I Have a Brilliant Idea!!!

(Oh great, now I’m having delusions of grandeur….this can’t bode well……)

But see, here’s the deal: I’ve been reading blogs for several months now, and I always think it’s cool when people do those exchanges—you know, sockpals, one skein exchange, etc. However, I only learn about them after people post about their booty (not that kind of booty, get your mind out of the gutter! It’s like pirate booty, for heaven’s sake!) by which time, obviously, it’s too late to join.

Well, Jo recently posted about getting a package from Marianne…and I thought (another bad sign, I fear) “Gee, why don’t I START an exchange?” I don’t have 100’s of readers, but I think that’s okay. For one thing, I kind of like the intimacy of a handful of people because we might actually get to know one another better, a thing which is very near and dear to my heart. If I had 10 or more, I think it could work. Heck, I might even try it with 6.

I am completely open to suggestion as to how this might look, but here are my first thoughts (definitely open to change). With the holidays closing in (like how I use the phrase “closing in”, as though it was a fighter jet circling over my house?), it seems like asking people to knit for one more person would be needlessly cruel, and might well result in a number of stunned, overwhelmed knitters, sitting on their couches amid piles of yarn and crying softly. In fact, since many of you may be headed for that particular abyss without my help (and, for the record, I do not do knitted Christmas gifts because I am all too aware that the specter of stupid knitting mistakes, also known as the Screw-Up Fairy, is overly inclined to visit me without the added temptation of messing with all my holiday gifts and turning Christmas into a hellish mass of hysteria and recrimination….not that I’ve been there or anything…..), I’m thinking that it might be nice to have the exchange be care packages, in the sense of “I care that the holidays are trying, once again, to drive you to the funny farm and I would like to take some care of you before you become a few yarnovers short of a lace pattern”. Wouldn’t that be kind of fun? You know—tea, chocolate, a magazine, bath beads, whatever rubs your Buddha (or, more accurately, your exchange pal’s Buddha).

I also thought that it might be fun to then turn it around. Once you’ve received your way cool box of goodies, you could then have the name and address of the person who gifted you (no longer a surprise, I realize, but when considering surprise vs. loot, well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?) and send them a post-Christmas “I’m so glad you survived and I hope you still have some remaining hair and are not driveling and drooling in the corner” package to thank them.

I’m on a roll here; I’m going to hope for enough interest and keep going. I don’t want to limit this to just the folks with blogs, as I have a couple of very dear commenters who have no blogs. They need to rectify this, of course, as I would then be able to communicate with them more easily and it’s all about me….but I digress. I think the blogless among us could participate….perhaps they could send photos or descriptions of what they received to someone with a blog (such as myself) and it would be posted for them. If you all think this would be fun, I would design a questionnaire for you and post it on my blog. You can copy and paste it into your own with all your answers (so the other person knows enough about you to get you something you kinda want—no one wants to proudly send a pound of homemade beef jerkey to the local vegan and make them cry); if you don’t have a blog you can send your answers to me via e-mail and I can get it to the right person. Once I have all the names, I can set a deadline and then match people. I would probably want to try to match people from very different geographical locations—it’s kind of fun to get stuff you can’t get where you are. For instance, I could include huckleberry truffles made from Washington State huckleberries (although what in the world a “huckle” is, I’ll never know….), which would be something of a yawn for a fellow Evergreen State-er, but possibly kind of fun for someone in, say, England, who happens to have a chocolate monkey and a sense of flavor adventure.

So, whattya say? Anyone wanna play with me?

In other news, the fact that I have spent an inordinate amount of time today writing an autobiography for my psych class may well have something to do with my feverish desire to organize something happy and fun and not at all dreary. Is it wrong that I keep wishing I could spice up my autobiography a bit? Nothing big, like “….and then I became an astronaut while still maintaining my position as principal with the New York Ballet”, (although ya gotta admit--that does sound pretty cool) but, you know, something that makes me sound a bit more fascinating, like “and I race drag cars in my spare time”, or “and then I led that trek through the amazon”, or even “I will never forget the native people of Nepal….”. All of which sounds just a tad bit better than “the highlight of my last month was when I sat down and organized my yarn stash….I even found that pink cotton I thought I had lost, although I no longer recall what I meant to do with it……”