Some people fix their hearts on their goals, map out a plan to achieve them, and toil relentlessly until they’ve become doctors or successful entrepreneurs, artists or builders of schools for girls in Southeast Asia or published authors. I truly admire those people, and for a long time I lived with the gnawing worry that I didn’t seem to be one of them. I’ll be 28 years old this summer, and so far I’ve been employed as a teacher, an editor, a construction worker, a paralegal, an administrative assistant, a college admissions intern. I have degrees in anthropology, environmental studies, and education. I’ve contemplated further schooling in art history, astronomy, architecture, literature. When I was a kid I thought I’d be a veterinarian, an archaeologist, or a marine biologist. Sometimes I think I’d just like to go be a woodworker with my dad. At any rate, my career path seems to have the trajectory of a windblown dandelion seed. As I said, this used to bother me.

But the upside of lacking the drive and vision to pursue the kind of quantifiable success that gets you introduced by your vocation at cocktail parties is that you’re generally more free to follow the interesting overgrown offshoots from the trail. And you never know what’s down there.

Because I have a blog and a knitting habit, I drifted into a job at one of the greatest schools around. Because of said blog and habit, I met Katrin, and we began to take weekly knitterly refuge in one another’s company. And on Sunday, waiting for her at our usual haunt, I was suddenly offered a job in a yarn store (cue Holy Grailish choral music). Could there be any greater felicity than spending a few days a week fondling yarn and helping other people to fondle yarn and getting paid for it? I won’t even tell you about the discounts. You’d cry.

So Tuesday and yesterday I spent four and a half hours up to my elbows in luscious yarny goodness, happy as a pig in a slop trough. As if this weren’t enough, the powers that be needed someone to model a gorgeous silk sweater for a quick photoshoot while I was there. For Vogue Knitting. (I assume just for their advertisement in the magazine, but Mr. Garter is getting maximum mileage out of the notion of his wife as a model.)

Still, it gets better. Here’s a teasing peep at a pending addition to the ShibuiKnits pattern line (imagine the green as richer and less yellowy than it insisted on being here, despite my best efforts):

Designed and knit by yours truly. Now excuse me while I go do a little boogie dance. I may be blundering around in the woods nowhere near a career path, but I’m not wholly without ambition, and becoming a designer has been a dream of mine for the last couple of years. Life, though not without its heartaches, is ultimately very invigorating these days.

I meant to be writing this on Monday. I had pictures ready. Pictures of knitting, finished knitting, made by me. But as it turns out, it’s been a week of anxiety and lumps in the throat, sore feet and the glum blues. Mingus the cat went missing on Sunday night — maybe it’s spring fever, maybe a dog chased him into an unfamiliar neighborhood, maybe it’s something worse. The not knowing is worse, for one. Mingus is a prime booger, up to no good at least once a day, usually looking for trouble and finding it, but I miss him… I can’t even write how much. I’ll get snot all over the keyboard. This week I’ve done everything you can do — visiting the shelters every two days, posting fliers all over a ten block radius and the internet, calling for him everywhere, talking to neighbors (you can meet a lot of really nice people looking for an errant cat), pouncing at every new message on the answering machine, running outside in a bathrobe at 2 a.m. without my glasses because some cats were snarling at each other and maybe it was my bellicose little pisser disturbing the peace. Mr. Garter left for Texas and his sister’s graduation at the crack of dawn on Wednesday, and it’s lonesome here without either of my boys.

Tonight I finally broke down and wept a little weep. I was already kind of unhinged about the cat, and then I got the news that Lloyd Alexander died. Most of you probably don’t pay a lot of attention to children’s literature, but he was one of the Truly Greats. And as Kristen put it, there won’t be another writer like him. Lloyd was an old-fashioned storyteller, and his books were marked by innocent joy and skillful craft, always wise and gentle and true and fun. No potty humor, nothing racy or edgy — and they still capture kids’ imaginations by virtue of the peculiar and simple magic of good story. I loved them growing up, and I loved them even more when I was assistant to his editor in New York. It felt like private admission to Xanadu to open a box containing his typewritten manuscript, and how I glowed when he adopted my suggestions. In my little experience of him as an author and as a person, he was witty and generous, scholarly to the point of endearing nerdiness, and a great lover of cats. On my mantle is an Edward Gorey stuffed cat he gave me for Christmas a couple of years ago. I propped it up there when I was unpacking because I didn’t have another place in mind for it, and somehow it’s stayed. I like its funny eyebrows and its red & brown knit sweater. Lloyd always drew his own Christmas cards; invariably they were cats standing in for the figures in famous works of art, and we all had to guess what painting they spoofed. I hadn’t studied art history yet and I wasn’t very good at guessing; I like to think that this year I would have gotten the reference.

I don’t know what Lloyd’s thoughts about the afterlife were, but I like to think of him as having gone to dwell among his many vibrant characters — with his wife and all their cats, of course. And I kind of hope he’ll keep an eye on Mingus for me, and maybe remind him that it’s good to return home after the journey.

My father and I felled the 30′ mimosa tree in my back garden. Thanks to a combination of good fortune, my weight on the end of some well-placed dropes, and Dad’s mad skills with a chainsaw and a come-along, we did this without damaging the cars, the fence, the garage, the house, my mother, or ourselves. RIP, mimosa. Its pink blossoms were a sheer delight, but it split down the bole during the wind storms and couldn’t survive.

I acquired a fabulous little oil painting from Yves, a French art dealer with whom I’ve become chummy.

I took my parents to the Portland Art Museum.

We watched The Queen (for me, a second time). Helen Mirren rocks my socks, but the Corgis steal the show whenever they’re on screen. My parents liked the movie almost as much as they liked the novelty of $3 movies + microbrew, a staple of Portland entertainment.

We hung my grandmother’s beautiful needlework tapestry in my entry way.

We went up to the island and picnicked on my parents’ property, from which you can see Mt. Baker, Mt. Rainier, and the Olympic range. We also saw some of the first hummingbirds of the season.

I forked horse manure.

I helped my friend Eliza’s delightful five-year-old collect half a sheep skeleton for her “bone museum.” If only I’d had my camera to help you visualize this wee elfling tramping down the hillside with a hock joint, a skull, part of a rib cage, three vertebrae, and a pelvis cradled in her short little arms.

I dug into a juicy treat: Nancy Milford’s Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. It was recommended by Rebecca, and I mentioned it to my book club as a possibility for our May read. I’m finding it hard to put down.

I listened to the Capitol Steps perform on NPR. They sang my favorite number, “God Bless My SUV,” and a ditty about the attorney scandal to the tune of “The Lonely Goatherd,” complete with yodeling. Awesome.

I carpooled home to Portland with my cousins. I was the Dispenser of Peanuts, Sandwiches, and Stroopwafels (if you do not know the manna that is the stroopwafel, you haven’t lived) and the Changer of Discs of The Trumpet of the Swan, as read by E.B. White himself (be still my heart).

I knit a lot on Glee (pictures of that soon: I’m working in the round and inventing waist shaping now).

I met my girl Katrin for coffee and more knitting. Katrin is making this, so we scratched our heads over Kim Hargreaves’s utterly baffling directions for picot cast-on. Following them precisely, I produced a bizarre spinal column of stitches on two needles that looked nothing like a picot edge.

I caught up on past episodes of Dancing with the Stars and cast on a Chevron Scarf ala Domesticat. I try not to stick my thumb out for too many bandwagons, but since I began this project more than two years ago, I’m forgiving myself the lapse. Cat’s zaggy version was so much cooler than the Old Shale start I’d made that I tore out my sad ten inches of abandoned scarflet. It should be the perfect birthday present for my mother-in-law’s 60th in May. Unfortunately, although I’m using the same Koigu and size 3 needles, my scarf isn’t lying as obediently flat as Cat’s. It wants to fold up along the increases and decreases. I’m hoping a vigorous blocking will persuade it of the errors of its stubborn ways. Has anybody else had this problem?

Thank you all so much for your lovely comments and generous praise for the Fishtrap Aran. I’m working up a post on the technical details for those of you who wanted to know more about the finishing process.

In the mean time, I’m struggling to keep my eyes open. Whose bright idea was it to kick Daylight Savings three weeks up the calendar? I think I get to pin this one on the Republican party, no? Dadgummit, it was just getting easier to decant myself out of bed at 6:20 because it wasn’t pitch dark anymore.

Happily, thoughtful Mr. Garter thought to put some fresh undies in the dryer for me long before dawn when he got up to drive Cousin Ewa to the airport. Clean laundry eases the pain of forced reentry into waking life considerably. It’s been Cousin Central chez Garter this past week as the whole clan assembled to remember Mr. G’s Great Uncle Wilbur, who passed away in January. Last night we had cousins festooning both spare mattresses and the couch, and we all stayed up much too late in gales of laughter over family quirks and anecdotes. Uncle Wilbur painstakingly recorded his entire life on typewriter, along with helpful chapters of advice directed at his descendents. “Who Am I Going to Marry?” was a particular favorite (take note, ladies: a career at a newspaper — or, one assumes, any career at all — may signal “marriage is not a priority”, and your suitors may turn elsewhere), as were his ruminations on the benefits of child labor and a wholly speculative account of his parents’ courtship. I give you this sage and somber observation:

“A pitchfork is a terrible thing to run across in a haystack.”

I don’t believe that adage came from the courtship chapter, but it may have. I was laughing too hard to make a proper citation.

I feel as though I’ve run across just such a nettlesome pitchfork in the freelance work I do in my non-knitting life. A project for my father-in-law has eaten far more of the past two months than I ever intended to give it, and it’s become an obstacle to a lot of the work I’ve wanted to do with patterns and with this blog. I had hoped that by now I’d have a snazzy page full of projects for you to download, because the ideas keep coming and I’m only lacking the hours it takes to write up sound patterns and knit up samples. John made me think about what we take from the online knitting community and what we give back, and now I’m feeling obligated to do my bit. Unfortunately, the freelance beast has managed to coincide with a final exam and another deadline I’m hoping to meet, but I hope that April will bring some new life to Blue Garter. Stay tuned. And watch out for pitchforks.