Yarn and quite a lot of etc
Some days are just entirely too exciting.
It’s midnight, and I’ve only this minute fed poor, neglected, starving hellhounds their dinner.* It counts, doesn’t it?, that I’ve only sat down to my own dinner now? After feeding hellhounds? And that they got their lunch when I had about three mouthfuls of mine before running off in some other flapdoodling direction or other?**
It began by oversleeping an hour thanks to setting the timer wrong.*** I stumbled out of bed with a yell, groping for Pooka to text [sic] Fiona . . . turned Pooka on and discovered a text from Fiona saying she’d overslept by an hour. So that was okay, except that it’s meant we’ve been sprinting in front of the gnashing-teethed time monster all day.
I’ve said this to you already, haven’t I?—that it is just like me to have finally found someone to do a little secretarial work for me . . . and promptly force her to teach me to knit and let her tease me into taking up my old folk rock mania and start going to live concerts again ( . . . she drives). She did so little work today that she’s refusing to let me pay her for it.†
But we went to a new yarn shop. We went to a fabulous new yarn shop, in fact: http://www.lisswools.co.uk/ It’s a bit of a schlep from here but hey. We both staggered out again about two hours later with smoking credit cards and wailing bank accounts.†† And raced back to New Arcadia for me to hurtle hounds and fail to eat lunch, and Fiona††† to do a little of the work she claims not to have done. Because then we had handbells. Well, 5-7 Thursday evening is sacred to handbells. Fernanda has a streaming cold and Colin is in Petra installing a ring of eight in a rose-red tower half as old as time, so that left Niall and me. I tried to cancel, but Niall said, you have a friend visiting? Why don’t we teach her handbells? —We have, in fact, tortured Fiona with handbells once before. So we did it again.‡ If she’s not careful she’s going to learn how.
And then we had to go to the concert. 
For anyone old enough to be scratching their (grey) head and muttering, didn’t that album come out in about 1974? —Yes. But do you really want to argue about the opportunity for a new Steeleye Span t shirt? (The Spring 2011 tour dates are on the back.) And when they did All Around My Hat and Gaudete for their encores and Maddy said sing: all us old geezers sang.
And tomorrow . . . No, no, I can’t bring myself to tell you about tomorrow. . . . ‡‡
* * *
* Which they ate with unseemly, which is to say delightful, alacrity.
** Which may help to explain why I was starting to feel a trifle light-headed the last couple of hours. I used to carry a nice little vacuum pack of roasted salted organic cashews in my knapsack for these emergencies, but I got tired of playing guessing games with the ordering system at the frelling store, and if I had time to roast my own organic cashews I wouldn’t need to be carrying them around, you know? Grump.
*** I never could count. Except places in a bell method, and that’s work.
† We may have to argue about this a little more. I haven’t decided yet.
†† Fiona bought MORE YARN than I did. No. True. Really. On the way to the concert tonight I sat in the passenger seat of her car taking skein after skein out of her shopping bag and going oooooh. I’ve told her she has to take a photo. The thing that worries me is that Fiona has been knitting eight years or something. What I’m going to be like in eight years . . . doesn’t bear thinking about. At the moment I’m partially defended from my worst self by the fact that I’m still so clueless.^ I’m really good at looking at yarn and going oooooh, and I can look at patterns and go oooooh too, but that’s about the limit of either my conversation or my comprehension of the subject.
I also overwhelm easily. When we first walked in the shop I was instantly riveted by the cardigan that the owner was wearing, which is one of my Ideal Sweater styles—slightly cropped, v neck, little shawl collar, long sleeves—yes she had made it, yes she could sell me the pattern . . . and as these things go, yes it looks like something I could conceivably grow up to make. So I bought the pattern, went dutifully over to the specified yarn shelves (DK, as it happens) . . . and was promptly overwhelmed. How do you CHOOOOOSE? Aaaaaaaaugh. And then Fiona wandered up to me, clutching, as I was, several different Rowan felted tweeds^^ and whimpering, and Fiona said, isn’t that the stuff you went back and bought all of your dye lot at the first shop? And I looked at her wildly, and we both dove for the pattern and . . . yessssssssss. I need seven skeins and I have seven skeins. Occasionally fate is kind.
Of course then I saw another knitted-up thing on a hanger and did my shiny new knitting-ooooh trick and yes the shop had that pattern too and it’s even designated easy knit which in my experience usually means ‘boooooring’^^^ so I did buy the yarn for that and it’s huge. I mean the gauge is huge. Big fat ropes of yarn. I need more needles! YAAAAAAAY! I haven’t told you about My Favourite Needles in the Known Universe yet, and this is my excuse to buy more. . . .
^ Although apparently cluelessness is rife in the land. I’ve discovered that the frelling clerk at our frelling original little yarn department in the big local fabric-and-girly-stuff store, having punched the buttons on her calculator in a professional-looking manner, told me to buy TWICE as much yarn as I’m going to need for the type of project I had in mind. This was the famous occasion—my second visit to the yarn shop, I think?—when I was told by the visiting authoritative American knitter person that if I saw a yarn I liked I should buy it now because it won’t be there when I come back. So I did. Only I bought twice as much as I need. GRUMP.
^^ Turquoise, forest green and dark cranberry red+
+ I’m still kind of thinking about the cranberry red. . . .
^^^ And in fact I would have passed right over this one if I’d been looking through the pattern books, draped, as it was, on a sulky anorexic 14-year-old model.
††† Who doesn’t eat. I don’t know how she manages this. She’s not even menopausal. I occasionally see her taking furtive pulls at a bottle of fruit juice.
‡ She could have kept working. And let me pay her.
‡‡ Okay, this just in from Fiona.^ Supposing I can persuade WordPress to load it.
^ Wow. I didn’t see the foot fetish toy this evening in the car.
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