It’s a chilly, blustery day. The wind is gusting outside in ways that seem to penetrate every single crevice, uninsulated wall, and leaky window of this old house. The temperature at 1:30 in the afternoon is hovering around 45F, which wouldn’t be bad if the wind weren’t blowing and carrying a fine spray of mist or the occasional thin shower. It’s the kind of day that makes you want to curl up in your favorite chair with a plush afghan, a large cup of your favorite hot beverage, and a good book, or your knitting and something cheerfully mindless on the television set.

It’s that kind of a day, and after picking up a nasty cold in these past two weeks and still finding that my voice comes and goes—I currently sound like a bad imitation of a cross between Marlene Dietrich and a Texas bullfrog—and after teaching four back-to-back classes with that voice, I wanted nothing more than to be curled up in said chair with said cuppa and said knitting or book.

Then look what I found in my mailbox:

The current edition of Interweave Knits.

In order to understand how truly excellent this was, you need to know that I have absolutely no subscriptions to knitting mags, and earnestly wish I did. The problem is that I hate subscribing to a journal I’ve never had in my hands. I like to be able to flip through it and see how it’s laid out, what kind of advertisements there are, and whether there’s enough content to make the subscription price worth my while. Since it would be an international subscription, then those things are double important.

This copy came courtesy of my Secret Pal, and she has absolutely no idea how cool I consider this—it’s not like IK is just hanging around on any old Norwegian magazine vendor’s rack—or how much trouble she’s caused. You see, I also have this:

What is that, you ask? Why, that’s the corner of my desk. While a portion of that is admittedly stuff which just needs to be filed, the stack does not include the term papers and reading responses I’m supposed to have answered more or less yesterday, or the fact that I still lack the last 2″ of the Mittens Swap mittens which I fully intended to have into the mail this week, and am determined will be out in tomorrow’s post.

So what’s my problem? Well, my problem is that I have about 6 hours left in my day, and I absolutely must get everything but the filing done—even while I have this copy of IK leering at me and simply begging me to carefully examine every single glossy advertisement, every single knitting pattern, every single seductive tidbit of knittingliness. (Quit frowning. I teach English; I’m allowed to make up words.)

Sigh.