What keeps me breathing

I got a pair of converse in 8th grade. Okay, not actual converse, the less-expensive rip-off brand, but it's the same idea.  And I adored them. I wore them constantly. For every occasion, and even with my Sunday-go-to-meetin' dress. They eventually started to fall apart and though I couldn't bring myself to part with them, I ended up getting a new pair. Which were buried in the flea-market-like mass of my closest only to be unearthed several years later. I still put on the old ones when I'm feeling lonely. They sort of feel like old friends.

Last week my grandparents were in town from Oregon. Grandma always does the crossword puzzles in the daily paper, and on Saturday, she found an advertisment for something called a yarn crawl. Now, I've heard of pub crawls and figured a yarn crawl couldn't be much different. That's mostly right. The idea is the same, though a yarn crawl is more structured and in most cases, more sober. Instead of one night, you have 9 days to visit every knit shop on the list. They're located all over Colorado. Instead of drinking your way through the local pubs, you feed your yarn addiction. It's a wonderful thing. At your first stop, you recieve a "passport" which you get stamped at every shop along the way. Each shop has their own prize basket filled with knitting(and crocheting)-related goodies. When you reach the last shop you turn in your passport and are entered in a drawing for the grand prize, which is a huge basket filled with something like $1,000 worth of yarn,