This weekend at GenCon, no fewer than seven people gave me the now instantly recognizable wide-eyed look and said, “You look so familiar,” including one man dressed impressively in a feathered hat and full-length cloak who was too busy looking impressive to stop walking and talk to me beyond that sentence. I didn’t expect any of those people to actually know me.

The jaw-dropping moment of truth happened Saturday morning as I was waiting outside my hotel to either be picked up by the airport shuttle (transportation was complicated) or split a cab fare with a fellow gamer who was also waiting outside. A couple exited the hotel and looked at us. They offered us both a lift, as they’d rented a car, and we headed to the parking lot. On the way, the question came up and I launched into my stock answer involving genetics and blank features. “Unless you gamed in DC…or live in LA…” I ended, trailing off.

“Yeah, I live in LA.”

“Really? What part?”

The conversation spiralled this way until we determined that this stranger works in my building, one floor upstairs from me. Indeed, I looked familiar because he’d seen me in stairwells and at the adjacent coffee shop. The other passenger listened with the quiet amazement only possible when you’re up too early to create a more verbose response to astonishing phenomena. Not only did this person work upstairs from me, but he plays D&D (probably 4th ed.) and is looking to add another person or two to the game.

This neatly solves the question of how I will get my gaming fix between now and when I graduate, which is increasingly likely to happen in March.

The weird thing is that I still love Christmas music. I’m just tired of singing it. I think a high tolerance to Christmas music is a requirement for a choral singer.

Having discharged my holiday duties as a singer, and nearly done with my duties as a postgrad (ha!), I depart today for Dublin via a long and convoluted route: Hattiesburg, Mississippi, then New York. I will bring my computer and will probably check mail once a day, but I won’t blog.

I will Twitter like a fiend, however. Follow me (DixieNomad) across the country, 140 characters at a time, if you’re so inclined.

There are three Irish designers in this issue of Knitty. And here I’d been thinking the “new wave” of knitting had passed Ireland by.

Knitty is a Canadian publication that initially had a primarily North American audience. After spending years reading through the knitting community, I enjoy the culture around Knitty as much as its content. (Even when the content isn’t to my taste, which has been often.) In some cases, I get to know people because they’ve published in Knitty and I start following their blogs. More often, I get to know people and then find out they’re submitting designs to Knitty.

I knit with the designer of this pattern, and the kid in the kiddie pictures is a friend’s kid. (He just broke his arm and has to have surgery tomorrow to get it set — send him warm thoughts.)

This lady saved my sorry arse this summer when I ran out of wool for a project. I found what I needed in her stash on the Rav and begged her to swap with me. She took a skein of Socks that Rock off me and I got to finish my shawl. And now she has a cute scarf pattern published.

And so on. I love reading about the designers and their inspirations. And, because it’s an odd quirk of my personality, I like knowing where they’re from. (It’s a habit I formed in college and never shook — whenever I meet a person, I want to know where they’re from. I often remember places of origin better than names.) I watch in awe as the strangest things become wildly popular things to knit. I don’t think there’s a sinner in the knitting community who hasn’t at least heard of Clapotis, though I might be the only knitter in the universe who doesn’t hate the design with an irrational passion but still hasn’t knitted one (or five).

The publication might be considered the flagship of the “new knitting.” You know, that knitting that might not be your grandmother’s knitting but we’re not saying that anymore because your grandmother’s knitting was pretty darn amazing and I’d really like to be able to knit like that thank you very much. So I’m happy to see Irish designers submitting their stuff and being included. I’m even interested in actually knitting one of the designs.

It could be that I noticed the Irish representation simply because I’m flying out there in a few short weeks and have done absolutely no planning.

In other news, I’m working like crazy and was accosted by door-to-door evangelists yesterday. By Tuesday, it had already been a long week. Now I’m in a twilight zone of long-weekness and juggling things, I’ve only dropped one thing so far, and it didn’t break.