KIP Day - Sat, June 6

Where did you knit on Worldwide Knit In Public Day? (The first one of the year, I mean ... the second official day is this coming Saturday. Apparently some weird adjustment in the calendar had to be made for the LYS owners who were at TNNA and weren't home knitting in public. Like they couldn't all go hang out at a park together and knit.)

Isn't this the strangest concept? I have been knitting in public for about 35 or 40 years, with responses ranging from interested questions about what I'm doing ("oh, you're crocheting ... my mother did that when she was old too!") to blank stares ("oh, god, I hope that weird woman with the sticks doesn't try to start a conversation with me") to polite lowerings of the eyes in embarrassment, as if I'd just taken off my knickers and waved them over my head while doing the Chicken Dance. (Ellen, if this is a splorf vision, I apologize.)

Anyway, because we're good little followers, the Noble Knitters, or several of them, gathered at the Forum on Saturday to knit in public. Again, odd, because we knit in public (the Barnes & Noble at the Forum) every Wednesday evening, much to the consternation of the other customers who don't appear to understand why we're taking up so much space and having so much fun. ("Who are these old people and why don't they go home?")

We started with lunch at the new California Pizza Kitchen with mixed results. My salad was delicious but some of our team found the deliberately odd and random mixtures a bit odd (who thinks of putting beets and Moroccan chicken together?) and even a little offputting (Eve definitely thinks that pizza belongs on a pizza, not a saltine). And then there was our waitress who was a graduate of the Rude-with-a-Smile school of waitressing ("Separate checks? Yeah, that makes my Saturday!"). Not to mention that everything at CPK is made to order, apparently down to catching and killing the chicken, or at least that's the way the wait seemed.

Yes, we ate in small, discrete groups, because it never occurred to us to ask in advance to be seated together. Oh, well ... I hope all the other tables were as congenial as ours was. And note I didn't say "discreet" because there's really nothing discreet about this group.

Anyway, we straggled outside, again in small groups because the Forum is for ... er, shoppers, not knitters ... and thus there aren't that many chairs available, and certainly not that many with any shade at all.

Which is how some of us ended up ... you guessed it, inside at Barnes & Noble, hanging out in the coffee shop, sucking down pink lemonade slurpees and irritating yet another group of customers.

(How come when 7-11 sells you a Slurpee it costs around a buck and when B&N (aka We're Not Starbucks We Just Look Like One) sells it, it's four bucks? Of course, I'm the one who paid the four bucks, so who's the dummie?)