Every year in January, the trade association for yarn shop owners, TNNA, holds its Spring yarn market in California. Usually it’s in San Diego, sometimes it’s elsewhere. This is an elsewhere year. I was originally scheduled to fly in today, Wednesday, arriving just in time for a class with Cat Bordhi this afternoon at 3:00. Yesterday morning, when I went to check in online and print my boarding passes, I discovered that the airline changed my reservation without notifying me. Instead of arriving at John Wayne International Airport at 1:30, I was arriving at 6:30. Not good.

So I got on the phone with the airline, and ultimately decided to travel yesterday. It’s a good thing I’m an organized person, and that I didn’t give in to procrastination last week, because I was lugging my suitcase to the first floor of our house at the exact moment BJ Bass pulled in the driveway to take me to the airport. As far as I can tell, I didn’t even forget anything! My only consternation was, what to take as travel knitting? I have two active projects right now, both of which take up more space than I’d like to use on an airplane.

Meet the Sea Monkey! You’ll recall that I’ve made Monkey socks before, and I loved the knitting and the wearing of them. Sadly, they snuck into a machine load and now are small enough to fit my sister’s tiny feet. The yarn is a sample skein of a wool/seacell blend that I dyed over the holidays using K1C2’s Culinary Colors.

The first leg of the trip, from Huntsville to Atlanta was the usual sardine can routine, so I knit very little. My seatmate was interesting and chatty. It’s not very often that I’m seated next to someone who wants to talk, but he did, endearing himself to me immediately by recognizing the craft as knitting and the project as the beginnings of a sock, without any prompting from me.

We sat on the tarmac for half an hour, held up by delayed traffic in Atlanta. We finally took off, and I made it to my connecting flight with moments to spare — they held the door for me. I had the entire row of seats to myself all the way to California, so I spread out and knitted till my eyes wouldn’t stay open any longer. I arrived at the hotel at 11:30 PST, which was 1:30 am on my internal clock, and slept like a rock.

Now I’m off to find the convention center, sign in at the registration booth, get my bearings and get on with this trip. Oh, would someone remind me next year that it’s always cold in California in January, whether or not The Weather Channel thinks so? I’m glad I at least brought a shawl!