Twists of Fate

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….

Yanno, I’m just don’t think I’m ever going to be a cotton fan. Knitting with the cotton ends up just killing my hands. And since my hands are a necessary component to my relationship to my work laptop, I need to slow down with the cotton.

I’m working on a baby cap in an random skein of Manos Cotton Striat in a nice neutral shade of aqua. It’ll be soft and drapy and fantastic, but it’s going to be slow going because I can only do two or three rounds (a whoppin’ 70 sts each) before my hands seize and I have to put it down. I’m alternating a few rows of hat, a few rows of sock, and a few pages of stuff online.

HP7? Done. About as I had expected, and I enjoyed it for what it was. Watching the fallout on the intarwebs though = hysterically funny. Seriously. I <3 fandom, but HP is batshit insane. The Potterdamerung is well underway. It’s spectacular!

Also, thank you to everyone who dropped by with birthday wishes!! I’ve since discovered that while yes, Godiva dipped strawberries = awesome, champagne and I are not so mixey. At least, not in that volume in that time period. Ow.

Happy Monday, if there is such a thing! :D

Before I get to the war to end all wizards, I should mention that I had a marvelous time at the shindig at TMK’s house on Sunday to meet Cuzzin Tom and a whole lot of wonderful people. I got to talk to Evelyn Clark about some neat things, and it’s always good to talk to knitters of all backgrounds, bound together by this common interest. I’m always glad that I get out and about to these, and really hope to get off my ass and join the Guild and maybe join them at Ferals now and again.

Also, Cuzzin Tom is just amazing. My shyness struck again, and i didn’t talk to him nearly as much as I would have liked to, but I did enjoy listening to his stories throughout the day.

One of them was a story about losing his mala briefly. I try really hard to be respectful of other people’s tools, and felt very honored to be allowed to handle his lotus seed mala. Holding it in my hands, I could feel this incredilbe buzz of energy…. I had to close my eyes for a moment, and just feel. I heard him say later that he’d had it for 16 years, and when he first got it it was white or light grey. The beads are now a gorgeous deep browniksh red color from handling and time.

How amazing must that be, to have one set of hands working them over and over again, as chants and devotional mantras are said. Through times of great peace, or maybe doubt, possibly fear, and incredible love.

I held his mala in the palm of my hand, and felt deeply and profoundly moved by how much devotion and love that stood for. I think he’s amazingly courageous, to walk the path that he walks, to go and see things and deal with things right up and in front of his face that would utterly destroy me. Meeting him and knowing that he’s seen all the troubles of Mongolia staring him right there in the face really brought home to me why people are doing this.

Thanks for coming and hanging out with us!

——-

We’ve got a little less than 36 hours to go where I live before Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows (does anyone else think this sounds like Harry is dating Kate Moss or maybe some other stick figure Barbie-type?) is released. Now, there are sucktastic people on the intarwebs that will spoil spoil spoil all the fun for everyone and either tell you what happens before you have a chance to read it, or just post scans of crucial pages. I know there’s a PDF of the book released on the web already, and hell, some NYT writer walked into a shop and bought it off the shelf earlier this week.

I prefer to remain unspoiled, and so will be hunkering down with some emergency rations, a battery powered radio, the sock in progress, some stitching and the vast silence of a self imposed internets blackout. At some point on Saturday, a hot person in a brown uniform will be dropping a copy off at my home, at which point I will devour the novel and get back to business as usual.

See y’all on the flip side! The folks bundled up in all the warm knitted gifts for Dulaan may be the only ones left standing after the book drops. :D

Canby, OR is probably too far for my little car to go anyway. I realized today that I won’t be able to go to OFFF and take the classes I had hoped to get to attend. It’s just too much money to justify at this point in time. Classes at any festival are likely going to be too expensive for me for a while. I am wondering if it would make more sense to see if there’s someone around that does private home lessons. I have a wheel here that they can use, and we could set up stuff side by side in the living room and have at it. I really think that might be a better way to go in the long run, though of course you get to meet all kinds of groovy people at the festivals.

Not much knitting going on at the moment. I did, however, add Big Girl Knits and Knitting Nature to my library tonight. Brother mine is in town for more classes, and we went to sushi and then hung out at a bookstore for a while.

I worked at that bookstore (B&N, the *enormous* one in UVillage) when I first moved to Seattle. It’s really strange to me, how far I’ve come in nine years. I’ve had a job nearly continuously (even during school, beginning in jr high) since I was twelve years old. It was always about what was available, what would fit into my schedule, and what I could talk my way into. I’m reviewing my resume of the last seven years, most of which were with the same company, and trying to look at it from an outside perspective. I don’t really feel that it captures “me” (though of course what resume really can capture a person?), but I do hope it shows that I’ve steadily worked my way into progressively more challenging positions. Nine years ago I worked as a cashier in a bookstore. Up until last year, I was a Project Manager for multi-million dollar software projects. This past year, I helped a very, very, VERY small Financial Sales Information team ease through the merger of two companies whose combined revenue was half a billion dollars a couple years back.

Life is weird.

I do, however, feel bizarrely encouraged that I can figure out this knitting thing I’m working on. If I, Shy!Woman extraordinaire, can survive going from working with a team of eight women to helping manage a department of over two hundred total strangers overnight, I can figure out what I need to do with this project.

Oh and hey, if anyone wants to look over my resume and help me figure out how to put more emphasis on the project portions of this past year, rather than the financial things, I’d appreciate it hugely. Drop me a line at my email if you’re interested. :D

I’m hugely amused by the date today: 06/06/06.

While my co-worker thinks Satan and I are BFF (Best Friends Forever…it’s a long story about stupidity and religious intolerance that I’m not going to get into here), and I’m heroically resisting the temptation to do ebil things to my work cube with red food coloring and some feathers, I thought I’d take a moment and post about some stuff. And things. Stuff and things, you know.

I had most of this draft written up when The Harlot posted about her postman and the latest packages. She scooped me, dammit! However, my love for one of my most recent lovely mail packages has not dimmed, and I’m sharing with you.

My very best RL friend EVER sent me a packaged packed to the gills with wonderful things.

Like this brown merino lace yarn. So soft. Such a subtle sheen. So freakin’ amazing and fabulous and I LOVE EET! I’m not really sure how I’m going to ball this up with the winder. Is this where those toilet paper cores come in handy? I am vaguely recalling something about cutting a notch in one end, slipping the end of the skein in the notch, slipping the core over the ball winder center and away we go. Am I correct in thinking that? Help me out here peeps.

Digging a little bit deeper into the box, I gasped and then did an actual happy dance of glee when I unearthed these. Bundanaurriklaedid!!! Y’all, I’ve been DYING to get this book and the attendant English translation for at least a year, though I’m pretty sure it’s been longer. I really, really love the shawls in this book.

Something about the Faroese-style shawls really appeal to me. The book was OOP for a while, I think, and I lusted after them on the Schoolhouse Press site for a long time, and they were a little beyond my means at the time. I checked out the local liberry copy over and over again, but finally had to return it. Very reluctantly, but I did it. I was pretty proud of myself, even if no one else knew. Fear the wrath of the librarian, y’all. *nods*

Last but not beast, I mean least, is this handful of wild buffalo fiber. MVBRLF’s (My Very Best Real Life Friend’s) SO at the time gathered this on a hike through Yellowstone. This is so cool…I’m pretty much speechless about it. I’m also gonna feel really dumb if I misremembered and this isn’t actually buffalo, but I’m pretty sure it is. It was like an article out of Wild Fibers landed right in my living room when I got to that part of the box. So, so cool. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it yet - I’ve just been feeling it up like a frat boy at Mardi Gras for the first time, and I didn’t even have to buy it a drink first.

Presents rock yo.

In between eps of Season Six of SG-1 (I cried so hard at the end of S5 and my absolute favorite episode EVER in Season Six, “Abyss”…see my LJ for details), and actual spinning, I’m daydreaming and looking through the book and trying to decide which shawl I’m going to cast on for. Decisions, decisions.

Thank you MRLBF A!!! *peppers you with smoochies*

Next post - actual spinning done! I plied another skein of random singles, and did another bobbin of a fabulous blended batt. Stay tuned for actual spinning content, coming to a smart ass blog near you!