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Not just one, but TWO sickening things for y’all this morning. First up, the one that really chapped my ass last night:

I pulled up to the toll booth at the ferry dock last night, and the guy says to me: “what’s the definition of emancipate, or emancipation?”, to which I replied “um, basically it means ‘to free or liberate’”. He says, in response to this: “Wow. You’re the NINTH driver I’ve asked, and the first one who has known.” Um… the FUCK? Hello? Eight carloads of people in front of me couldn’t define that word? That totally tossed my cookies.

This, mind you, followed lunch on Wednesday with my dad. Some of you may remember that two years ago, right about the time he turned 70, my dad finally decided to quit hiding his real self, and he came out of the closet. Go dad. I fully support him on that one. What I do not support, mind you, is him at the age of 72 discovering a sudden overwhelming love of… god help me… boy bands. Yeah, part of it is the cute boys. But he LOVES the “music”. I kid you not. He tried to make me listen to *nsync on the way to lunch. Tried to tell me that the music was some of the best he’s ever heard. Went on at length about the talent presented. It was pretty horrifying. Even my 12 year old daughter won’t listen to that crap. sigh

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As of 6:45pm last night, my life is all about the Sock!. Oh my heavens yes. It is. And shall continue to be until the Sock! is all gone. And then I’ll have to get some more. ‘Cos it’s Gooooooood. Mmmmmmm…. Sock!

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If you’ve looked at the gallery any time in the last two weeks or so, you will have noticed that it was all kind of broken…

My (omg beyond wonderful) web host sent out a message a couple of weeks ago, asking us all to upgrade any scripts we have running on the servers to whatever the latest version is. My happy little photo gallery was the only script I had running, so I dutifully followed all the instructions to upgrade, and…. it ate itself. Even the owner of the hosting company was perplexed at why and HOW it had done what it did, and neither of us could fix it. We tried. Then I tried just totally wiping it out, deleting the database, and starting totally from scratch. That didn’t work either. NO clue as to why Gallery continued to mangle the paths to everything, but it did, so Gallery is now gone.

I ended up having to switch software, and ended up with Coppermine, which seems to work, but takes an enormous amount of tweaking to get stripped down enough to be something I’m willing to deal with (’cos, really, I don’t give a flying fuck which pictures are ‘most popular’. Really. I don’t. Makes no damn difference to me.)

Most of the photos are back up at any rate, at this point, and I’ll keep tweaking until I get it the way I actually like it, and there it will be. And no, there’s not a damn thing in there that’s new. That will come later this week when I will have pictures of Shoal Waters (which I finished yesterday), and two lone socks, both of which (I swear) will have mates soon. Soon, I tellya, soon!

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I don’t even know where to begin with this one, so y’all are going to have to go look for yourselves. Swallow whatever is in your mouth before you click. You’ve been warned.

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Yesterday I had a Me Day. It involved a)not getting out of my jammies until it was time to go back to bed, b)a hell of a lot of sitting-on-my-ass, c)11 episodes of Homicide: Life on the Streets (the end of season 4 and the beginning of season 5 to be specific), d)the first baked acorn squash of the season (for me anyway. fresh from the garden.)(and OMG I had totally forgotten how yummy that is*), e)hot kettle corn from the Whirley Pop, and f)bubbles in my tub. Through most of that I knit the second sleeve of Shoal Waters. For whatever reason that sleeve felt like it took forever, and not just the whole day. Alas. This morning I picked up the majority of the roughly 450 stitches all the way around the front for the button bands and trim, so, with any luck I’ll be able to finish it off tonight. And then comes…. buttons. I will be getting ‘real’ buttons for it when I go to Vancouver in November, but in the mean time I’ll have to find some temps. Have I mentioned how much I hate shopping for buttons? Maybe I’ll just go back to the quilt store and the vat of vintage buttons and pick three random ones. Probably save myself a LOT of grief that way…

* Remember when you were a kid and your mom used to have this obsession with baked squash during the fall and you thought licking the cat’s ass might be preferable to ever putting another forkful of baked squash in your mouth? And your mom totally didn’t get why you did not feel the love that was baked squash? Um… yeah. So now I’m all growed up and… um… my daughter loathes baked squash more even than the green vegetables and brushing her hair, and… um…. I TOTALLY DON’T GET IT. And no. I have no clue when the baked squash suddenly became not just palatable to me, but downright OMG wonderful, but it did (it was probably the first time CritterBoy made it for me). The Booger doesn’t believe me when I tell her it will happen to her too, and that suddenly one day that’s all she’s going to want to eat forever. Ha!

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I’ve gotten a boatload of mail about where, exactly, I found the Trekking XXL I’m currently enjoying the heck out of. I didn’t actually get it on Salt Spring, but on the way up there. I found it here:

In Sheep’s Clothing
9711- Fifth Street,
Sidney, BC
V8L 2W9
Phone/Fax: 250-656-2499

I’ll be up in the Vancouver area next month, and will be checking out as many yarn stores as I possibly can (which, if this trip is anything like last year, will be none). In Sheep’s Clothing has a fairly decent selection of the sock yarns even though the place is teensy. It was all kinds of cute, and her prices weren’t unreasonable. So. Now all y’all know.

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Oooh! Look at me go with the no-picture-be-havin’ post YET AGAIN! The suckfulness is so over the top! Yay me!

Anyway. Picture if you will a sock. There you go. That’s what I’m making. Just like that one.

No, I’m kidding. It looks nothing like that. Seriously. The yarn is Trekking XXL that I got on the Salt Spring Island trip. It’s dark, it’s tweedy, it’s not stripey and I’m thoroughly enjoying working with it thus far. The pattern is… uh… some foo-foo thing out of Nancy Bush’s new book It’s one of the patterns that was originally for a child’s sock. The sample in the book is the mostl lovely purple. Mine is not purple, but I’m liking it anyway. And omg but I love Nancy and her well-written patterns. Yes indeedy.

I also just bought this one:
because Kim had it and OMG it was SO much cooler than I thought it was going to be just from looking at the cover (yeah, yeah, we’ve been over that. I judge books by their covers and you can just get right over that). DAMN cool book.

I will duly endeavor to take some pictures of stuff this weekend. And post them. ‘Cos I know I’ve been a slacker on that front of late.

Any of you jonesing for a road trip to Portland next week? Speak now! I know the way to Woodland Wool Works….

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My office mate just ordered us one of these:

for the office. Because it’s The Best Toy EVER. Seriously. Go look at it. And read the reviews. Especially the last one. Brilliant that is.

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No matter how good it tastes at teh time, half a pound of Lindt chocolate does NOT make for a viable lunch. Just sayin’…

On a completely related note (I’ll leave it to you to figure out the relationship there), I had SUCH a cool weekend. Saturday I finally got to meet Sam in person! She is amazing and wonderful and it was much fun. The Booger spent, get this, Five Straight Hours cranking the big-ol’ drum carder making batts for Kim to spin. She’s currently knitting herself up a hat out of the two skeins she ended up with. There was much spinning, and there were tasty vegan foodsnax (omg. If I could live on that apple pie and these donuts, I could be vegan. Alas. But those donuts? Not present at the demo, but available at hippie-marts everywhere, and worth the trip and the price. And that’s coming from a confirmed donut snob.). Other than the temperature in the greenhouse when we arrived (none of us were prepared for HOT), the day totally rocked. Especially the part after the demo when we got to go have dinner at Kim’s. Not only are Kim and her husband Franck both phenomenal cooks, so the food was super tasty, but then we had to take some chocolate home with us. Oh, oh the burdens we must bear…

Sunday morning, The Booger, who has up to this point never had the slightest interest in spinning on anything but spindles, decided that she wanted to learn to spin on the wheel. It was a rocky start, but once she got it, she really got it. I’ll have pictures of her first wheel-spun skeins later this week. They’re very cool.

So there you have it. Life is still a train wreck, but at least there was one good weekend in the middle of it all. Ooh! and I’m in the middle of making plans to invade Canada! Well, at least one small hotel in Vancouver over turkey-day weekend. And some yarn stores. And buttons? Did someone say buttons?

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Let me just say that Really Bad Things happen to Elsebeth Lavold’s Silky Wool when you accidentally run it through the washer with a load of socks and jeans on the heavy duty cycle. Really Bad Things.

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godDAMN fall seems to arrive with a vengance in this town. I swear that a mere week ago I was a)not getting up in the dark, b)not getting home in the dark, and c)not freezing my ass off at all times. Sigh. Didn’t the sky used to be some color other than grey? Yes, I realize that to us locals here in the pacific north wet the day star is scary and bright, but dammit, I’m starting to miss sunlight already.

On the bright side, this means that Woooo! It’s sweater weather! And perfect sock knitting weather. And, well, yeah. I dig the hell outta that.

So, yes, with the bad comes good. Not always, mind you, but generally. Sometimes you have to wait a damn long time for the good after the bad, and by then you’ve forgotten the bad and it all seems so unrelated, but lo! it is not. So there.

If you’re in the Redmond area this weekend, there’s agonna be a spinnin’ demo at Classic’s Nursery (damn but I hope that’s the right link) on Saturday. Afternoonish, methinks. All afternoonish. C’mon by! Say hello!

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CritterBoy and I went for a drive last night and ended up near a book store, so I grabbed a copy of My Friend Leonard, the sequel to A Million Little Pieces. I started it last night (and ended up staying up WAY later than I should have), and continued reading on the ferry this morning, since it is now too dark on the car deck in the mornings to knit, especially on something dark. And I cried and cried and cried. And I laughed and laughed. I’m sure the guy in the car next to me thought I was totally cracked. Whatever with him. I’m not all that far into it yet, but so far it looks like it will be at least as good as, if not maybe even better than the first one. I love Frey’s writing style. And yeah, here I go with the book pimpin’ link again. I promise I won’t do this every day, but… yeah. We’re about to be living on 1/3 the income we’ve been living on, and, frankly, that won’t quite cover the basics, so I’m pimpin’ books. And yarn, apparently, judging by the ads that google is putting over in the sidebar. And selling some crap on ebay. And fixing computers. And… and I still haven’t come up with more than that yet, but I prolly will. So clicky clicky, ‘cos every little bit helps, right?

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I just finished reading a book I picked up at the airport last weekend while waiting for Barb’s husband’s plane to arrive. He was off working in Chicago when Barb’s water broke, and my Job For The Day was to get him to the hospital Before The Baby Arrived. Turned out that wasn’t actually going to be a problem, but we didn’t know that at the time.

Anyway. The book. I bought it because, going against everyone who has ever told me “never judge a book by its cover”, I liked the cover. The image of a hand completely covered in cupcake sprinkles made me happy. Yeah, the blurb on the back sounded vaguely interesting, but dammit, I liked the cover. So I bought it. Even though it had an Oprah’s Book Club sticker on it. I pushed through that shit and bought it anyway.

Holy shit, folks. Good book. Strangely written, but really good. I write like I talk (well, mostly. I actually swear a LOT more in person), but this guy writes like he thinks. It’s stream of consciousness in a totally primal way. The content was, at times, really fuckin’ bleak, but I couldn’t put it down. And yeah, I cried at the end. Bigtime. And not because it was particularly sad, but because it was BIG. Maybe part of that was because it’s been a really BIG week and all that emotional stuff that I usually keep locked up tight has been right there at the surface, I don’t know. But it was good.

There you go. The book review of the day. Link immediately to follow. Clicky clicky.

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So, here I am on Saturday morning, sitting in front of the computer (typical, really), wrapped up in the PFS. And, really, it’s doing a stellar job of keeping the chill off. And it is damn chilly in here, ‘cos, well, fall is definitely upon us. It’s POURING down rain, the sky is grey, the trees are all kinds of colors. But dood! I’m actually wearing this big lacy thing that I made with my own two hands! And… and… and… it’s really cool. Lace is magical.

And yesterday, I done picked m’self up a copy of Knitting Vintage Socks. Not that I don’t have a ton of sock knitting books downstairs already, but I needed another one. Just one more. It’s totally sock knittin’ weather out there, and I have every intention of getting started on a new pair of socks at some point this weekend.

And… What else? Oooh! Shoal Waters is coming right along. The fronts are done, and the back is more than half way there, so I should be casting the sleeves on this weekend at some point. Guess I should start looking for buttons soon, no?

Last but not least, in my totally random stream of consciousness post this morning - we went and saw Serenity last night. Well worth the year+ wait for it. And OMG. That thing? I TOTALLY didn’t see that one coming. And the people in the theater? Worth the price of admission alone. There were lots of Blue Sun t’s (Critter Boy’s was in the laundry), several Jayne hats (Critter Boy among them - a gift last night from his cousin), and more than a few guys dressed as Captain Tight-Pants, and some girl dressed up as Zoe (but not quite carrying it off). If there were any guys in dark suits and blue latex gloves I missed them (sadly, ‘cos that woulda rocked), but I love it when the people take the movie stuff this seriously. It makes me smile, and this week? I needed that.

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