I'm going to be turning 30 in November, which will mean that I can no longer consider myself a teenager.

I don't think it's too early to start coming to terms with the implications. It's going to mean a major shift in perspective. A reckoning with my list of Things I'll Accomplish Before I'm 30. And time for a new list:

How Turning 30 Is Different (and coincidentally, better) Than Turning 20

1. My love life. Yay! I'm one of those lucky people that got matched up with a soul mate. And now we have this stable and nifty thing called a marriage. Much better than finding out the person you thought you were in a relationship with was actually sleeping with two of your closest friends. Two! Not one. Yikes.
2. Finances. I have a career, y'all. I'm not working two jobs plus a work-study in the cafeteria at school. I can buy grown-up things like a house and a car. I have a retirement plan. I have life insurance. I have a bedspread that didn't come from Goodwill.
3. Parenting. Can I just tell you how nice it is not to always be the youngest mother in every playgroup? And how nice it is to be parenting with an invested partner? It's nice. It's also nice not to have random strangers offering me advice like "You should put some socks on that baby's feet!" Because I guess now I look like I know what I'm doing. Or maybe now I just look mean and unapproachable.
4. My goal weight. Then: 97. Now: 118. Progress!
5. Creative outlets Knitting is so much more portable and (dare I say it?) practical than hauling around loads of paints of other supplies for a creative fix. I wonder if I had been knitting at 20 if I wouldn't have minded so much that my boyfriend was a fuckwit and I felt compelled to work things out because of baby Matilda. At least I could have knitted some witty diaper covers.

Weird, I'm nearly a grown-up.

On my drive to work, there's a certain left turn that I never feel confident making without a green arrow. It's on a busy street, with oncoming traffic coming up over a hill around a curve. You can't actually see the car barreling toward you until you're halfway into the turn. So I usually sit there and wait for the arrow.

Inevitably, there is a middle-aged man in an SUV behind me in the turn lane, just itching to lurch into traffic and arrive at his destination one fraction of a second sooner. Often he's smoking a cigarette. Sometimes he's a woman. But regardless, my sitting at the green light ahead of him as traffic whizzes by is infuriating.

At the slightest break in traffic, I can somehow read his thoughts: "Come on! You could have made it!"

I anticipate the honk:

HONK.

I know without even looking that he's shaking his head at me in disgust.

I glance in my rear-view window. Yep! There's the head shake. Occasionally it will be punctuated by an angry drag on the cigarette.

I used to take it personally, but it's become so routine now that I almost count on it. I think it's funny that no matter who is in that SUV behind me, they unfailingly participate in the traffic break/honk/head shake ritual. They probably don't even realize that every SUV that's gone before them in that same turn lane has experienced the same frustration at my little green car's failure to make that left-hand turn.

They should take comfort in that, I think. It'll give them something to do while they sit there and fume.

Sometimes when the kids are clingy and clients are complaining (and vice versa) I find myself thinking things like, "What I really need is a good bout of the flu to make me stay in bed and knit for several days."

What I fail to remember is that the flu doesn't make you want to sit in bed and knit. It makes you want to curl up in a fetal position and wish for death. It also occurred to me that weeks 6 through 12 of pregnancy felt a lot like that, and so, no thank you, we won't be having any more babies in the near future. I'm just glad that after several days of compulsive vomiting I no longer have to know what my food looks like after I swallow it.

In the meantime, the spiders in my house have disappeared as mysteriously as they arrived. This lends credence to both Jim's and Carole's theories below, that a) they were venturing inside in search of moisture because it has been so rainless lately; or b) that something very primal and female-weaver-spirit-ish was trying to make itself known.

I listened to the spiders. I finished one of the ten thousand half-finished knitting projects stuffed behind my shelf, and lo! They are gone. Huzzah.

Plus, summer rain makes me happy. Knitting while it's raining is pure joy, I tell you. It's better than s'mores.

Gertrude decided last night that it was high time she showed everyone the contents of her stomach. Repeatedly. And that is why I have this knot on my head. Because at 2:42 a.m. when one is sleeping on sofa cushions on the floor beside a sick child, and that child suddenly bolts upright screaming, "Mama, PUKE!!!"… well, it is very easy for your feet to become entangled in your blanket while lunging for the trash can. And you can very easily wind up cracking your head on the bed post of child's bed.

As such, I'm too exhausted to pick up toys strewn about my living room or to fill the dishwasher with virus-contaminated water cups and plates holding crumpled, half-eaten pieces of dry toast.

I am not, however, too exhausted to finish eating the entire fruit pizza we had stashed in the freezer. Frozen fruit pizza is even better than fresh fruit pizza. And those frozen strawberries (embedded in frozen cream cheese frosting, atop a frozen sugar cookie crust) have assured me they contain enough super-charged vitamin C to keep a thousand viruses at bay.

So I obviously have nothing to worry about.

Except those really cute size 7 jeans I just bought on clearance. That was stupid, what with fruit pizza in the freezer and all.

Can someone please explain to me why there are spiders in my house? Big, black, hairy, angry spiders. And they're everywhere, including my bedroom. I'm so freaked out I don't even know what to do.

The irony is, I've never been especially afraid of spiders. I'd rather have spiders in my house than cockroaches. Or flying bugs. Or flying cockroaches. Brrr. I had one of those things find its way into my room when I was a kid, and I'm still traumatized. Even my cat went into hiding from it.

I remember it actually being about as big as the cat.

Anyway, here's a milestone for me:



My first sock! It's an actual sock, with a turned heel and a decreased toe and everything. I'm so proud of it.

You'll notice it's toddler-sized, and there's a reason for that. These socks are for Sam, a little handknitted footnote to the Pixie Dust for Sam campaign. He's an adorable two-year-old baby who's about to have a bone marrow transplant, and I figured he could use some warm fuzzies on his tooties. If you want to knit or otherwise make something for Sam, let me know and I'll add it to the package. In addition to the socks, I'm going to send a couple of Sam-sized hats like this one:



…and maybe try to knit a toy or two, because we all know how kids love getting socks as gifts. Maybe he can use them as hand puppets.