So many hobbies!

My first meme

Elizabeth tagged me for my first meme.  Thanks, Elizabeth!  I have no idea what "meme" means or stands for.  Could someone help me out?

Here we go:  “The rules of the game get posted at the beginning. Each player answers the questions about themselves. At the end of the post, the player then tags 5-6 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read your blog.  Let the person who tagged you know when you’ve posted your answer.”

1. What was I doing ten years ago?  I had just started working for the University of Michigan as a temp and still trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up.

2. What are five things on my to-do list for today?  It's the end of a normal work day for me which is bland and dull so I'll give you tomorrow's list instead:  (1) Go to work; (2) Buy pots and potting mix for my tomatoes and peppers; (3) cook up a batch of Chicken with Wild Mushroom and Balsamic Cream Sauce - one of Rachel Ray's 30-minute meals [only she can make it in 30 minutes - the rest of us take about an hour but boy is it worth it!]; (4) Bundle up the rest of the llama for washing; (5) Hang out with the cat.

3. Snacks I enjoy?  Ruffles baked potato chips, edamame, chocolate, sweet cherries and just about anything involving ice cream.

4. Things I would do if I were a billionaire?  Pay off my families' and friends' debts; buy my place in the country and build my perfect house; travel to my heart's content; buy a hybrid car; spend the rest of my life on my little farm growing my own fruits, veggies and chickens and doing the things that make me happy.

5. Places I have lived?  I've only lived in Michigan:  Ann Arbor, Tecumseh, Perry, Lansing, Madison Heights, Davison, Flint.  I once did a 3-month apprenticeship in letterpress printing in Covelo, CA but that's the closest I've come to living in another state.

6.  Peeps I want to know more about? 

Georgia at Yarn Pirate.  She dyes beautiful yarn and recently had the most adorable baby.  Go see H wearing his sunglasses - too cute!

I recently discovered the Yarn Zombie and I've been enjoying reading her blog.  I can already tell she's someone I'd enjoy hanging out with.

I'm not sure if I found Val or she found me but we've been reading each other's blogs.  She seems to be good at everything she does and I'm coveting one of her box bags.

That's it for me.  Have a good weekend!

Emergency knitting!

When the Yarn Harlot was here a month or so ago, she told us of a study that had been done in England(?) where they had exposed different groups of people to graphic and disturbing photos.  The group of people who were doing a repetitive task while watching the images coped better than the other two groups.  The researchers commented on how knitting could help people cope who have experienced something traumatic but they countered that having emergency knitting on hand was impractical.  When the Harlot delivered that last bit, the entire group, all of whom were knitting (or spinning), burst into raucous laughter.  As for me, I'm prepared for any traumatic event.  Look what I have:

I really didn't need another project bag, but when I saw that Illiane's Corner was selling these, I had to have one.  These bags have a zippered pocket outside and on the inside, a zippered pocket on one side and mesh pockets on the other. 

The llama fleece was pulled out and inspected tonight and I am both very pleased and completely disgusted.  The fleece is beautiful; very soft and silky with virtually no guard hairs.  However, the folks who owned and sheared the llamas did so only for the comfort of the animals and not with spinning in mind.  The llamas weren't blown out to get rid of as much vegetable crap and dirt as possible so the fleece is just loaded with it.  There's so much straw and hay in the fleece I don't know if it will be possible to get any usable fiber out of it.  If anyone has any info on getting the VM out of a fleece, please let me know.  The fiber is too beautiful to give up without a fight.

Plying, how I love thee

Take two bobbins whose singles look nice, ply them, and you get a yarn that's totally fab!  I'm having impure thoughts about my new yarn.  Does that make me a sick wacko?

The yarn came from some batts I got in a trade:  Merino, alpaca and bamboo.  Oh, my!  This yarn is so very soft... I may have to sleep with it tonight.  Well, probably not; the bamboo gets a bit fuzzy if it's abused.  Does all bamboo do that or is it just that this isn't spun horribly tight?

And now for a close-up:

Hey!  I did a pretty good job on this!  [Note to self:  Rats!  Try to sound more modest!]  I mean, I owe it all to Owen.  We've spent some quality time together and I'm getting the hang of using a double-treadle wheel.  I especially love the plastic? rubber? drive band that doesn't have to be tweaked all the time.   And the batts!  The batts were just lovely.  [Note to self:  buy more batts!]

Lazy day... mostly

My initial plan for today was to cook up a mushroom chicken dish in the morning (for work lunches) then after lunch, make the dessert I would take to Eric's.  This plan probably would have been carried through if I hadn't started reading "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" by Barbara Kingsolver.  It's about a family's one-year commitment to only eat locally grown food... and it's completely sucked me in.  There's a lot of information in this book and most of it is a real eye-opener.  After you read it, you'll be shopping at your local farmer's market and by-passing the grocery store.  It's made me even more eager to grow my own food and even more frustrated that I can't.

That said, I bought out-of-season, imported sweet cherries and made this:

Eric, Terry and Alice all liked it, and it was good, but my taste buds wanted something more tart.  If I make it again, I'll use tart cherries, or maybe rhubarb.  Rhubarb would be fabulous. 

I finished up the last of the Border Leicester fleece today.  Hot, sunny days are wonderful for drying wool outside.  I only had to leave it outside for about 45 minutes and not only was it dry, it was hot.  I'd imagine white fleeces would take longer to dry but the dark gray wool dried super fast.

I know I said I'd have a finished skein of yarn to show off but I'm afraid I only got as far as these.  Tomorrow...

Washing wool

 

It's much easier in this photo to see the beautiful gray color of the fleece.  The brown parts are weathered tips.  If I want to keep the beautiful gray, the tips will have to be nipped off.  Mindful of the wool thieving tendencies of squirrels, I stayed on the couch with the drying racks in full view the entire time they were outside.  Fortunately, the sun was nice and warm and there was a bit of a breeze all three mornings, so they dried quickly.  Only one more batch to go... then I start on the llama fleece I got last year.  I have some dard brown Corriedale and some dark brown Polwarth and I want to blend them with the llama as soon as I get a drum carder.  The three will make a beautiful blend.

I'm becoming more and more ticked off at Typepad.  They decided to "upgrade" things and as a result, they're screwed things up.  With every new post, I need to reconfigure how photos are imported in and while typing, there's an extremely annoying delay in the appearance of the text, expecially when deleting.  I'm not the world's best typist and I make mistakes.  Backspacing them out takes twice as long as it should because the cursor doesn't keep up with the keystrokes.  Aargh!  I sent Typepad a complaint letter and they basically told me they were sorry I'm frustrated but look at the extras they've added!  <insert rude noise here>  What good are the extras if the ordinary, mundane features I use each time are now crap?!  Oh, yeah, you can no longer cut and paste text either.  What do we do in these blog posts?  We create text.  Why in the world would we possibly want to manipulate that text once we've created it.  That's just crazy.

Sorry.  I pay a yearly fee for Typepad so I'm more than a little annoyed that they've screwed things up.  If you use Typepad, and they're ticking you off, too, send them a complaint and ask them to fix it.

Tomorrow I'm going to Eric's for a spin-in.  Woot!  I'll be bringing a new recipe I first saw Elizabeth had made:  Cherry Cornmeal Upside-down Cake.  Her pictures look sooo good.  Sweet cherries are expensive this time of year but hey, they were on sale and I doubt I'll make this recipe too often.  Besides, I love trying out new recipes and friends don't usually mind being used as guinea pigs for the first effort.  :-)

I'll have some spinning to show off tomorrow and hopefully pictures of drying llama (although it's supposed to be gray and rainy tomorrow morning).  Enjoy your Memorial Day.

Meet Owen

He's my handsome new love.  Unlike my faithful David, Owen is very portable and I expect I'll be taking him with me everywhere.  (Well, maybe not everywhere.  He's portable but he's still a bit too heavy to be schlepping on the bus with me to work on Mondays when we spin after work.  My plan had been to take him to work with me in the morning then after work, take the bus downtown to where we meet, thereby saving on ever-more-expensive gasoline.  His carry bag has a shoulder strap but I've already torn something in my shoulder by carrying a too-heavy work bag and Owen's carry bag doesn't have a side handle, which would have been helpful.)  I'm still getting used to him, but I can tell Owen and I will be very happy together.  I hope to have some of our first yarn together by the end of the long weekend.

Wow, that sounded weird.  Even to me.  I need to get out more.

Enjoy the long weekend.

Oh, so wrong

Remember when I was brimming with excitment because I got my confirmation and I was going to SOAR?  Yeah, all that was was the confirmation that my application was received.  We won't find out until June if we made it in.  I'm such a dork.

A small skein of the Border Leicester I bought at Maryland.  It looks brown; it's gray.  It's not next-to-skin soft but it not terribly far off.  Once I get it all scoured, I'm considering it sending it off to be processed into roving.  I tried carding some up on a drum carder and it didn't work very well.  I don't spin evenly from combs and that pretty much leaves roving. 

I bought my new wheel tonight but I'm saving the big reveal until I come up with its name.  I'm currently trying to decide if it has more of a masculine or feminine feel. 

I'm sorry I don't have much tonight.  I fell asleep on the couch with the cat and now I'm all fuzzy headed and I can barely keep my eyes open.  Honest, I was just going to lay down with her for a minute...

Feeding my addiction

I've been neglecting my store.  Over a year ago, I canceled my TV cable subscription because I was addicted to the telly and wasted copious amounts of time sitting on my butt doing absolutely nothing.  I thought Netflix, and the 2-hour movies I'd rent, wouldn't feed my addiction and for the most part, that was true.  But I've been renting TV shows and those seem to push my addiction button.  I completed the first season of Torchwood over the weekend and that's when I realized my addiction had risen its ugly head yet again.  I was a bit obsessed with the show.  (It didn't help at all that several of the characters are HOT... oh, and the writing and acting are excellent.  I highly recommend it for those of you with more self-control than myself.)  So, the TV and DVD player stay off during the week.  I'm going to make friends with my radio again and visit the library for books on tape.  I'm still working on an order for a couple of spindle boxes - an order I should have completed last week - and I need to make more to put up in my store.  I can't do that watching the telly.

My new wheel was a no-show this weekend.  A thousand curses on the UPS man who dared to show up at the store without it!  I expect I'll be making a special trip to pick it up after work on Tuesday.  I'm not sure what happened, but my shawl project got derailed.  I've got 10 ounces of that soft Polwarth/kid mohair blend to spin up on the new wheel and I'll need to buy more. 

My new sock got some knitting attention this weekend.  I'm almost ready to turn the heel:

I'd really like to learn to knit a heel flap; I've fallen out of love with short row heels.  Besides, I like the look of the heel flap.  I just need to find directions for it.

Nine random things

Tonight was pretty much a slug night for me.  As usual, I haven't been getting enough sleep so when I got home, I crashed.  No knitting.  No spinning.  Just Seli and me, watching Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.  Well, I watched, Seli slept.

Tonight is basically Random Thursday:  a list of miscellaneous oddments.

1. There are few things that can compare to taking a nap with a cat curled up in your arms.
2. My condo is in serious need of a good vaccuming.
3. Oh, my God!  Torchwood!
4. Ginny Weasley kicks butt!
5. When my sister and I were in Maryland for the wool festival, we called our mom to let her know we were misbehaving (she's always telling us to behave in public - as if!).  We got Dad instead.  His reply to our announcement was, "I'd expect nothing less from you girls."  I love my dad!
6. I really hate flossing.
7. I'm not terribly fond of vacuuming, either.
8. I have a vague fear in the back of my head that we have some tough times ahead of us here in the States and I know I'm not ready for them if they come.  I don't like not being prepared.
9. My new Ashford Joy has been ordered and with luck, I'll be able to pick it up on Saturday.  Once I have my Joy, on Mondays I'll be taking the bus from work to the Art Center for spin night.  It'll be one less trip in my car.

Novocain and a new sock

Unless you were born after they started adding flouride to the water, or you have good genetics, it's likely your teeth are crap.  I had my fourth root canal this afternoon.  (Or is it the 5th?  I've lost track.)  Fortunately for me, I have a great dentist.  That man can numb a mouth like nobody's business!  It's been nearly 7 hours since my appointment and some parts are still numb - for which I'm grateful, 'cause once it wears off, I'll be feeling the achy aftermath of getting my tooth reamed out.  Thank God for Advil!  Hey Mom, not only did I not cause I scene in the dentist's office, I didn't bite him either.  Aren't you proud of me?

I decided on the yarn I dyed in class for my current sock.  It's knitting up beautifully and while the yarn is a bit splitty, the fabric is very soft.  I think the yarn base is Henry's Attic Superwash Merino sport weight.  The photo isn't doing it justice.  I used Judy's Magic Cast-on from Knitty.  I had to start and restart four or five times before I finally refused to rip back again.  Somehow I've managed to have a purl row at the very end of the toe and I can't figure out how I did it.  I did it twice, actually, and the second time I was sick of ripping so I just kept going.  I hope it doesn't make for too annoying a ridge against my toe.  I'm having trouble finding a toe-up cast-on I'm happy with.  I though the Magic Cast-on would be my true love but as with all new loves, the rose fades and you get obnoxious purl ridges that you can't explain.  (Not to mention my brain's painful attempts at translating photos and descriptions into physical actions.)  It's possible I only need more practice but just in case, I'm on the lookout for my new cast-on lover.