Well, the meeting yesterday was not fast. It was, in fact, long, drawn-out, and somewhat rancorous. And I'm fully expecting, as head of the group, to have to deal with whatever blowback is going to result from our turning down a particular request.

But oh well.

I went home after the meeting and put the tail end of the Rangers game on the radio. Now, I am not particularly a Rangers fan, and not really a baseball fan, and I'm dismayed but not surprised that so many of them are using steroids (and that's another rant for another time), but I do like having the games on the radio going in the background.

I don't know why, but I find listening to radio baseball announcers - the particular cadence of their speech, the way they can seamlessly go back and forth between discussing stats or past games and reporting on something that happens right then in the current game, the way they say "Swing-and-a-miss," all that - I find it oddly comforting. It's like, when baseball is on the radio, I'm somewhere safe, I'm somewhere where people can't come and pick at me for stuff.

I don't know why - my father is not a particularly great baseball fan. My mother is not a sports fan at all. I don't remember long summer afternoons as a child sitting in the shade listening to the Indians ('cos that's who'd it'd've been) on the radio, or driving places with the announcers discussing the game. I didn't know either of my grandfathers well enough to know if they were particular fans of baseball, or to have had the experience of, say, hanging out in their workshops with them while they listened to the game. (My mother does tell me that her father - whom I never knew - after he was retired, one of his great summer joys was to sit in the cool dim living room of an afternoon, with a bottle of beer or pop, and listen to the game on the radio. Although I don't believe in inheritance of acquired characteristics, sometimes I wonder if there's some kind of, I don't know, psychic memory of things that get passed down through families...)

But anyway. I listened to the tail end of the Rangers getting beat, and I ironed up the fat quarters I've selected for the pastel quilt, and I started cutting. And the bad meeting receded in my mind, and I felt a certain peace.

Sometimes, I find, working on a quilt is a better retreat from the world than knitting. With knitting, you're basically stationary - you're sitting, only your hands are moving. It's a good time for reflection and contemplation, but if there's something in your head you'd rather forget than contemplate, it's not always the most relaxing pastime. With working on a quilt - I mean, piecing a quilt - it's more active, you're up and down, you're over to the iron to press something, you're having to concentrate hard to use the rotary cutter so you don't cut your hand or mis-cut the small precious piece of fabric. It's a better way to drive stuff out of your head than knitting, even lace knitting, is.

Later, I shifted to working on the simple socks. I need to take some of my disks home with me so I can get pictures of the current states of my current projects.