It "warmed up" this week -- I think the high has been at or near 40 every day. I never, ever thought I'd be so happy to see 40s in February. I remember a couple of Februarys in high school where I didn't even need a jacket at least for a few days. Then again, I also wrote on that dumb "10 things I will do as an adult" list for my sophomore English teacher that I would never live in a big city like L.A. or New York. (That's still true for L.A., though.)

So I've been wading through the melting piles of snow and itching for baseball season to start. Yeah, yeah, I know we aren't done with football season just yet. I don't care. I want to see my Cardinals -- all the old guys like Jim Edmonds and (my boy) Albert Pujols, all the new guys like Mark Mulder and David Eckstein (the latest in the players-I-like-on-other-teams-that-come-to-the-Cardinals club). And Rick Ankiel, who's kind of both. (And who was my boy before his wild pitch meltdown and the awesomeness that is Albert, and who will hopefully regain enough of his own awesomeness that I will have to have a pitching boy and a position player boy.)

And we are -- though I have to remind myself almost daily -- DEFENDING NATIONAL LEAGUE CHAMPS. Which I haven't been able to say about a Cardinals team since I was 8, when I was new to sports fandom and thought this was the kind of thing my teams did every year. (Again with the young-and-clueless theme.)

But, unfortunately, there's no TIVO'ing of seasons, so I'll slog my way through the remaining six weeks of winter (regardless of what any groundhog said -- at the beginning of February there's always at least six weeks of winter left in New York). I've started a new novel -- about baseball, natch. I've decided to abandon the other one for the time being, not necessarily for good, but because I need to just write a straight linear storyline for a while without worrying about how what I'm writing is going to require rewriting something else, which I know I shouldn't be worrying about but it makes just writing new material seem very daunting and exhausting. (As does that sentence.) This new story, on the other hand, is fun because I'm not dealing with 100 + pages of previously generated backstory, not to mention characters I invented as an undergrad. Ostensibly, it's about the first woman to play major league baseball, but most of the main characters are people who are support staff for the team she plays for -- i.e. the ballpark organist, the radio announcers, the guys who play the little music clips when players bat, that sort of thing. I've just worked my way into the second chapter so it could go off in an entirely different direction. Which is the whole point.

The other thing I'm doing a lot of lately is knitting. I'm actually in a state with my knitting that is very similar to where my writing was until about three weeks ago -- I have thousands of project ideas and I keep jumping from one to the other so nothing gets done. I got a great deal on a subscription to Vogue Knitting which I know sounds really snotty and high fashion but it's actually a very accessible knitting magazine. So I have all these new patterns that don't look like something a preschool teacher would wear (no offense, Mom or Jac, and you guys don't dress like that, but you know what I mean) AND it's Tax Free Week on clothes in New York. Which includes fabric and yarn (makes sense, but you don't expect that sort of thoroughness from the government, at least when it involves taxes). So I went out last night and picked up some really beautiful, unbelievably soft wool/llama yarn to attempt this awesome tweed jacket pattern from the magazine. Which is getting in the way of finishing the scarf for Sus's birthday/Christmas present (and she's a leap year baby, so time is getting short), which is in turn getting in the way of doing those other two pairs of socks with the sock yarn I picked up at Christmas. Not to mention, there's this pants pattern in the magazine that I ....

OK, I'll stop now.

Come on, isn't it at least time for Spring Training?