Last week a story about sightings of unidentified objects in the skies over England came on the radio, and the broadcaster announced that there were multiple reports of UFOs. Alex promptly turns to me and says "they have alot of quilts over there, huh?"
I gaped a moment before sputtering out "how do you know about that?" You see, for those other innocents in my life, in quilting and knitting parlance a UFO is an "unfinished object" - that project you begin but eventually abandon to the back of the closet or the cutting table. I had no idea he knew that term, certainly not well enough to immediately whip out a pun that hadn't even occurred to me, the creator of the UFOs currently cluttering our 'office'. (Lets be real here, I turned the 'office' in to my project room months and months ago.)
He said I told someone about it in his presence the week before, and with a little thought I remembered it. We were at lunch with one of his colleagues who told me about the sweater she started knitting and never finished, and I was reassuring her this was normal and we even had a term for it, UFOs. (I was basically recruiting her back in to the ranks of knitters, assuring her one abandoned project should not be the cause for all lost hope.)
I would say he was apparently listening much more closely than usual for that to have stuck in his mind. Only, I used it in terms of knitting, and he referenced quilting. And I am much, much worse at quilting UFOs than knitting. I think I may have indoctrinated him. He's learning the parlance of knitting and quilting without meaning to and without any conscious effort on my part. One direct, yet small conversation about knitting UFOs brought to the surface my many other references to UFOs. And there it all sat, ready to spill out in a quilter's pun at the slightest provocation.
You may shower him in pity now.
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