We’re down to mere hours until Kimber and I will be on Salt Spring Island for the Fibre Fest. A whole weekend of fibery goodness. The weather looks like it will be perfect, the house we’re renting looks like it, too, will be perfect, and other than forgetting the camera battery and charger (Critterboy is bringing them in with him, so I can pick them up downtown before I leave), I’m pretty sure I’m packed and ready to go. Woo!

The only lameness here is that Critterboy may well be on his way to San Francisco before I get back, which is gonna be suckful as all hell.

Oooh! And we have three new baby chickies! These are a cross between Noodle and Rocky the Polish rooster, so they’re super tiny and have fuzzy feet and beards. They’re all kinds of cute. I’ll photo them when I get back. Promise.

edit: Critterboy just sent me an IM letting me know he forgot the battery. Ack!

Comments Off | In: Chix, Outings and get-togethers | | #

For weeks and weeks and weeks now I’ve been planning this amazing trip to Salt Spring Island for the Fibre Festival. My plan involved leaving Seattle on the 28th, ‘cos in my mind I had that festival FIRMLY stuck on the last weekend of July. D’oh! Turns out it’s next weekend. NEXT weekend! Crap!

Commence frantic packing and money gathering and ipod updating!

Hey, at least I get a vacation one week earlier than I had expected. That’s a good thing, right?

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I don’t do online surveys hardly ever, but this one looked like it could be not only amusing, but maybe useful to someone, somewhere, for some reason. Yay, science!

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Cripes. I turned the comments back on, and within a couple of days had hundreds and hundreds of pure spam comments flooding in. Joy. Woo, poker and porn! Fuckers. So, at least for now, the comments have been turned back off.

If you posted a legit comment and it got eaten by the blacklist, send me an email about it and I’ll see if I can’t get it posted.

Grrrr.

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(yeah, yeah, gratuitous bathroom mirror self portrait, I know)
It only took me how long? Multiple months.
Had to laugh, though, when I tried it on tonight. Critter Boy took one look, giggled, and said “yeah, those are huge”. He, um… likes it.

In other news:
Go check out Booga’s site. Do the world a favor and buy a pattern (or two or ten) from her and send a nasty note to Belle Armoire about their blatant and admitted copyright violation. And don’t ever buy another copy of BA. People that so callously violate copyrights don’t deserve to be supported.

(An interesting thought about crappy treatment - the prevailing thought seems to be that folks who work mostly online are somehow less deserving of respect and are also less of a threat. I’ve heard it countless times, but can’t imagine how that idea still has such a foothold. If you treat someone crappily in person, be it a customer or a copyright holder or whatever, chances are they might tell a few people. But piss off a blogger? Good lord, that’s asking for damage. People from all over the world are going to read about it, and post about it on their own sites, and so on and so on and so on until a measurable amount of business has been lost. Dumb, dumb, dumb.)

And, in further news of people treating each other badly, I was the recipient of some quality road rage this afternoon. While waiting at the ferry tollbooth for my credit card to be processed (I was buying a book of commuter tickets, so all you ferry commuters can getcher panties outta yer cracks now - I’m not one of *those* people), some guy on a bicycle pulls up behind me. He apparently thought I was ‘chit chatting’ with the tollbooth chickie, and got pissy about it. The ferry was due to leave in TWENTY FIVE minutes. It’s not like there was a)any hurry, or b)a line. Not that there was any chit chatting going on anyway. So he starts bashing the back of my car with his bike. And then proceeds to start yelling about it with the “what the hell is going on up there???” crap, and then, get this, he SPITS on the back of my car and rides around flashing what was presumably his bike pass at the ticket taker.

Now, I’m not one to sit back and take this kind of shit offa anyone, especially some asshat in logo’d up lycra. And, really, if you’re going to be an ass, a closed off ferry dock covered with state troopers isn’t the place to do it. Damn those boys are nice.

I talked to one of the troopers, he looked at the back of my car and confirmed the spit, and went and had a chat with the guy. Came back a little bit later with the guy’s name, address, phone number, drivers license number, and date of birth. Just in case I wanted to follow it all up with a call and a claim to the guy’s insurance company. Woo!

Best part of the whole thing? Dude was SIXTY. I kid you not. And he’s damn lucky I didn’t throw it into reverse and back over his uppity old ass.

Comments Off | In: General, knit-o-rama | | #

Have you ever had one of *those* projects? You know the ones. You love the pattern, you love the yarn, you love it as you’re knitting it, as you’re seaming it, as you’re blocking it, and as you pull it on over your head? And then… 15 minutes later you learn to hate everything about it. Passionately. Bugger all. I had one of those last week.

The project was the Sunburst Pullover from the Summer 2002 Interweave Knits. I made it with Blue Sky’s Organic Cotton. The pattern was all kinds of fun to knit. The yarn? Divine. Yummy even. The finished sweater? Cute as hell until I wore it for 15 minutes. Then the inherent satan in it took over and it committed messy hara kiri before my eyes. The hem rolled in weird ways. The sleeves got shorter by the minute, until they were no longer the wonderful fingertip length that I love, but some god-awful chunky just-below-the-elbows nightmare. Other than that it was ok, but ferfuxake the ever shortening sleeves and the flippy hem action made me crazy. Alas. I’m pissed off at it, and am going to rip it right the hell apart and make a baby blanket out of it. So there. I’ll show *that* damn sweater. Ha!

In other news… uh… hmmm… Oh!
The Rogue for the booger? Yeah, in the, what, three weeks since she’s been down here (! yes! three whole weeks! it has been beyond freakin’ great), she has managed to grow. So it’s too short now. Alas. I’ll get some more yarn and make her a new one, bigger and thicker for winter.

Um, what else? Ooooh, there was the ugly yarn. Which isn’t quite so ugly any more. It’s not wearable yet, but at least I don’t cringe when I see the ugliness of it’s color anymore. (It was, btw, not something I originally dyed, it came to me in a trade and while it looked lovely in the photos, in real life it was the most sickly shade of aqua imaginable. It is now a VERY nice, saturated cobalt blue, which will, in due time, become a wonderful, saturated, dark greyish cobalt, which I will cheerfully wear. Huzzah!)

And pickles! I made dill pickles yesterday. 7 quarts of plain kosher dills (which ain’t kosher in any way, shape, or form), and two jars of spicy garlic dills for Critter Boy. Mmmm, and some raspberry/strawberry jam. It’s yummy. I’ll let y’all know how the pickles turn out when a) they’re done pickling and b) I can get someone to taste them. I hate dill pickles, but Critter Boy likes them, as do most of my friends, so I’m sure that six weeks from now we’ll have a verdict.

Beyond that there hasn’t been much to report. I did finish a super cute round lacy washcloth from the new new pattern from Fiber Trends. Fun pattern, that. And I’m almost ALMOST finished with the Lavold tank that I started a majillion years ago. Might even wear it tomorrow. We shall see.

I’ll try to bust out with the camera and actually post some pictures of some stuff tonight. That’d be nice, no?

Comments Off | In: General, Mmmmm, fibery gooness, knit-o-rama | | #