• Road tripped to Marengo, Illinois to visit The Fold, a spinning shop far enough out it’s on the whole other side of suburbia, the scary side with agriculture and stuff. My, they have a lot of fiber. I got to ogle lots of fibers I will never spin — like buffalo fiber, only $32/oz! (For non-spinners: a sweater might take two pounds of fiber or so. Therefore, $32/oz is rather expensive.) They had several different sorts of dyes, and loads of handdyed and specialty yarns. And about a dozen wheels, mostly Schacht and Louet. I had hoped they carried Kromski wheels as well but alas, they did not. They did, however, have several used wheels for sale, which might come in handy if your pal niqui decides to buy a “real” wheel someday.
• Discovered that driving to The Fold takes you directly past the Illinois Railway Museum — which sort of bummed me out, because I made the trip out there in the afternoon, with no time to fit both trips in. So I stuck to the original plan and hit The Fold, saving the IRM for another day. I may go up on a Saturday or Sunday, since they run all the trains on the weekends, and weekdays only electrics (and if I go back, I will actually have my camera with me).
• I successfully reminded myself why I loathe laundromats, by putting all my rugs in my granny grocery cart, along with my unfelted Kitty Pi which I finished knitting last weekend, and hauling them over to the laundromat on Tuesday, where I suffered in a sweltering room full of small screeching children. The stupid Kitty Pi took 3 times through the washer to felt, at $2 a pop. The rugs only took one washing (at $5 for the gigantic jumbo supermatic washer thingie, but at least drying was free, which was good because it took over an hour in two dryers to get them mostly dry). I admit, laundering the rugs was not the most exciting vacation task ever, but, I’m ridiculously pleased that my rugs are no longer cat-fur-colored anymore, so there it is.
• Took my car to the mechanic’s, since last week while taking Tiger to the vet, my turn signal controller thingy shorted out and melted. !! So, there went $294, but it beats opening the window and using hand signals in the rain. (Yeah, I know, I know nobody noticed I wasn’t signalling and nobody recognized the hand signals for what they were. It doesn’t matter. This is the sort of guilty conscience I have to live with. You have no idea.) I swear that the replaced signal thingy clicker sounds different — the clicks are higher pitched, or something. Nonetheless, the blinkers blink once more, so it’s all good.
• Locked myself out of my house for the first time ever! (Um, in this apartment.) I was carrying a box out to the car and the gate clicked shut behind me and… “Shit, my keys are upstairs!” I tried upending a planter and standing on it to reach down behind the gate and open the doorknob, but I wasn’t tall enough. Fortunately, a neighbor girl saw me trying to get in, and volunteered to jump the fence for me — which she did. And while I was upstairs fetching my %^&(*&* keys, she and her dad actually got a broom and dustpan and cleaned up the potting soil I’d dumped on the sidewalk while upending the planter. How’s that for neighborly? I never saw that one coming. Nonetheless, I was extremely grateful, and not just because I’d left my front door standing wide open.
• Dragged my old PowerMac G4 and display out to Evergreen Park and sold them for $50. Minus the gas money and the stop at 7-11 for a soda to get me through the traffic on the way home, I came out $40 ahead. Woot.
• Drove way the hell out to Downers Grove to drop off my Denon stereo receiver for repairs — you know, the one that got fried last summer and I swore I was going to have repaired someday? Someday came! In 7 to 10 working days I shall have an estimate for how much it would cost to repair it. Here’s hoping the answer is “twenty bucks!”
• On the way back from Downers Grove, stopped in Oak Park to take my comics collection to a shop to sell it off, then went to a used record store to sell a bunch of CDs and DVDs I culled from my collection (this is the first time ever that I’ve removed anything from my record collection, with the sole exception of one CD, Staind’s Break the Cycle, which I bought on my lunch hour and had sent out email to all of the staff at FastWeb asking if anyone wanted it before I even listened to it all the way through. It was so crap, it was too crap for me to bear, and I own a CD called “Silly Songs” which has “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini on it.” That should tell you something about how crap that album was.), then off to a second used record store to see if they were interested in any of the CDs the first record shop was not (they weren’t, which means those are going into the Giant and Growing Pile of Stuff To Haul Off to The Brown Elephant — a pile which threatens to take over the whole entryway to my apartment if I don’t do something with it soon).

Yet to be accomplished:

• Saturday or Sunday, I dunno which, I’ll go up north to the Midwest Fiber & Folk Art Show in Crystal Lake, where I will ogle the goodies and see if there’s anything I can’t live without that I can pay for with the money from selling off my (unwanted) worldly possessions
• Next Monday, I plan to take whatever cash I have left over and hit the Unique Thrift Store on Half-Price Monday, which I am assured is both a spectacle and an event (and, more inportantly, Half Price), for both (a) anything I find interesting and decide I cannot live without (like some glasses, since I am inexplicably down to one pint glass left in the house, and I’m tired of drinking out of United Center and Sox Park souvenir plastic cups if I want more than a juice glass’ worth of water), and (b) sweaters to disassemble for yummy and dirt-cheap yarn.
• Then, last on the big to-do list that involves leaving the house, next week some time will be my massive trip to the Brown Elephant, to rid myself of the Giant and Growing Pile of Stuff et cetera, et cetera. Lots of clothes are getting dumped, along with some candle holders, books, an old inkjet printer that doesn’t work with OS X 10.4, etc.

POTTERWATCH 2007: My book shipped today! Of course, I’m a snob and bought it from the UK, so it has to ship internationally before I can read it. So I’m pretty much just sticking my fingers in my ears and chanting LA LA LA LA I’M NOT LISTENING to the entirety of mass media for the next few days. It seems the NYT saw fit to spoil the story in their advance reviews, which is very lame, so I’m taking that as a harbinger and assuming that the whole story will be out by, say, Wednesday. I shall have to be very stealthy to avoid being spoiled.

I have gotten way less knitting done that I had thought I would have done by now! It didn’t help that I had to rip back my Baudelaire sock, last Saturday, a good five inches or so — I started too late to do the heel increases, and so it wound up being way too long, which I naturally discovered after I was ready to start the short rows, so I had to rip it alllll the way back. I actually spent our entire waiting period before Order of the Phoenix began ripping my sock back and then putting it back on the needles and sorting the stitches so they weren’t twisted. Sigh. I resented the sock for the rest of the day, and defiantly worked on my afghan instead the rest of the day, watching Doctor Who at A.’s. So, my Baudelaire is sitting in my sock bag, where it might just stay until it’s time to resume Transit Sock Commuting, week after next, when I go back to work. My MS3 is coming along okay, if you don’t mind that I can’t seem to get past Row 63, and have fallen back to my Row 61 lifeline like three times already. (I also put it down in order to punish it, two days ago. Yesterday, I spun instead. Take that, you naughty, ill-mannered lace!) I might pick it up again today, and put it on some total bargain 9″ bamboo needles I picked up at The Fold for !! $2.50 !!, since my 14″ aluminum needles were bugging me (mostly due to the length).

And now? Now I think I shall go figure out what I’m going to do about dinner, since it seems to have gotten to be about that time.

Talk to you all after HP7. :)