So…apparently I have a web site – the best kind of unexpected and wonderful surprise! I feel entirely invigorated to post but also completely tongue-tied and fairly certain no one  is going to be reading it!  Well, I know two people who will read it.

Wait, three.

So suddenly I have so much to do…pictures to take and upload…a new format to figure out.

And then…then I need to think of what I want to say.  I recently went back and re-read the blog from the beginning – if you’ve never done this with your own blog, its an interesting experience.   Reflecting back I would say that I see some stuff that was very much “in process” for me emotionally.  Some I am still dealing with, other things are no longer an issue.  It was a nice reminder and a chance to see how far I’ve come.

Where did I go?  Nowhere really.  I would say two things happened.  First, the US economy tanked and took the Canadian one with it.  This coincided with my language training and the combination of the two spelled the death of my etsy shop.  I haven’t quite nailed down the lid of the coffin but will have to decide at some point whether or not to pull the plug.  The sheer explosion of indie dyers is daunting, but that was there before and I was doing fine.  Still…in some ways I want to leave it to those who have more time and dedication than I do.  But I also really really miss it.

The quiet demise of the etsy shop had a  negative impact on the blog as a lot of my inspiration for writing was coming out of working with fibre.  As my head quieted down, there seemed to be less and less to say.  I think I went into a “quiet” period that was actually quite peaceful, but not very entertaining for others.

So I am here – and I’ve kept up with the blogs out there although rather quietly.  I’m going to take my time updating projects – even my ravelry project page is far behind!

Please stay tuned for more!

P.S. Thanks J – I needed a push.

Happy Thanksgiving to my fellow Canadians today – I hope your day is full of turkey and family (for some) and sleep and rest (for the others). I personally spent last night sleeping at the hospital wired up to within an inch of my life for a sleep study to see if I’ve inherited the family apnea. So I slept terribly, was home by 6:30 a.m. and crashed for another three hours in my own (delightfully comfortable I will never complain about my mattress again promise) bed. After I got most of the cement out of my hair.

I shouldn’t complain though – I’ve had two great dinners – one here at home with my parents, kids and niece and the other at a friends who is a gourmet cook…more on this in a moment…

First – I owe you a bit of old stuff promised earlier, starting with my trip to Toronto at the end of August.

I went down to visit Wanna-Baa of the comments, but stopped on the way to visit a farm in Port Hope – probably one of the few, if only, shepherds locally with Blue-Faced Leicesters. I have no pictures for you, but the farm was just amazing – there were turkeys wandering around my car in all different colours, a guard goat and the ugliest duck I have ever seen who thinks he is a person and insisted on following us to visit the sheep. Sara had brought out bags of fleece from her spring shearing and I ended up with two BFL fleeces – one is a first year and the other is a third year.

Both fleeces were relatively clean and so far the processing has been dirty but not horrifyingly so…

…than the very adorable alpaca…

There was also a baby donkey and the most amazing dogs – Lori raises Leonbergers – enormous but incredibly gentle. It was a whole lotta dog let me tell you.

Luke, his grammy and a REALLY BIG DOG.

So that’s it for the history although I should shout out a huge thank you to Chriss and Elizabeth for helping me skirt the fleeces and for their advice on how to get them clean.

And while I’m on the topic of fibre…

I seem to have acquired some more…

I participated in a fiber swap on Ravelry. Basically we were split into groups of four and each member of the group sent fiber to another member each month. This month I got a lovely 4 oz present from Lapoli…isn’t it nice???

I’ve also made an early 2009 resolution – I think this will be the year I knit for me. I have been considering simplifying my wardrobe pretty significantly and would love to focus on having most blacks and neutral bases that I can cover with my own knitted sweaters, cardigans, shawls and jackets…

I was so taken with this idea that I promptly cast on some things a bit early…

February Lady Sweater in Mirasol Tupa.

And work on the Susie Hoodie from More Big Girl Knits also continues. I am just about done with the bust increases and will be onto the arms soon which I am really looking forward too…shorter rounds!

Getting organimized…

Something had to be done. I couldn’t pull out a project without having fourteen others fall out of the cupboard. So – big canvas bins for fiber – the white has fiber to be dyed and the blue contains fiber that is up on etsy right now…

And some nice wicker baskets for yarn from current and upcoming projects to show off themselves…

Is it a bad sign when your house and stash start to look more and more like a yarn store?

(Oh and just to revisit an earlier post…all this clean up meant that I took some stuff off the needles…which means I managed to find all those needles I was lamenting about losing…

…not that this stopped me from putting in a knitpicks order…no siree!)

Now last of all…

Wild encounters OR how I pissed off a mother cat and paid the piper for it

Warning – includes photos of my legs that do not include handknit socks.

So I’m at my friend’s place for Thanksgiving and she has a formerly feral cat that arrived on her doorstep looking for handouts, got adopted and turned out to have gotten herself knocked up before they had a chance to spay her.

The kittens were born about 5 weeks ago – four adorable little ones – two black and two tabbies. Like all kittens they have sweet faces and short stubby tails and when they run it seems like their back ends go faster than their fronts.

I am helpless in the face of kittens.

So I am walking towards the kitchen behind a kitten and reach down to pick it up but clearly she doesn’t want interference and takes off ahead of me. I keep going into the kitchen but as I hit the doorway I hear this horrible hissing and feel pain in my leg. I look down and its like a scene from Wild Kingdom. You know the one where the pride of lions is taking down a full sized elephant by coming up behind and attaching itself to its back, claws fully embedded in the skin?

And that’s just one side and the picture is a lot prettier than my leg which is also pretty bruised and there is more on the other side. I WAS wearing pants by the way…

So a few bandaids and some peroxide later I go down to get some dessert. I walk towards the kitchen again and as I hit the door Phoebe attacks the OTHER leg (no kittens were around by the way). Talk about determined overprotective mother!

Those would be puncture marks from her teeth! For the rest of the evening she kept a close eye on me and everytime I moved my hosts had to step in to move her out of the room.

I am certainly none the worse for wear but certainly learned my lesson when it comes to mother cats!

Have a terrific week everyone – I am off for a workshop with Brandon Mably and an evening lecture by Kaffe Fassett at WoolNthings…I should pack my camera NOW so I don’t forget it!!

Damn it…I’m going back to bed.

Warning – the following paragraph may contain whining.

I hate my job right now and the petition to remove the Board at my condo has been received and Deposal Day is August 27th. I’m not sure if I am looking forward to it or not. And it going 35 degrees today with a humidex of 45 – which registers as “Disgusting” on the Weasley thermometre.

Done! Thanks for hanging in there!

Now the good stuff.

First of all — I was blissfully unaware that August 1st is the best day of the whole year. For some, this day is Christmas, for others the beginning of tax season and for still others its the first day of school.

For me its the day a very very important book arrives in my mailbox. I am saving the reading until I am ready. Ready will be a quiet house. The cats are resting so nothing is going to get broken. I have a steaming cup of coffee beside me. Then its time to dive in. Time to dive, straight and deep, right into the heart of the IKEA catalogue. Harry Potter is just going to have to wait.

Next up – an FO!!!

Northern Light mittens from Knitpicks - knit as shown with the same colours (yarn is Palette). Knit on dpns of unknown size (thicker than socks though – maybe a 4mm or so). I love them with a fondness that is bordering on unnatural. They were a fun, if not quick knit. My fairisle sucks big time but they shore do look purty from afar!

I so loved the colourway – and had so much left over – that I immediately embarked on my next bit of obsessive knitting…

Pretty no?

Is this one more clear?

Its Elizabeth Zimmermann’s Baby Surprise Jacket. Everything you have heard about brilliant design? EZ’s genius? ALL true.

In order to knit this, I had to put aside my Mystery Stole. I am on Clue 3 and as of Friday will be completely behind when Clue 5 is released.

The excitement and speculation are mounting – cause Melanie is going to reveal the theme that day to the Yahoo group. (by the way, my guess is the elements – the border looks like water – the graphical bit like wind, then flames above the diagonal lines…and the next bit looks like rocks to me)

Both of these have shoved aside the Dale Fairisle Sweater with Scary Steeks…

I love love love the lace on these. They are a bit loose – which is worrying me in a nagging way I am choosing to ignore and will cast on the second one anyway – but I had to add 1/3 more stitches – not only because I have Fred Flintstone feet (wide, flat and easily double your vehicle acceleration) but because the pattern is ridiculously small. Note to self: pedicure!

Here’s a lacey closeup.

There’s plenty of other projects floating around – like Lizard Ridge (4 blocks knit – a zillion to go)

The nagging voice in my head is telling me to get ready for work. I must obey the voice.à

Edited to add at 1:09 p.m. – I am 14 people away from Ravelry!!!! Tonight? Tomorrow? Can I elbow people out of the way virtually?

Last spring I was asked by a neighbour if I would become a member of the Board of Directors for the condominium I live in. Now, I’m not exactly up there in the “involved in my community” category, but since I do hand over a significant chunk of change to these folks each month I figured it might be good to understand better what it was being used for.

I arrived just in the nick of time – for the first special assessment the owners here have ever had in nearly 30 year of existence. Turns out our roofs are leaky and the best long term option is a membrane roof. Cool! The money has been collected over the last few years and we are good to go!!!

Or not, since it seems that our attics do not have sufficient fire inhibitors and to upgrade them to meet the building code is going to cost each unit owner $2400. As a member of the board, if we do not do the attic upgrade, we would be liable if there is a fire – not to mention the havoc played with personal home insurance. So now, on top of the usual monthly condo fees, we have had to ask owners to cough up another $70 per month over the next three years.

So, you say – why go with the expensive roof? Why not shingle it instead? Well, every time we put on shingles the damn thing leaks – it’s a structural problem based on bad initial design that affects property values.

The owners are now staging a revolt, or coup or mutiny. However you want to characterize it, its ugly and involves words like “corrupt” and “misleading”. Everyday my neighbours are scurrying around and talking in hushed tones. People who normally don’t give each other the time of day are uniting in anger and pointing fingers at a group of volunteers that unfortunately includes me.

So I have achieved a couple of interesting first for me: first time on a Board of Directors, and probably a first time being kicked off one.

Clearly, success will have to wait for a little while longer. In the meantime, I’m just going to keep on knitting these.

Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.
C. S. Lewis (1898 – 1963)

Pattern: Charlotte’s Web Shawl from Koigu in Apple Laine reds (5 skeins plenty left over to add to a sock but not enough for a pair). This was a really fun knit after I clued into the “put a marker after every repeat and your life will be much much better” rule. Now I just want to give it away because frankly? I find it a bit too small for my liking. And I’m done with it too. Wierd isn’t it…to covet a pattern and work so hard on it? I guess that makes me a process knitter?

Next up:

The Yarn Harlot’s sock recipe from Knitting Rules in a since discontinued Simple Stripes from KnitPicks. These are knitting up super super fast. It is either because I am using 2.75mm instead of …um…whatever I used for the last pair – or I am getting much faster. Either way, watching the colours change and the nifty not-quite-fair-isle-so-that’s-why-it-was-so-cheap white bits show up makes for an entertaining knit. The only thing is that they are a bit narrow, but fit Madeline though not for long. I have some more in another colourway I’ll try but only if the yarn softens up a bit after a good wash. It seems a bit prickly.

So that’s kinda all she wrote. I am off work tomorrow after it was not unkindly suggested that I might want to relax for a day before the constant “please god let me die before I have to change the damned documents again!” drove my co-workers to commit mass suicide or murder me savagely. My plan is laundry (so we can be sure to survive the deep freeze with no risk of frostbite to the naked bits), cooking some freeze-able stuff for the next week (seems I am a better parent when making dinner is easy) and maybe a wee little side trip to an LYS or two for some fondling and coveting.

I don’t talk much about work here…mostly cause I happen to really like my job and the people I work with. There’s lots of variety and I am, mostly, in charge of my own destiny day-to-day. I work as a communications advisor to central government department. This means that if we have a big event with a VIP announcing a VIT (very important thing) — then I have to walk a fine line between the people who are creating the Thing (i.e. public servants, policy wonks, analysts) and the people of the VIP (political aides) and everyone in between and on either side. And god forbid we forget to consult with person X over sentence Y since it might impact on their job sometime in 2011 and we wouldn’t want to upset anyone. This is the quintessentially Canadian government at work.

And then the VIPs go and do what they want to anyway.

All this to say that we are very busy at the moment and while there is knitting and an FO to share it will have to wait a few more seconds…or days.

In the meantime, think about sending a birthday card to Shane…

1. Realistic. Um…not. At least I’d like to be less realistic or pragmatic. I am pragmatic out of necessity not desire. If I were independently wealthy I’d be FAR less realistic.

2. Living in Real-time is a challenge for me. I often am looking ahead, fantasizing about being somewhere else or living in memory. Sitting down and enjoying the moment is something I find really difficult. I suspect this issue is what contributes to my feeling that life is either passing me by, or I’m missing something.

3. Rational. Mostly although sometimes I am surprised when I consider that most of my major life decisions were based on instinct. Job changes are a good example. Because I work for government in an internal service I have a lot of mobility to move from department to department. I have squeezed my way out of a number of growing from bad-to-worse situations (usually involving a management change with a trickle down effect). I also managed to get pregnant and realize my ex was expressing his feelings elsewhere on instinct. I like to think that my instincts are attuned to a pretty rational side of me…else I’d be in real trouble!

4. Ready. For something…though I’m not sure what exactly.

5. Restaurants. I just asked the random word generator for a word and reloaded until I got an R-word. I do love a good restaurant. I have recently discovered a fantastic Indian take-out place near me. Anything that involves someone else preparing the food and cleaning up the dishes is a good thing in my books.

6. Random – proceeding, made, or occurring without definite aim, reason, or pattern. Kind of like my brain although I have this feeling that there is a certain amount of logic and patterning that I prefer not to examine too closely. Like why I could live on cookies even if they make me feel icky. Why I can knit a shawl but emptying the litter box is chore I prefer to avoid. Why at one point in my life I was desperate for a job where I was important enough to rate an invitation to attend meetings, but now that I have one I’d do anything to get out of them.

7. Ramble. I like to ramble. See 6 above.

8. Relationships. Now here I could really ramble. Right now I am in a space where I look at the relationships I have (a few very good friends, many acquaintances) and I wonder why it is that I have such an easy time letting people go. I really do. I go to a job, make good friends, but then find it a major challenge to keep them after the fact. I suspect it is because I am very much affected by others – I either come out of my shell and can access my own humour and quirkiness or people make me feel tired and I can’t really talk around them.

9. Rare – its how I like my steak. I am very particular about this. When barbequing I generally implore the cook (usually male) to introduce my steak to the flame but not really let them get too acquainted. The (usually male) cook is often disappointed because my preference does not allow for demonstration of skill in achieving the perfect cross cut grill markings or prowess in achieving medium-rare. Still, these people should be grateful I let them cook my meat at all – I only cook it because other people around the table don’t appreciate watching me eat raw steak. Plus it’s a bit warm, which I suppose is a good thing.

10. Resolved…does NOT describe me. I kind of bend whichever way the wind is blowing. I am never truly resolved about anything. Except about my steak being rare. And wanting my kids to turn out okay.