"You mean I can't wear flip flops in the rain?"

For someone who's unemployed I find myself surprisingly busy. I have no shortage of things slated for the needles--a vest for my dad, a neck warmer for my mom, a cowl type thing for me, a Montego Bay-ish scarf I've been meaning to knit for about a year. . . Oh, and let's not forget about my terminally WIP Grecian Plait and the Springtime in Philadelphia beret I'm half way done with. Yet, even with all that stuff close to being/currently on the needles I find myself coming up with new projects for myself.

I've lived in the Bay Area for over two years now and consider myself a happy (though unlikely) convert. As a kid I sang the praises of my beachy, deserty homeplace, even going so far as to claim that I would never move away. Yet, years later, I find that I've happily adjusted to the absence of L.A. traffic (let's be real, all of Southern California is now plagued by the traffic that used to exist only in Los Angeles), the amazingly tolerant people, and the pedestrian culture up here. One thing I seem to have been ignoring, though, is the weather.

This fact became apparent to me when I was looking through my wardrobe on a cold day earlier this week. Different colored tank tops for every day of the month? Check. Absurd number of lightweight cotton cardigans and jackets? Checkity check check. Luscious warm sweaters? Che--wait a minute... where are all my sweaters?

How embarrassing for a knitter not to own any sweaters. I suppose my brain never snapped out of perma-warm weather mode, and somehow I managed to avoid buying or knitting a single sweater (for what it's worth, I also never got the hang of wearing shoes. Only after slipping on wet concrete did it occur to me that my Rainbow Sandals were perhaps not the most rain-appropriate footwear). Which leads me back to my point about how I can't seem to stop casting on for new stuff. My sweater crisis the other night and the increasingly crisp weather make it clear that I must I must knit myself a sweater for winter pronto. And out of Malabrigo, no less.

So here I am with piles of job applications to fill out and a half-dozen knitting projects to work on, and all I can think about is when I can bike over to the LYS and buy some Malabrigo for my simple, classy, perfect sweater. Something with bell sleeves, and maybe some tiny cables; something the color of the foam on a latte. (Do Lattes even have foam? I'm not a coffee drinker).