Twists of Fate

It should be interesting to see how much my spam stats jump with a subject line like that. Oops?

I sort of like the idea of “adopting” or “renting” a sleep for a period of time. You help pay for their care, you get the fleece afterward. It’s kind of a nifty idea, but I haven’t really heard of very many good programs out there. I’ve heard of a few bad ones, but the good ones? Maybe everyone is keeping it to themselves? Hmm.

I need to find out when Shepherd’s Extravaganza is again this year. I hope to pull out the fleece I got last year which was gorgeous and amazing. I may have to save it for late spring/early summer though, when it’s warm enough to wash outside. The house here is on septic, and I rather like the idea of spinning that Romeldale in light, sunwarmed grease. Which means a soak in sunwarmed water with a tiny touch of soap to loosen the most obvious dirt, and air drying. My fingers practically itch for it already.

In the meantime, I have a little bit of roving (stop laughing! I will have you know that I am a Mistress of Understatement, dammit!) to work on. I need to reacquaint myself with the idea of spinning anyway, so prepped roving sounds like a plan to me.

But maybe I’ll find an Adopt-a-Sheep program that would be worth it. I think that’d be super groovy.

I have the dumb.

I also have the sneezes, the giant smudges under my eyes from not enough rest, and the extreme exhaustion. To bed I go. More blog tomorrow.

Blech.

Well, I like ordering things BY mail. I rarely get actual mail these days. I’m bad with hardcopy anything, really. Sometimes I think my life would be much more organized if I had a port in my head I could either plug into (ala Data from TNG) or you know, beam stuff to a receptor and keep track of shit that way. Me and hard copy are non-mixey things.

Online shopping, on the other hand, is awesome. Especially the book buying. I love me some Powell’s, amazon, abebooks and alibris. Good stuff there, yo.

And even ravelry. I’m not too much with the interaction, and heavens know that while I like the idea of the notebook features and all, I usually just casually browse the site for the destash groups. Which is stupid but. Someone had a fairly reasonably priced copy of La Starmore’s Tudor Roses for sale, so I got it. And Knitting from the British Isles.

HowEVAH, it was early and pre-coffee, and I ended up tooling around abebooks, and in the span between clicks completely forgot I had already bought a copy of the second book. And I ordered another one. So now I have two. I think I like the copy I got from abebooks better though. It came with a handwritten note thanking me for my exuberant YAY! message I included to the seller. “You made me feel as if my job is beneficial after all. When I first picked up this book I knew someone would really like this book.” Sweet huh? It’s in perfect condition, though without the dust jacket.

It’s ironic. I spent a good portion of cash online to get a hard copy book. I guess books (and DVDs) are my exceptions to the hard copy rule. There’s always room for an exception, right? At least, in matters relating to knitting?

Elaine and Cathy wonder about the wheel. Heh. Let me get it before I go all YAY about it. And I’m glad Cathy wrote, because I forgot about the mystery box? However, I also have a splitting headache and still want to save it as a treat for later, so I’ll have to check in on it tomorrow once I’m home from work. I’m not trying to torture you, I swear. I just know if I open it now, I won’t head to bed. Which I really need to do, given that I have gotten nine hours of sleep in three days and got up at 5am to go into work early for meeting prep. Feh.

Stay tuned….

I’m so sick of waiting for the sun to come back. Or come back as far as it ever does here in Western Washington. I feel like, I dunno, a great flowering tree, ready to bud and burst into bloom! But, do so now and I’ll probably die. Or at least get sick. And so I wait. Very impatiently.

…I really have no idea where that image came from, but there you go. I want sun! I want warm! I want lush growing things! Hrmph.

Not much else to say tonight. Knit a wee bit, and saw maybe 1/4″ of progress. I am probably the world’s slowest knitter. It’s OK though. I’m too tired to do much more than post this strange little entry and fall face first into bed.

And dream of the sun on my face and the scent of flowers on the breeze that’s stirring my hair.

NCIS is very addicting. I stayed up far too late early Sunday morning, and got out of bed in the early Sunday afternoon. Knitted just a smidge, resisted the temptation to buy any more yarn via destash forums (BAD BAD habit!), and watched more TV via my computer. Good times.

Hope the week ahead is stress free and easy. Tomorrow is only a three meeting day, which is a shocker. Of course, no one is yet at the office and that’s likely to fill up quickly, so who knows.

I do know that the New Moon is very early in the morning my time on 8 January, and I will spend the next day or so brainstorming intentions for the coming moon cycle. I like chunking things down that way. It doesn’t seem so overwhelming to try to make goals if it’s just 28.5 days or so to plan for.

Hope this week and moon is good for everyone else as well!

In St Distaff Day if I bought a new wheel?

Background: I am a big SciFi geek. I love me some Star Trek and Stargate. I even bought all the MacGyver DVDs so I could extend my enjoyment of Richard Dean Anderson back a few years when he was young, taut and pretty. I also now have two Swiss Army Knives in my possession, but that’s a whole ‘nother issue.

Because my RDA lurv is so strong, I got up at 4:30 AM on a fucking Saturday morning to try to get tickets for Gatecon 2008 in Vancouver. The website launched ticket sales at 5am. There were something like 230 VIP tickets, and they were gone within 90 seconds. I have issues with the navigation on the site, the fact that they allowed people to purchase in blocks of ten for fucks sake, and yes, I am in fact BITTER. I’m even invoking the CAPSLOCK OF EMPAHSIS to tell you how BITTER I am.

Obviously, I wasn’t one of the lucky ticket winners. Included in the ticket price was a photo session with the man himself. I’ve invested a lot of tv crush time on him, and you know, I like Vancouver. Tail end of August, nice hotel, a whole plethora of other geeky people who could debate Goa’uld vs Wraith vs Replicators for hours, with citations of specific eps and character names and all the attendant nerdiness that I really do enjoy reveling in.

However, tickets were also 185 GBP, which = a shit ton of cash in USD these days.

So, the moral of the story? I didn’t get the tickets, but I was so frustrated (and sleep deprived) that I called up Copper Moose and ordered a new wheel to help dry the BITTER tears of my fannish disappointment. It’ll be cheaper in the long run, I think. Price of new wheel vs con ticket, gas and drive time to Vancouver, hotel stay for three nights, meals, slipping and falling in the dealer room and swiping my card on the way down…. It’s probably for the best.

Plus, there’ll be no need for RDA to bust out a restraining order*, so I even save on legal fees! It’s a win all around!

Right?

::crickets chirp::

*Disclaimer: I wouldn’t stalk the man, and in fact in-person celeb meetings make me squirm liek whoa. I’ve been to cons where people go off and stalk the actors while they’re in town, and I’ve asked the car to pull over and found a ride back to my hotel to avoid being part of that behavior. I dig the level of interaction RDA has with his fans, and am ridiculously pleased that he’s dipping his toes back into the great fannish ocean after years and years of avoiding it like the plague (see Simpsons episode 17:17 “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bangalore”). I hope everyone treats him with the respect and courtesy anyone should give someone who’s as skittish about his privacy as a wild mustang who just unexpectedly stumbled into a wolf pack. I look forward to the con reports (BITTER! SO BITTER!), but the second level tickets are still way too expensive for me to justify the whole shebang. Anyway, wouldn’t stalk him, respect him lots, hope he enjoys and makes arrangements for smaller cons/events in the future.

I used to have a ginormous crush on Raychel Ray from the Food Network, but it was back when she was new and fresh. Now that she’s all corporate and, well, married, not crushing quite so much. I like the idea behind her meals, and now and again I watch her show, but she used to be so darn awesome.

I get my perv on with Paula Deen (seriously, have you ever seen Paula’s Party? It’s like a rolling sexual harassment wagon.) and Alton Brown makes me tingly. Good times on the Food Network, yo. Plus, if they make Giada’s shirts any more “scoop” neck, we’re going to be able to see her navel. Not that there’s anything wrong with rack that.

I was musing earlier about crushes. Many of my crushes on men are on older men with wicked, depreciating senses of humor. One in RL who was very kind to me when letting me down (though I still quail in horror at that particular Life Moment), and my massive crushes on a number of television actors. The one in RL was twenty two years older than I was, and an excellent man. Very aloof, hardly anyone at work knew anything about him, but I smiled at him one day and said hello. Next thing I know we were having coffee breaks together and having great talks. He was also nursing a broken heart (divorce) and missed his kids a lot. It wouldn’t have worked, but my youth and stupidity cost me a friend in the end. I feel pretty bad about that, but at least I can think of him now without being completely crushed.

Randomly, that led me to thinking of a girl I knew in high school. I think it’s because both Older!RL man and she have these amazing, piercing blue eyes. She had the most astonishing pale and clear complexion I’ve ever seen on another human being. Pale, milky skin with these rosy lips and cheeks…she was beautiful. She was also a bigger nerd than I was, which if you’d known me then is well nigh impossible, but it’s true. I think the fact she had a mathematically inclined mind tipped the geek scales in her favor. I wonder what happened to her, but my google-fu, it fails me. I’d check the spelling of her name, but that would require pulling out my high school yearbook, and there’s no way in hell THAT’s going to happen tonight.

Strangely enough, the blue of my crushes eyes are reflected in the scarf I’ve been working on because it’s so mindless. I’ve gone four entire days with some knitting, and it’s awesome! Lame? Maybe. But it’s exciting when I haven’t had a chance to do any consistent knitting for months.

So far today I’ve managed to resist buying a Journey Wheel, a book charkha, and ordering either a Columbine or a Majacraft Alpaca. Good thing too, because I’m getting up early tomorrow morning to try to get tickets for a thing in August. More about that later, I hope.

Congrats for surviving the first potential work week of January, to anyone who is reading! :D