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.