Top 10 Reasons I Should've Gone to Knitting

10. The women (and one man) that gather are fantastic folks
9. It's like the only time all week I actually knit
8. All the stuff I thought I "needed" to do didn't get done anyway
7. I wouldn't have yelled Shit! so loudly in my mother's ear
6. I wouldn't have burned my hand
5. I wouldn't have stepped on the cat
4. I wouldn't have inhaled so much smoke
3. I wouldn't have had to open the windows and feel 36 degrees inside my house
2. I wouldn't have wasted a ton of oats
1. I wouldn't have caught the oven on fire

Yep, that's right. Trying to squeeze in a "quick batch" of granola--among the hundred other things I tried to get done while ignoring my instincts and skipping Knitting group--I ruined not only the granola, but the entire evening.

On the phone with my mom, I absently measured ingredients, stirred to perfection and opened the oven door. Not realizing it would hit a drawer perpendicular to it that was slightly open, the oven door bounced right back up, catapulting the tray of carefully laden granola out of my hand and all over the inside of the hot oven. Being coated with oil (and all kinds of yummy spices), it quickly began to burn. I jumped off the phone, stepped on the cat, frantically tried to un-stick quickly burning oats from the oven floor, burned my hand, dried my eyes out with smoky heat, and generally fell apart. It was the stuff of a good hard laugh, I'm sure, to see me there in the mess.

Needing to salvage some part of this project lest the whole thing end in failure, I cleaned everything up and decided to continue ahead as planned--with the granola that didn't burn.

Ah, how hindsight is 20/20. Silencing the very wise voice in the back of my head that said, "Some of the oats fell through the oven floor to places you couldn't reach..." I thought, "They'll be fine!" I turned the oven back on, inserted the much-smaller portion I thought could be salvaged, and promptly proceeded to move on to the next project. That is, until I realized black smoke was billowing out of the oven and that large flames were leaping up from the They'll-be-fine! oats that, being coated with oil as they were, had commenced to catch fire.

With visions of the gas oven exploding me to smithereens, I quickly turned it off, filled a quart full of water and madly threw it into the oven. Which, thankfully, turned out to be the one successful thing I did all evening.

So I learned something last night, skipping knitting and catching the oven on fire:

When I feel out of balance, I don't need to merely switch activities (i.e., trade Activity A for Activity B)... I need to STOP. Altogether. No activity. Nothingness. Rest. Nada. Zilch. I need to cease the forward movement, take a deep breath, get still and quiet, and re-center.

It's a tough lesson. My house is still smoky, my hand and the cat are still sore, the granola is still not available for breakfast, I have charred remnants still to clean out (in a part of the oven that has to be dismantled before I can use it again), and I still feel off-kilter. And dagnabit, I miss my knitters! But, it's a lesson learned.