Standing on words alone

I still don’t have picture taking ability, due to my prematurely dead camera battery.  Photos taken with Photo Booth are okay for spontaneous LOOK AT THIS! sort of things, but not for sharing such subtleties as stitch definition, etc.

I just spun a few more yards of lush green corridale/romney blend.  To see the fiber, look at my title bar up on top.  (It’s not really a lush green fairy cave, you see.  It’s wool!)  Anyway, my singles are getting a little more even, and the drafting business is becoming clearer (I think).

This helps.

I hope embedding YouTube videos gives credit where credit is due.  That is most certainly NOT me doing that drafting.  It is someone who knows what they’re doing.  I just happen to be able to click with this clip, in that it makes sense to me and my hands.

I got my time off for Rhinebeck!  It’s still three months away, but with my vacation time now written in stone, I feel like I can really start thinking again about it.  I’ve started a wish list.

• a Bosworth spindle, most likely a midi
• That Golding spindle that looks like tree branches inside the whorl, with an owl sitting on the branch
• Fiber.  Duh.
• Enough yarn for a sweater, pattern as yet unchosen.
• More fiber.
• More yarn.
• Hand salve from Blackberry Hill Farms.  Look.  Here
• At least a look at the Socks That Rock, although I may not stand in line for something I can order, unencumbered, off the internet.  I like the stuff, just maybe not enough to get into groupie mode.
• If I could find the jasmine tea I bought a few years ago at Rhinebeck, that would be lovely.
• I think I’ll skip the chocolate dipped potato chips this year.

The little girl who grew up across the street from me when I was married also grew up, I guess.  She is a few years younger than my daughter (23). Evidently she had a baby and is living with her mother.  Friday night her baby, just a year old last Tuesday, accidently drowned in their swimming pool.

 

She was a sweet girl back when I knew her, and her mother was a really good mom.  We all had pools back then, but we managed to escape the horrible tragedy that she’s now living through.  I can’t begin to imagine her pain. You have your baby’s birthday party on Tuesday, and the following Tuesday is the baby’s funeral.    I can’t wrap my mind around it, and I’m a distant observer.  I feel so horribly for them all.

 

It’s humid.  Life in western New York often resembles life in the bottom of a simmering tea pot.  Constant moist, bubbling, heat.  It’s so humid the a/c can’t even cut the water out of the air.  Combine this with my own internal combustion system (thank you, middle age, and thank YOU, menopause), and I am a sticky, whiny mess.  I heard Primrose Oil helped. With the internal combustion.  Not the weather.                                                                                                                                                                         

I have this desire to reread the Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice.  It started last night at the bookstore when I was looking at the pile of ridiculously attractive vampire novels set up by the back door.  I was going to buy the first in the series, until I realized they were geared towards the high school set.  Now I’m all about exploring different genres of fiction, but I can’t bring myself to purchase books geared towards teens.  It’s bad enough I still sneak peaks at Glamour magazine now and then.  (I finally gave up on looking at Seventeen magazine when I was in my 30’s.)                                                                                                   

So anyway, I’ve got a taste for vampires today.  One of my favorite classes in college (first run through, in the ’70’s), was a Gothic Lit class, where we read Interview With A Vampire.  It had just been published.  I’ll never forget the professor.  Anne something or other.  She had long, black, witchy hair with gray streaks and floated around campus in a black academic robe that she wore like a vampire’s cloak.  But damn, she was cool.  She talked about vampires and angels (she was way ahead of her time) like they were real creatures who walked around with us every day.                                                                                                 

She was so authoritative.  ”Angels do not ‘graduate’,” she told us.  ”It’s not like a promotion from angel to archangel.  When you’re an angel, you’re an angel, you stay in your class.  You don’t move up.  And when we die, we don’t become angels.  We become dead.”  Oh, she was a hoot.  I can’t believe they gave out grades for that class.                                                                                                                                             

Look at this.  Nearly noon and I’ve done nothing but drink coffee and spin.

 

And now I’ve written to you.

Thoughts from a sidewalk cafe

Thursday afternoon.  75 degrees.  Sunny.  A little breeze.  No work.  A sidewalk cafe and jazz on the speakers. Is it possible to get any better than this?  

I have this list of things I wanted to do on vacation.  It is Day #4, and most of my list is done.  One of the things – spend the day at a cafe with my laptop and knitting.  Check.

I’m at Spin Cafe on Park Ave.  Most of you Rochesterians probably know the place.  Decent coffee, and the wireless is free.  

Knitting is the new socks from Apple Laine yarns — Apple Pie.  On size 0’s, the inch of 2×2 ribbing is a slow go, indeed.

I cleaned out my bureau drawers yesterday and found a Kitty Pi I had started several years ago.  I just have to finish another couple of rows around the rim and then felt it.  Voila.  A new bed for the man-cat, and another project jumps from the UFO bin and into the light.

There are three people sitting at the table next to me.  Two men and a woman.  They are all talking about their marriages, past and present, and their therapists.  Words I hear, caught in the breeze:  ”Abuse.”  ”Drinker.”  ”Apologetic.”  Also heard, “I just came from a meeting”, and “early recovery.”  Is it wrong that I think their coffee is paid for by their SS disability checks, earned after several letters from their respective psychiatrists, verifying the severity of their mental illnesses? And this is how they spend their days…chatting in coffee houses about their meds and shrink appointments, engaging in miniature therapy sessions among themselves?

It wasn’t too many years ago that I, fresh from the trauma of separation and divorce, and engaged in my own weekly visits with the psychiatrist (old man with prescription pad and little else of any use to me), spent many an unemployed hour in coffee houses (Okay.  Maybe not.  I spent my time in Perkins.) chatting it up with my fellow sufferers.

At least then I had some friends.  

I am one of those people who never learned the necessary skills of making friends.  It is beyond difficult.  It is nearly impossible.  Three young women just met on the street in front of me, all hugging and exclaiming to each other, acting like long lost sisters.  Sisters.  I think that’s a key word.  Sisters.  I don’t know how I can miss something I’ve never had for more than a couple of years at a time, but I miss the closeness of another woman friend.  Even if it’s just someone to laugh off a stupid-man-moment with.  Oh share the bittersweet days of mothering adult children who have little use for us anymore.  Or someone to reign me in when I want to shop until I drop, which is something I do because (I am keenly aware of this) I am longing for some kind of community, and where else to find it but at the local mall, where someone is always happy to see you?

So I have to work this out, somehow.  At the ripe old age of 49, and what could best be described as in the crone period of my life, how on earth to I teach myself the mechanics of making friends.

Suggestions, as always, are welcome.

Planned Obsolescence

The receipt says 8/18/07.  The warranty says the battery is not covered.

Isn’t that convenient…

Which just means I have no way of adding my usual high quality photographs to the blog.  I’m fairly certain the difference will be negligible.  But that doesn’t mean I’m not pissed off.  What the hell?  They should make it clear at the outset that the actual cost of the camera will be retail plus the additional yearly cost of a replacement battery.  I know.  $29.00 is not likely to break my bank. It’s just the point of it that bothers me.

Pictures will be from my Mac, then. 

Noro Silk Garden Clap continues.  I know.  It’s boring me, too.

My pond scarf is morphing into some kind of hippy bag.  This was after I was planning a trip to the lake to find a piece of driftwood to make it into a wallhanging.  Now I’m thinking it’s just a mess and I should toss it in the closet.

I got some Apple Pie sock yarn (Apple Laine) from Spirit Works yesterday.  After I cleaned and sorted and exhausted myself with housework, a little treat at the yarn store seemed like a good idea.  You can’t see the colors, but they’re bluish-purples and golds.  

It’s HOT here.  I’m thinking that either an afternoon in an air conditioned coffee shop with my knitting, or a trip to the museum, are in order.  Another idea is a trek out to the Apple store to get a laptop sleeve for my Macbook.  Or I could stay home in the a/c and knit one.  

God, my life is boring.  I really need my camera back to ‘pretty’ things up and make me believe (and you) that I am not really so boring, after all.