found this when walking in to the living room this morning: a cat napping using a bump of my new fiber for a pillow. obviously my failure to put it away last night paid off in cute photo opportunities — at least, until i accidentally woke him up:
and speaking of that fiber, it’s spinning up nicely, on the lovely new Louët:
but spinning more of it shall have to wait, as the post lady just rang my bell and brought me a little pressie from across the pond:
So yeah. Today was pretty sweet.
Yesterday evening I was scanning Craigslist listings for garage sales, as I really want to get an old (huge) enamel canning pot for dyeing yarn. I didn’t find one of those, but I did find two garage sales advertising yarn. So I got up early today and left the house about 8:30 AM. Hit the first one, in Lincoln Square; found a couple of shirts, but the yarn was basically a large pile of funfur. Alas. Still, I bought a funfur blob, since I want to make another kitty pi, and I’m unwilling to spend more than $0.50 for novelty yarn.
Travelled to the second garage sale, which had bin after bin after bin of acrylic yarn, some really ancient stuff, some newer and in decent condition. I bought an afghan’s worth of rose pink Red Heart Super Saver for a buck, so that’s something to keep me busy once I finish my ripple. But! They had other stuff. GOOD other stuff. I’m fiercely envious of the woman who got the Kitchenaid stand mixer for $35 right before I got to that table. I got two LPs, and a rubbermaid thingie I intend to use for storing cat food, and a nice big flour sifter for a quarter, and a potato ricer also for a quarter, and an older, kinda beat copy of the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook (which I keep meaning to buy a copy of) for a buck. Several knitting and crocheting books, which I’ll list later. And: a big-ish blue speckled enameled pot, with a pasta/steamer insert, for $1.25!! I was psyched about the pot. (Actually, I was kind of psyched about the flour sifter too. Now I can actually sift the ingredients in recipes that call for sifted things! And it has this adorable little crank… I mentioned it was a quarter, right?) The pot is destined to be used for dyeing yarn and roving, so I am very pleased about that.
From there, I went home, carried my swag inside, and then hopped in the car, and headed up to Crystal Lake for the first annual Midwest Fiber and Folk Art Fair, which is a boring drive out into the country (“There’s corn here!” I exclaimed on the phone with Kim.). Got there around noonish and wandered through the Fine Art Show first. They had a number of things on display, knitted items, felted items, quilts, and mixed media. I was particularly impressed with a couple of the quilts, actually — one was an odd interpretation of tiny, off-kilter log cabin squares and I really liked it; only $2200! — and another had diagonally-placed star squares but was overstitched with these great spiral swirls. And a third — I honestly can’t remember what the main pattern was now, but what impressed me was that the wide border of the quilt had very elaborate embossed patterns. I didn’t notice them at first, but then they popped out at me and I was just really surprised by how interesting they were. Anyways, that was the Fine Art Show.
Then it was on to the vendors. Four large tents worth of vendors. So much stuff for sale. Fiber (for spinning and felting) and yarn completely dominated the first two tents.
I was excited when I found the booth for Wool, Warp, and Wheel, because they are a local vendor for Kromski wheels (with whose Mazurka wheel I have been mildly infatuated lately, in that “maybe someday…” way). I had wanted to check out the wheels if they had them, or talk to them. So I wandered through the booth, ogling the pretties — they did indeed have Kromski wheels at the Fair, and even a Mazurka! I was feeling pretty good, which was when the saleslady approached me. We exchanged greetings, and I said I was pleased to see them there since I had wanted to look at Kromski wheels and I knew they sold them. She asked me if I spun, and I said yes; and I mentioned that while I was not in the market today, I was thinking about getting a Mazurka.
She corrected my pronounciation. Evidently, it’s “ma-ZUR-ka.” Not “ma-ZHUR-ka,” as I had been saying. Alas. Perhaps if I was a real spinner I would know these things.
Then she asked me if I had a wheel. Yes, I said, and smiled. Yes, I have a Babe production wheel. Then, in the most patronizing tone imaginable:
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
…
That pretty much ended the conversation. She lost interest in me almost as quickly as I lost interest in her.
Hey, snotty saleslady? Congratulations — I won’t be spending $600 on a wheel, plus more in accessories, with your company! I’ll mail order it and pay shipping rather than give you a dime! I’m a little offended that you dissed my wheel. Even if you thought it was cheesy or low-rent, or whatever the hell your problem was with it, it’s not really cool to talk down to customers. Especially customers who’ve just said they were contemplating giving you a thousand dollars or so in the near future. Besides, I like my Babe wheel, so bite me.
Thus endeth niqui’s patronage of Wool, Warp, and Wheel. I’ll give my money to someone nice, instead. Like, say, Nels at Babe’s Fiber Garden, who asked me — when I wandered into his booth while I was still stinging from the Wool, Warp, and Wheel woman, and told him I really loved my Babe wheel — what I was using it for, and I said “well, pretty much just wool, I’m afraid of hard to spin things like cotton,” actually set me up with one of his charka wheels and taught me how to spin cotton.
Anyways, I continued through the fair, accumulating a few goodies along the way. (Oh, it was very dangerous there. Very, very dangerous. Apparently there are a lot of alpaca farmers in this region, and they ALL wanted me to take home some of their fiber. I resisted, but it was a close thing.) My booty — minus a couple of things which are definitely destined to be gifted, and including a couple of things I haven’t decided if they’re gifts or not yet :) —
Clockwise from upper right:
But, although I am really impressed with the fabulousness of what I took home from the fair, the real prize was not bought from a booth at all.
While scoping out Craigslist for garage sales, I had noticed that someone had posted that she was looking to get rid of a couple of her wheels. I got in touch with her and found out that they were both still available, so we arranged to meet up at the fair so I could try them out. Neither of us could get her second wheel to spin for us today (sub-optimal spinning conditions, in fairness: standing in a parking lot, leaning on one leg, treadling with the other, and trying to draft in the breeze), but the Louët picked up my test bit of roving and ran with it, producing a fine, neat single with basically no effort at all on my part. So,… it came home with me. Total budget buster, I admit, and I probably should have abstained. But! These wheels sell for $400 new. I got this one for $200 (plus two extra bobbins I bought at the fair — though, apparently one of them is a high-speed/laceweight bobbin, which I didn’t notice at the time. Still, it had one, so I can still Navajo ply with only two bobbins.) And it was such a breeze to use. And it’s no larger than my Babe wheel! I’m really pleased with it.
Then I left the fair, Crystal Lake attacked my car, I effected repairs without having to break out the sock yarn, as I threatened (in jest; I would have called roadside assistance before using handpainted sock yarn to tie my car back together), and my continuing experiment in “slowpokedom in pursuit of mileage” netted me 33 mpg at ~ 60 mph on the tollway. I had planned to spin some of my lovely new roving on my lovely new wheel when I got home, but then I got sidetracked by writing this stupid blog entry, because I am an idiot.
Anyways, I will close this entry with a photo of the roving I got the other day on my trip out to The Fold — which I was trying and failing, repeatedly, to spin on Thursday night, to my frustration. I don’t know what it was, but yarn was not in the cards for me that night. I resorted to looking at the roving and going “oooh, pretty. ooooh, soft.” I may give it a shot on the swanky pretty lovely shiny new Louët tomorrow. Wish me yarn!
A mechanic is niqui!
Originally uploaded by sldownard.
Shoelace!
—
So. On my way out of the parking lot at the fiber fair — and by “parking lot” I mean “grass” — there was a bump which caused me to scrape the underside of my front bumper, pulling out onto the street. I thought little of it beyond “damn, you guys could fill in the craters once in a while.”
Five miles down the road — in some suburb between Crystal Lake and Elgin — there was a mild bump in the pavement, after which my car started making an unpleasant scraping noise. I was on the phone with Kim at the time, and pulled off into the nearest handy parking lot, which happened to be a (plant) nursery which was closed for the day, which at least kept me from getting funny looks from anyone except a couple of employees leaving for the day, one of whom eventually walked over and stared at me without saying anything — I assume he was planning to ask if I needed help but couldn’t quite find the courage to actually speak, and/or overheard me talking on the phone with Kim and figured I was crazy for babbling about yarn while messing around the underbody of my car. Anyways, I got out and looked under the car, and what had happened was that the skid plate — which is a plastic sheet that covers under the oil pan, etc, between the two front wheels, from the front lower valance all the way back to behind the axle — had lost its front bolt and fallen, and was scraping along the pavement.
(Side note: a replacement skid plate is $160. I say again, Crystal Lake, you couldn’t fill in those craters once in a while?)
But I am a girl of no small amount of ingenuity, and I fixed my busted skid plate, right there in the parking lot of the Platt Hill Nursery: I tied it up with a shoelace from my ice skates. Laced it up nice and tight right through the bolt holes – the ones other than the one in the front which was ripped, presumably from the force of a bolt being pushed through it. I even tucked the ends of the laces away neatly so they wouldn’t drag on the asphalt.
Hey, it worked. Shut up!
Yet to be accomplished:
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. :)
as of about 1900 yesterday when I finally left the office…
I AM ON VAAAAAAAAAAAA
CAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
TIONNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!!!
I was talking to the cleaning lady when she came by our office yesterday, and I realized, I’ve never taken two full weeks off work before. which is pretty fucking stupid of me, actually, especially considering I used to get 3 weeks at the university.
It does take a lot of effort to break the “but I’m not done with project X” / “but if system S blows up, nobody else can fix it!” / generalized angsting over what might happen and omigod they cannot survive without me! This was especially a problem at the U of C, and, e.g., the PureMessage junkmail systems that I could never talk anyone into freaking helping me out with. I had heard Tom Limoncelli opine on this at LISA one time, and he made a remark that was just something I’d never even considered before — he said something like “the company doesn’t give you vacation days because they’re nice. The company gives you vacation days because taking time off makes you a better employee, because you are less stressed out. So taking vacation isn’t imposing something inconvenient on the company, it’s something you do to get better.” And I’ve sort of parroted that to others since then, but I never quite bought into it myself — I couldn’t make myself take more than a few days off unless I was doing something critical, like moving into a new apartment (and even then I’d only take one week).
Anyways, this time, I was actually a little bit disappointed that I had to leave on vacation because I had just gotten really rolling on a particular project I’m super excited about doing — automated configuration and package management; I set up a new yum repository for all of our locally-compiled packages, which can be added to our YaST sources at install time, so Support can manage the packages that we build, and also we can deploy a bootstrap config management, um, config at install time, that can go out and fetch the instructions for completing the post-install customizations. It’s gonna be sweet. Oddly, as soon as I dumped bcfg2 for cfengine (my original choice, but I talked myself out of it because Narayan’s so good at writing marketing copy), I was up and running in two days. :P But I digress. I had just started to really make serious progress there and so it was sort of a bummer to have to disengage (two whole weeks!) but at least this way I have something cool to come back to, rather than something sucky (another fine reason I never took a vacation at the University — fear of what would be horribly, horribly broken when I got back).
I think it helps that I’m not in a completely dysfunctional environment anymore; I think things will be pretty stable even if I am not there to put the fear of god into the systems. And if not, I trust someone will either take care of it, or call me. But I am not going to worry about it. And I’m not going to read my work email, either! Because that way madness lies. I cleaned out my inbox and my sent-mail before leaving the office yesterday, and I’m calling that good enough until I get back.
People keep asking me what my plans are. Initially I’d planned to take a long weekend next weekend, and drive out east. But then Tiger got sick, so now I am not going to do that. (Can I get a giant WOOHOO for Tiger getting sick now, and not a week and a half later when I was out of town? thank god!) So my plans are pretty pedestrian, actually. I’m planning to clean out my closet, pull out a bunch of clothes I never wear, and take them all to the Brown Elephant, along with some books, a bunch of CDs and DVDs I never listen to/watch, and my old G4 and inkjet printer. (This will be a nice tax writeoff!) Actually, I plan to donate basically an entire carload of shit. It’s going to be an enormous pain in the ass hauling it all downstairs to the car, but, y’know, whatever. There will be less junk in my house thereafter! I’m going to take a bunch of old dead batteries to the battery recycling place. I’m going to then rearrange my yarn stash, since there will be room for it in the bedroom closet (instead of out on the back porch, where I worry about moths getting into the wool). I’m going to clean my office some more (since the yarn will be off the desk). I’m going to clean the kitchen a little (once the G4, display, and inkjet printer boxes are out of there, since they take up a HUGE amount of space), and paint some more trim in there. I’m mybe going to touch up the paint in my bathroom, kitchen, and office where it’s gotten dinged up a little bit. I’m going to get a bunch of knitting in — hopefully, I’ll make some progress on MS3, with the lovely KnitPicks yarn that fibre enabler Kim sent (in response to my woeful “I want to do MS3, but I cut my yarn budget for the month! Curse my stupid stupidity!”). i want to knit some more on my clapotis, and maybe I’ll even get my Baudelaire socks done. I might make some progress on my crocheted afghan. I’m going to catch up on personal email (I know, I know!). I might go to the Museum of the Art Institute on free day. I’m totally going to hit this one local thrift store on Half-Price Monday and see if I can find something I can’t live without, for cheeeeeeeeeeeeeap (and that includes sweaters for disassembly/yarn recycling, since that totally doesn’t count in the budget. ;) I might drive out to Ohio for a couple of days, if I can kennel Tiger. I might do a lot of things! I don’t really know! All I really know is I’m going to sleep in, and I’ll probably watch Ellen at least once or twice.
But now? I am off like an Invisibility Cloak — to go see the new Harry Potter with A. and L.! (Queue standing == excellent sock knitting time. You know it!)
VAAAAAAAAAAAACAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATIONNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!
