What's up.

Things around here are pretty slow, between the weather and the pain situation. More doctors and physical therapists this week, but for now, the weather looks like this:

Note the gray skies that say "more snow soon".

This morning the husbeast called me from work (he's still working Saturdays for the overtime), and we were talking, and he made this statement: "I didn't slide into that guy's front yard again this morning, so that was good." Usually he goes to work before the snow plows are out (or WHILE the snow plows are out, he loves that), so it's an adventure, even allowing for the fact he's in a huge vehicle with four wheel drive. He's passed two snow plows in ditches this week on his way to work.

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I've been spinning. I finished up the fawn-colored alpaca (well, finished half of it) that I'd intended to give to my mother-in-law for Christmas. Since I wound up buying her something instead, I'm putting this aside for That Project, the sweater I'm gradually accumulating natural-colored animal fibers for. (I intend to get some bison, yak, and other exotics for that project, as well as assorted types of wools and camelids; it'll take a year at least to accumulate enough yarn the way I'm spinning).

This was a bear to spin. Not impossible, but for someone like me, who spins for relaxation, it was quite a lot of bother. It's alpaca top. Top means the fibers were combed smooth, and then pressed straight and flat. Wool top is fun to spin because it's easy to draft; all the fibers smoothed out move around easily. But alpaca is smoother than wool to begin with, on a molecular level (not as many scales), so alpaca top is too much of a good thing - it's so slippery it's really difficult to draft and ply without pulling the fibers completely apart. Not fun. Once it's done, it's really super soft, though.

I had a couple other exotics here to spin, from the Great Fiber Binge. Tussah silk (that I'd dyed myself), and more of the alpaca. Plus the pencil roving I still want to try supercoils with. But after the alpaca, I'd about had it with difficult technique and wanted to return to my spinning-for-relaxation plan. So instead, I got out the fibers I'd gotten to experiment with color blending (the orange-to-pink) and started spinning that.

The label doesn't say what exact kind of wool it is. I'm thinking of it as New Zealand Mystery Sheep, but it feels like Corriedale, or possibly a Corrie/Romney blend. So it's an easy spin. Just what I was looking for. Aaaah.

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If you're looking closely at the background of the last photo, you can see what the new time suck here at House O Samurai is.

We got a Wii. Actually, it's worse than that. We got a large screen TV AND a Wii. It had been planned for quite some time; the husbeast has wanted a new TV since, literally, before we got married. But I kept saying "the TV we have is fine". Eventually, over the last eighteen years, I let myself be talked around to the idea of a new TV, a large screen, but since we had a working TV, I'd only agree to it if we paid cash. (No going into debt for luxuries. We're finally out of debt and I'm not going back in willingly.) Remember the move from South Carolina to Ohio, back at the end of July? We finally got reimbursed for the move, from the military, right before Christmas. So we used some of the money to buy presents, and then in the after-Christmas sales, we went wild and got the TV and Wii.

The Goober is having loads of fun with it; we got one of the racing games, where you drive around, and she has a ball. We're on the lookout for other games for the Goober, maybe educational ones. But for now she's content to run into things and watch us play Super Mario World. One night after we put her to bed, we decided to play a game of bowling together, and when the Goober heard the game go on, shouted "HEY!" in annoyance from her bedroom.

Watching hockey in high-def is ten kinds of awesome.

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Still knitting, on a couple half-assed, super-easy projects, and getting psyched to get back to work on the Lustkofen. Starting the Christmas knitting a year and three months in advance, yeah, I gotta try that again. Talk about low stress.

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By the way, on the fashion subject. I get the idea of fashion-as-art and photography-as-art. Really. I just don't think VK is it. A blog I've been following lately is Haute Macabre, a blog run by some women who lean toward goth with a pinch of steampunk. They're pretty cool about finding affordable clothes to suggest, interspersed with photos from Japanese Vogue and other fun things. I don't like all of it, but I think all of it is haute. At the least, they choose things that are on the right track, in terms of fashion-as-art.