up with a particularly devilish scheme for how to work one section of it. This is NOT the same thing as “particularly difficult to execute” - I really don’t think it will be - but it does include kind of an interesting thought experiment. More on this soon - I’m really trying to break out of the stealth habit.
• Speaking of which… I’m working on a couple of Tstealth Projects blah blah blah.

Column B; Scenes from a BACKlog

Items from the To-Do List, some Done, some Un-

• Done: Prep Firebird for public release.
• Done: Release it.
• Done: Make new web page and Ravelry ads for Firebird
• Un- : Run said ads. Why? Because…
• Un- : … long overdue updates to Tsarina home page. Sigh.
• Done: Prep Frenchman’s Creek for public release.
• Un- : Release it. Any minute now.
• Un- : Get cracking on ads and page for Frenchman’s Creek, and…
• Un- : … about those updates to the home page…? Yeah, really, get cracking on those too.

I guess we know what I’m going to be working on next.

Those three letters pretty much say it all.

The first thing they represent to an old-style computer geek like me is the ACKnowledge character in ASCII and TCP - as if any ACKnowledgment were actually necessary that I have, well, not been so much in evidence lately on the bloggy front.

ACK!!!! would also not be an inappropriate response, on my part, to the product of the little piece of date arithmetic wherein I subtract my the date of my previous post from the date of the present one.

Mostly, though, ACK constitutes the reason I’ve been so non-present here in recent weeks; the difference between what I’m not getting done and, um, the other things I’m not getting done. Because no matter how much I do get done (and there’s plenty of that, honest) the To-Do list just hasn’t been getting any shorter (please note literary use of artistic understatement), and I keep having this nagging feeling that every minute given to the blog is a minute taken away from the bACKlog.

This is sort of stupid, because of course the unblogged blog thus generates a bACKlog of its own that almost rivals the To-Do list in ever-increasing length. At some point I’m afraid I’ll have to declare Blog Bankruptcy and just skip over huge wads of unused b(ACK)log fodder just to get moving again. Really excellent unused b(ACK)log fodder, too, so I’m still trying not to let it come to that.

The irony of the present post is not lost on me, incidentally - I’m well aware that I’m not getting things any forrarder by sitting here making excuses for non-blogging instead of just getting on with it and blogging, already. But if this breaks the bottleneck it’ll be worth it; anything to get bACK on the horse. (And meanwhile it’s one more day of not facing the massive pile of picture triage, ahem.)

(It isn’t just the bACKlog, at that. To be fair, it’s been kind of life-ish in these parts during the past few weeks; life-ish in ways I can’t really discuss here. Life-ish in a mostly good way, I think, at least in the long run. But even good life-ishness can tend to be, as TheBoy^TM would say, Fraught with Fraughtness. And it turns out that Fraughtness and bACKlog are just NOT a productive combination.)

I was going to wind this up by laying out the To-Do and To-Blog lists, in order to give you some idea of the scope of the two parallel bACKlogs… but on mature consideration I’ve decided that would be a completely insane move, as tending to drive me to bury my head permanently in the sand, which would not be at all conducive to further blogging or other productiveness, now would it. Instead I’m going to go off and tighten my focus to the Most Urgent Item on each (I consider it a major achievement that I have managed to identify same) in the hope of having something to show for both in short order; and meanwhile I’ll leave you with a picture, because really it’s just unfair to saddle you with all this empty navel-gazing and not give you anything cute to look at.

There. That’s Ptolemy pretending to be a Good Spinner’s Cat, which you can parse as either the good cat of a spinner or the cat of a good spinner. Or both, as the fancy takes you.

And on that note - I’m off to work. But I’ll be bACK soon, I swear, with my shield or on it. Or both, as the fancy takes you.

In my e-mail this morning:

Dear sir:

Nice to meet you!

This is Benny Chou

We are manufacturer of all kinds of socks named Zhuji Chennuo Knitting Co., Ltd in china.
i sent the product list to you by the email.
if you are interesting in any kinds of socks, please contact with me any time,thanks

Our detail informationare as below :
Capacity : 100,000 dzs /moth
Employe : 150 person
Machine : 150 from Korea ,Italy ,China
Products: cotton single needle stockings, cotton double needles stockings, cotton trousers-stockings, socks with five toes, fur-circle socks,filament materials stockings, filament materials middle-long socks, filament materials short socks, filament materials trousers-stockings,and sports socks

We can supply you product which you need at low prices with quality guarranty. let us know your specification. we hope to establish a good mutual business relationship with you.

Your earyly reply would be very much appreciated.
Awaiting your response with great interests.

Best regards

Benny Chou

 
Yeah, I’ll get right on that.

Mind you, I’m not so sure you have “product which I need”; at the risk of sounding boastful, I think I’m already pretty “interesting in any kinds of socks.”

And you might have a better shot at an “earyly” reply if you didn’t measure your capacity in “dzs / moth.” I don’t think I want that anywhere near my stash, plz kthxbai.

It was clearly a very stupid mattress…. It was a large mattress, and probably one of quite high quality…. It did something that mattresses very rarely bother to do. Summoning every bit of its strength, it reared its oblong body, heaved it up into the air and held it quivering there for a few seconds…. The effort was too much, and it flodged back into its pool.

Douglas Adams,
Life, the Universe, and Everything

The funny thing is… I remember that a year ago last Friday I was driving along and planning a sardonically existential blog post about the hell that was the Road To Cummington on the Friday of Memorial Day Weekend. And then the incredible wonderfulness of my experience at MA S&W just knocked the whole thing out of my mind. I didn’t forget it, but it just seemed so piddling and irrelevant by comparison that I was happy to let it slide. You know?

And then this year, for at least a couple of hours before my little mattress dance, I was thinking about that drive and I was muttering to myself, “HA! You thought THAT was bad…!” and planning an escalated blog post.

And THEN the shit mattress hit the fan tires.

This time, though, I’m damn well going to squeeze out all the existential juice I can. In spite of, and secure in, the fact that the weekend was still amazingly wonderful - indeed, given that it’s Cummington I would expect no less.

Then I’ll be free to turn my attention to the festival itself. I’ve started looking over my pictures and many of them are, well, not exactly stellar. But fortunately I am not an island and I can gank the good stuff from my friends. Meanwhile, I can ride someone else’s coattails as usual and thus still point you to some actual weekend pictures: go see Dan’s report, and wish him and us a happy anniversary.

And speaking of anniversaries… there’s another anniversary that deserves mention and celebration here, one that falls somewhere in the middle of the whole NH-MA silly season: it was right after last year’s NHS&W that the blessed Tservitude of our blessed Tserf began. I really don’t have words for this, except to say that without that I honestly can’t imagine how I’d ever have kept functioning and Tsarina-fying with my head above water. And because I literally can’t imagine it, I really almost don’t even know how thankful I am, if you see what I mean. I was re-reading Douglas Adams the other night, and I was struck by his attempt to describe a world that had no sky. Yeah, kind of like that. Even he couldn’t quite picture or articulate it. I sure can’t.

But enough of all this touchy-feely sappy stuff, right? Time to plunge into the bowels of the New England highway… I was about to say “system.” Heh.

So a-a-a-a-a-a-nyway….

I got off to a late-ish start, and as I was driving westward on the Lawn Guyland leg of this trip, and experiencing survivor guilt because for once the barely-moving traffic was all headed the other way, I listened frequently to the local traffic reports - because I knew well, based both on a lifetime of experience and on the specific vicissitudes of last year’s trip, that I was headed for a perilous voyage no matter what I did, and that it behooved me to choose my route wisely and avoid the worst of an already bad business.

And what I heard in every report, literally every five minutes on average, was this:

The CONNECTICUT TURNPIKE is at a standstill and backed up for a kazillion miles because of an overturned tractor-trailer that is leaking battery acid all over creation.

So, thinks I, that isn’t going to help anything. So, thinks I, I sure as hell am not going anywhere near the putative so-called “Connecticut Turnpike.” Which in any case… I have never heard of.

Never.

Now, I am 51 years old, and I have lived near Connecticut, sometimes even in Connecticut, nearly all my life. I spent my earliest summers in a Connecticut farmhouse. I went to college in Connecticut. I went to boarding school just on the other side of Connecticut. TheBoy^TM currently owns a house in Connecticut. Some years ago I co-founded and co-ran a small ballet company based in Connecticut. I have been driving back, forth, up, down, through, around, and across the entire state of Connecticut for 35 years. I know the roads by their names and nicknames and numbers - the phrase “back of my hand” comes to mind - they are the map of my whole life, and I can tell you exactly where the Hutch (-inson River Parkway) turns into the Merritt, AKA CT Rte 15, and at what point the Merritt changes into the Wilbur Cross; I know the Mass Pike and the NY Thruway and where and how they are one and the same I-90; I understand all too well the workings and history of the Boston Post Road, AKA Route 1; and never never NEVER in my life, not once, have I heard mention or inkling of a “Connecticut Turnpike.”

Incidentally, in the wake of my adventures I took an informal poll, and it turns out I am not alone: nine out of ten New Englanders, some of them long-time Connecticut residents, were similarly innocent.

So anyway, where was I? Oh yes, the radio. Calmly spelling out one highway disaster after another on roads both named and numbered, and admonishing me to Beware the “Connecticut Turnpike” without EVER identifying it by number, as who should say, of course everyone knows what I’m talking about.

So I figure, I’m safe from that at any rate, since I never had the slightest intention of taking it.

This is what in the literary line we call foreshadowing. You know what’s coming, right? It could hardly be otherwise.

But I’m not going to spare you.

So, out of the three major candidates I choose my usual preferred route, the Hutch to the Merritt to the Wilbur Cross - Tinker to Evers to Chance.

And for a while there it’s just fine.

Then it gets slow. Then it gets slower. Then I remember that last year it was exactly the same, and that at that point I sucked it up and got on I-95. Now, I don’t LIKE I-95 - I can’t imagine that any sane person does - but last year it turned out to be the wise choice, and its nearest junction certainly has the proverbial Utility of Location at this moment, so… I go for it.

And for a while there it’s just fine.

Then it gets slow. Then it gets slower. Then it gets slower and slower still.

(Have I mentioned lately that my car is not air-conditioned? Have I mentioned that it was 85 degrees?)

Then the messages on the electronic highway signs start to take on an ominous and increasingly familiar theme, and at last I have to face the fact….

Yes - I am in fact ON the mythical high road of Brigadoon, which under its thin hateful veneer of I-95 is indeed none other than the nonexistent “Connecticut Turnpike” itself!!!!!

Rage. Fury. Many unprintable and unpronounceable fulminations.

You might have to be a resident of this area to understand the full implications of my next act of desperation. At the next exit I get off and take the old Boston Post Road, i.e. US Route 1.

Route 1 is so-called for very good reason - the Boston Post Road dates back in part to the 1670s, and in many places it doesn’t seem to have changed much since. For this whole stretch of coastal New England it parallels, or rather is paralleled by, I-95 (also NOT known as the imaginary “Connecticut Turnpike”), but where I-95 (aNkati”CT”) is a major highway, Route 1 is strictly local, strictly mom-and-pop, strictly stop-and-go, 100% small-town-midtown all the way. The more so here as it participates in Connecticut’s charming game of perpetually playing bait-and-switch with turn lanes.

Nevertheless, snail’s pace or not, at this point it proves BETTER - as anything would - than I-95 (aNkati”CT”). Besides, I only have to get as far as New Haven on it, which in a normal universe would not be very far. In a normal universe.

And really, it’s kind of OK, by comparison.

At least for a while. It isn’t GOOD, but at least it’s moving. Until it reaches the point where enough other people have had the same idea, and at that stage BOTH roads simply clamp shut. At this point, when I have spent the first FIVE hours of a FOUR-HOUR trip averaging 20 miles per hour, and the past half-hour fantasizing about getting all the way up into second gear, I form yet another desperate resolve. I inch up to the next possible junction and… I get back on I-95… SOUTHBOUND. I now spend the sixth hour of my four-hour trip averaging negative 70 MPH; I am making tracks, hell-for-leather, back the way I came, and damn it feels good.

Backtrack to where I can cut back over to the tried-and-true Merritt (AKA 15), and after a slight kerfuffle I get on it and head north again, grateful to be moving, albeit slowly.

It’s now 8:00 PM, and I’ve been on the road since 2:00. I stop and put in a call to Patrick, asking him to let Jennifer (whom I can’t reach because she’s still at the fairgrounds with no cell signal) know that at this rate, well, she probably shouldn’t wait up for me.

By the time Jen calls me back an hour later, we’re looking at a big improvement. I’ve broken through the Barricade of Slog at last and am doing 75 on I-91, the last major leg of the trip, making up for lost time in fine brisk style. We agree that I’ve got maybe an hour to go and that Jen may as well go ahead and order pizza. We hang up.

And not five minutes later… Wham-o.

After the incident a lot of people asked me “was it at that terrible curve?” and I had no idea what to say because I had no memory of any curve; all I knew was that this huge THING appeared suddenly, out of the darkness, out of nowhere, right in front of me in the middle lane, and that the inevitable impact felt like the Airborne Monster Cinderblock Of Doom. It wasn’t until much later that I looked at a map and reconstructed what they meant and what must have happened. THE Curve probably explains why and how a mattress ceased to be on the top of some schmuck’s vehicle and became a deadly engine of highway destruction - and also explains why and how it could have loomed up before me with no warning at all.

Having lost all sense of time and space while the thing was actually happening, I found it interesting to reconstruct some part of the location and trajectory, and to determine that it must have taken me approximately 1,000 feet to come to a juddering stop (it felt to me like whatever I had hit I had picked up and was dragging with me; not true, of course, but it was my best guess based on the sensation of rims clunking directly on pavement) - still in the middle lane - with my hazard lights flashing and the rest of me shaking all over.

The next person in line came to a stop directly behind me. The thing had taken out both of my RIGHT tires, and both of her LEFT ones. Next guy got it on the right - one tire. I’m not sure about #4, though I do know he too lost a tire but otherwise, like the rest of us, was miraculously unhurt.

Here, incidentally, is a full-on view of my poor little car as it appeared after being deposited in the lot of the mechanic who (first in a long line of uncertainties) might or might not be open - and indeed as it turned out was not open - over the holiday weekend.

You’ll note it’s listing strongly to starboard.

Here’s why:

When I could speak I called Jen back and told her to revise the time estimate upward….

The rest you pretty much know, I guess. We managed to limp to the shoulder. Called the cops. Arranged for all the towing and the waiting. Jen schlepped an hour each way to scoop me up along with all my gear, and we were safe in the motel by 1:00 AM - and I was actually glad to see a mattress.

And now for my award speech, because I would like to thank the heroes of this saga. For starters the people who technically were only doing their jobs but who did them with grace and kindness: three anonymous tow-truck operators and two ditto state troopers. Jennifer, who had already had the day from hell (and no help from me in setting up the booth) before coming far out of her way to rescue me. TheBoy^TM, who had to coordinate the logistics of the whole salvage and repairs operation from a distance, because I could neither call nor be called, neither send nor receive messages of any kind, during the day on Saturday and Sunday. And Dan, who cheerfully stuck around on Sunday to help us take down and pack up the booth (again! watch out, laddie, this is getting to be a habit), and then just as cheerfully loaded me and all my gear into his car and drove me all the way to West Springfield in the hope - but not actual certainty - that I’d be able to pick up the car and drive it cautiously home.

Which, very fortunately for me and not much less so for him, it turned out I could. And did.

And now I think I’ve got that out of my system at last and can turn to matters fibery with a clear and relatively undistracted mind. And I can’t say I’m sorry to learn that Mercury will be out of retrograde before my next trip.

I would just like to say this, though, to whoever has been going around tossing mattresses out on the high road to the detriment of innocent motorists:

Hard be your bed, now and forever.

So the car was in fact OK, except for two tires and one rim. What with the holiday weekend and incredibly complicated logistics (there is NO cell phone service at the Cummington fairgrounds unless you happen to be on Verizon, and even that is iffy), I figure I’m lucky yet again that it was possible for the car to be drivable and available by the time the show was over: wearing two new tires in front and the donut spare in back, I came home sl-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-owly and carefully - and uneventfully.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, I must say it was a marvelous weekend. Don’t know yet how we did from a business standpoint - hey, if I made enough to offset the cost of my Close Encounter of the Rogue Mattress Kind I will consider it gravy - but we sure did have us a fine time with our friends. There is just nothing like Cummington for that.

As usual these days I will be late to the party with stories and pictures and details and loot - for one thing I kind of feel like I need to start off with the wounded-car pictures, and I don’t have those yet because they’re still languishing in Jennifer’s camera. But also as usual I can coast for the moment on other people’s reportage - by way of appetizer you can feast your eyes on the blog of A Certain Overachiever, as well as some great pictures on Kathe’s Flickr photostream.

To put the cart before the horse for a moment, though, I must just mention that on the way home I discovered the slow lane’s silver lining: stopping en route to fuel myself and to give the donut a little breather, I discovered what has to be one of the Top Ten Diners on the PLANET. Seriously. Just off Exit 9 on Rte 84 in Newtown, CT, the Blue Colony Diner. From here on out, I assure you, any remotely northward trip I take will include, if necessary, a considerable detour to get me there again. I can’t believe I almost didn’t go in; I can’t believe that I considered just going in for take-out. It was a fortunate impulse that seated me at the counter and kept me there.

The food was really good, but I’m not sure I would have cared if it had been fried cardboard; what swamped and enveloped me was the realness and neighborhood-ness of the place. It’s a good clean really-truly diner, family-run, with plenty of pride and integrity; there’s not a trace of faux gentrification or delusions of grandeur about it, and it just exudes warm down-to-earth-ness. With a sense of humor. Salt of the earth ain’t innit. Nearly everyone there was a regular who knew the staff by name. Hell, by the time I left there I was a regular who knew the staff by name. As a rule I’m not one to go volunteering my life story to strangers, but I guess somehow these people weren’t strangers.

So when you go there - and go there you should - be sure to look for “Greek Diane” and for the waitress who nicknames herself “Rude” (and is anything but), and tell ‘em hi from the lady who got attacked by a mattress on the highway. Tell ‘em I’ll be back.