Chitchat and the occasional in-depth analysis about fiber, knitting, spinning, crochet, cooking, feminism, self-image, and a modicum of personal blathering.

Saturday, October 21, 2006

Drive-Through update

A moderately quick one because, as Willy Wonka so eloquently put it, there is far too much to do. Anna is home for the weekend and has brought her roommate Erin with her. We went out to Buffalo Wild Wings last night, where it was... interesting, to say the least. When we walked in, the place was packed. It was packed because they were auctioning off girls for charity. Ironically, for St. Jude's. Our young women were curious as to what the auctioned girls would then do to/for/with the men who "won" them. I was so disgusted by the implication and the imagery, it really set the tone for me. To top it off, they were using an unimaginably loud, distorted PA system. Instant headache.

We did manage to get a booth. BWW's booths are not comfortable. In fact, they're downright agonizing. It was not helped by the large family of mom, dad, and 27.3 children in the NEXT booth. The 27.3 children were all kicking the seat, which sent lovely shock waves up my back constantly. Since it was so crowded, the service was crap, and we couldn't get playmakers that worked for trivia. I ended up asking dad in the next booth to please get his horrible little monsters to stop abusing us. I think he was kind of shocked, because frankly, it was obvious to everyone but me that his little brats shit rainbows and piss vintage wine. And the look his wife/concubine/girl-he-won-in-an-auction-ten-years-ago was giving me was one for the books. I was like, hey, bizatch, bring it on. I'm mad enough at your kids that if you decide you wanna swing on me, I'll hit you so hard they'll ALL feel it.

The worst thing about quitting smoking is having to sit where the small children are. But I'm not going to go off on a rant about modern child-rearing methods (or lack thereof) right now, I'm just going to say how glad I am that my children knew how to act in public.

So, the whole feeling emotions when they happen thing is working out.

My back feels much better. I still get pains. The pain is moving around, trying new places to torture, I get headaches, weird sensations in my legs, my hands go numb sometimes. I do as instructed by the books and examine how I'm feeling at the moment, and invariably, it makes it much better. Except the headaches, I can't make them go away yet. My mobility is improving, my stress level is MUCH better, and it's getting noticable.

And Anna was amazed by how the house looks. Lowering my expectations on myself actually resulted in a cleaner house. Who knew? Of course, flylady helped with that, quite a bit.

Fiberish things were pretty major this week. I'm not going to take a picture of the ridiculous amount of Sugar n Cream cotton I bought on sale at Michael's because it was a buck a ball. I will show you this, the first of many.
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That's a ballband dishcloth, obscenely easy, and looks like I'll get about three out of two balls of yarn. You can whip one off in an evening. Will make lovely all-purpose stocking stuffers and things to give out as gifts to family and co-workers. Also makes a nice break from the neverending FNF shawl of doom that can't even be kept in its box anymore.
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I do think I'm down to the last three balls of yarn on that, though, so the end is in sight.

Spinning was also very good this week, the abortive attempt at navajo plying notwithstanding. I had a breakthrough in fiber preparation and feeding. It led to a nice thin "maple sugar" single which I attempted to navajo ply. To say that did not work out would be an understatement. I did stop before I'd ruined the entire 350 yards of nice thin single. I then split it out and two-plied it.
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It wasn't a total loss.

The next project was a blend of blues in a superwash merino. I just filled two bobbins as far as I thought was okay...
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(probably slightly further than that) and plied them together into a ... dare I say... thin, amazingly thin, mostly sport weight two ply that looks really amazing AND is 239 yards.

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Lemme repeat that. Two hundred and thirty nine yards. My biggest skein before this was about 150 yards.

Two hundred and thirty nine yards. And it is gorgeous.

That's no big deal to folks who have been spinning for a while, but it's a very big deal to me. Now I know I can do better yarn than I thought I'd ever be able to do. Happy!

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