Armed for War

I am now officially a compulsive e-mail checker.

Death by Socks begins as soon as the pattern posts....which is whenever the organizer happens to post it....any time today. And now that it's after midnight, well, I want to be the first to get the pattern since my victim lives in Ontario and the person living for me only lives one state north of me. :-S My experience working for a book distributor two jobs ago taught me that mail to Canada is SLOW. The good news is that mail to Canada goes through Ontario so my victim will get her socks faster than if she lived in British Columbia (even though BC is closer geographically).

For those of you who have not heard of DbS or Sock Wars, it's an assasin-style game where each knitter is assigned a victim. Your goal is to knit your socks (all knitters knitting from the same pattern) as fast as you can and mail them to your victim to "kill" them. Once they are dead, they mail you the yarn and unfinished socks there were working on for their victim, which you finish and send to their victim to kill them, who sends you their unfinished socks......it goes on and on like this until you either die and are out or emerge victorious.

I'm curious to see how it goes. At any rate, as ambitious as I am, I'm not too optimistic that I'll last very long. My assassin either talks a good game or knits very fast, and lives pretty close to me. Once the socks she's killing me with are done, it will take 1-2 days to get here while mine will take at least a week to get to my Canadian victim.

If I die early in DbS, I can join Sock Wars, which starts in March (assuming I decide I like the whole knitting-as-a-game thing). There is some talk on SW about people in previous competitions which have made their socks out of worsted in order to get them done faster. This, in my estimation, is cheating. I own a pair of worsted weight socks and they aren't good for anything but hiking socks. And while they are pretty decent hiking socks, I don't really hike enough to make good use of them. That and if I'm making socks with skinny yarn on tiny needles, I'm going to be miffed if I'm offed by someone using worsted and size 7's.

Anyway....that's my sockerly rant. Better go check my e-mail again. Wish me luck