Twists of Fate

After all my bitching about not being able to sign up for classes at Madrona Fiber Arts this year, I re-checked their website and found that they added some spinning classes. So, despite my terror, I signed up for two six hour sessions in addition to my Kauni hat knitting class on Sunday afternoon. I originally completely got the wrong weekend when trying to reserve a hotel room, and the hotel was sold out for the Wintergrass Festival. So I booked at a B&B that’s two miles away (because I worry about my car driving back and forth to Tacoma three times in a weekend), only to realize tonight that there are, in fact, rooms at the hotel and for the same rate as at the B&B. Ah well. I got a really nice room at the B&B, with another giant tub for soaks (which I will probably need after six hours of spinning), and I will hopefully get some rest. If I stayed at the hotel I’d be too likely to stay up way too late with other people and party, and I have a HUGE two weeks at work following this event.

I’m not sure I’m up for the spinning classes. Yes I can spin a continuous single, which is all that is required in the class description, but it’s been over a year since I spent any real time at the wheel. Well, worst case is I take the Alpaca with me and end up embarrassing the hell out of myself in front of people who probably know exactly what they’re doing. Of course, if they knew that they’d probably not be taking the class, so I don’t know what I’m worried about.

I swore I’d get around to spinning more this year, so here’s to hoping that this kick starts me towards that goal. The first class is pointing out the different methods for worsted vs woolen spinning, and the second is all about camelid fibers. All of which I think will be totally interesting, so it should be a good weekend.

Now if I could get my hands to stop shaking at the idea of spending this much time spinning in front of other people when I am truly not sure I can even actually DO it anymore? That would be quite nice, thank you drive thru.

Snagged from Sprite Writes, one of the blogs that I find refreshing, like a mojito at, well, twilight on an early summer’s day.

First round of answers:

And then I took it again, just for shits & giggles:

Huh. And? SWEET! Multiple personality disorder, courtesy of the world wide intarwebs!

I had more to say, but I have a screaming migraine and can’t think. It’s one of the bad ones - hwere I’m conscious for it. The “good” ones involve me throwing up and passing out for three hours. The bad ones have me throw up more than once, but I stay conscious because I throw up if I close my eyes or lie down. Basically, there’s a lot of throwing up and queasy, head blinding pain.

Good times! Not.

A candidate I can get behind!!

Er, not that way of course. I love sheep, but I don’t love sheep. Not even Dolores, tempting though she may be. I mean, I don’t have health insurance, and you just never know where her fleece has been.

ANYway, I can totally say I’m a member of the Fibertarian party. At some point, when I’m not totally PMSing and generally wanting to trample my fellow Americans under my stiletto-shod heel while bolting into the Fran’s Chocolate store in an effort to stem my irrational tears.

Um, yes. How you doon?

No, not Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup. I’m thinking about why I buy fiber.

And, frankly, why I buy it in such excess.

What prompted all of this Deep Thinking today? My mother is in town for a week or so to help my sister out when Papa heads back to work. She is, however, coming over to MY place Thursday-Friday and spending the night. We’ll be cleaning and maybe putting some shelves together, but that’s not actually a given.

I’m…sort of dreading it, actually. Y’all know how there are just some folks in the world who don’t understand The Stash. Nevermind that she just bought herself a ring with diamonds and blue topaz in it on a whim. In her words, “…the jewelry store was closing! !nd it was 75% off!”

Maybe if I replace “jewelry store” with “yarn store” or “fleece sale” it might work. Eh, on second thought, probably not. To her, the jewelry is functional. She wears it every day and sees it on her hand whenever she looks down.

Me? I look at these cardboard boxes that have most of my yarn and fiber still stored in them, and I imagine. I think about how awesome it would be to work with that Romney roving I sent to the processor last year. Or ponder whether leaving that Merino fleece from Australia in the warm summer sun might help with getting the grease melted enough to make it worth working on. Or thinking about how neat it would be to dye roving this year before spinning it, and wondering where the box of dyes went off to. Or thinking about how awesome it’ll be to get all my knitting books and binders with patterns in them actually unpacked and on a shelf, so I can “kit up” projects with the yarns I have. Or…well, you get my drift.

Isn’t it interesting how differently we all think? My connections to the physical world are usually my last priority. Maybe it’s because I’m in pain all the time with a variety of conditions that I noted and promptly ignored. I can’t really change them, and pain management is about the best I can do, so yes, noted, will to my best to incorporate things to help, and moving on now. Maybe it’s because I find the world a pretty harsh place, though less so than it was when I was growing up in a pretty awful household. Maybe….

Whatever the reason, I always retreat to my head and my thoughts, daydreams and the amazing, exciting wonder of possibilities. Give me some raw fiber and I can spin you a tale of about a dozen things I’d make it into, if given the chance. And if I do a lot more of that in my head than I do in the real world? What’s so wrong with that? My time, especially lately, is pretty limited when it comes to pursuing my chosen hobbies. If I end up buying (way) more than I can use, and if I can afford to do so, what the hell is the problem?

*sigh* I needed to get that out, I think, before Thursday, so I can be rational and adult about it rather than reverting to my childhood years and feeling guilty for asking for a little extra something when we really didn’t have the money for the basics, let alone the extras. Food for thought, I suppose. A sour meal, to be sure, but food for thought.

In the meantime, I’m going to go fondle some yarn or fiber and daydream. Because it’s my day, and my choice about how I use my time. Dammit.

Cathy, in the comments to the last post, intimated that she’d like to smack me around a little, going all YAY over Spring being here.

Er, hrm. Slapping = bad! Eeek!

It’s not actually warm enough to garden out here yet. I shifted my start date of the seasons back six weeks because it never, ever felt right to celebrate the beginning of of a season when it had already been here for weeks and weeks already. For me, February 1st is still cold, still grey, but there’s HOPE that things will begin warming, and it’s a much easier, more gradual shift into the actual season. It just feels better to me, and my attitude adjusts accordingly.

I do think it’s easier to do that here in the fairly temperate maritime zone than it is back there in Colorado. I remember the wet snows of Feb/March (and occasionally the one in May or early June), but here? The trees look like they’re beginning to bud. It never fails to amaze me how one day not too long from now I’ll look up and all the trees will have tender new leaves on them, and it will have happened w/out my notice.

It doesn’t mean that there aren’t long, LONG weeks ahead with cold rain, and the ever present grey skies of the Seattle area. That, in may ways, is much more brutal to me than the freezing temps of my hometown right there on/in the foothills of the Front Range. There are may times when I look back on those 300+ days of sunshine and want to just cry and cry, because the sun goes missing for what feels like months at a time here. And even if it is sunny outside, if I’m at work on campus, I’m likely buried in a meeting room and won’t actually see it before I have to leave for home. In the dark. And the rain. Where it takes me over an hour to drive 12 miles because of traffic.

I think there’s always some kind of trade off for the beauty of where we live. The fairly mild climate is awesome, but the lack of sun is awful, and sometimes, that lush growth is actually kind of overwhelming. The snow and cold where Cathy is can be hard to take after months of it, but the beauty of the land and the mountains, and that amazing sense of wide open space is something that will stay with me forever.

So, Cathy, send me some sun and I’ll send you some greenery. Deal?

I made it! I made it through what I reckon as Wintertime and am so thrilled that Spring is here again!

I am pondering perhaps a small row of planters, or even just flowers where the little fence in the yard used to be. Or maybe I can get someone to come over and help me re-scape the bit right in front of my windows, which was done to be a sort of low maintenance “Northwest garden” style, but now is just a couple of ferns, a big log and some weeds. The Oregon Grape gave up the ghost last summer, though the landlady says it was on it’s way out well before I moved in, and there’s a ton of leaves there what probably could’ve been raked better in the Autumn.

But oh. The Light! It returns! And I made it through another winter YES!!!