Fiber content.

Other than knitting endless rounds of lice (I thought this would be the fun part, because I could read and knit at the same time - guess again), I've been spinning.

I finished another skein of the orangey merino:


The alpaca (from the videos) isn't quite done yet, but it's plied and off the bobbin and on to a niddy-noddy:


And now I'm up to something with the Dread Carbon Fiber. It's kind of pissing me off because I've got this spinning class coming up on the 24th and I'd like to take all the bobbins I've got. Which means getting everything on the bobbins done. That's not too hard, since I usually finish one spinning project at a time.


But this carbon fiber's been a pain in the ass to spin (think reeled silk, only more annoying). I need to spin 500 yards of it, then ply it with Something Else, by Saturday. The good news is, the finished project will be fun, and technically Art Yarn (I hate that term), and up for sale in my Etsy shop as soon as I get a PA business license. Not to mention I'll be rid of some more of this damn carbon fiber.


Otherwise, uh, Sekhmet, you fucker.

(Sorry for the blur, it was accidentally shot with the low-shutter-speed setting I use when photographing yarn. Not so good for action. Plus she knew better than to hang around when she saw me.)

Quote meme!

Okay, I've been thinking of this one for quite some time and yet again I've NOTHING to blog about, so here we are.

Here's the deal: I'm giving situations common in stories, and you list all your favorite quotes from those situations. Do not limit yourself. Movies, books, TV shows, old legends. Heck, if you can find a real-life situation like these and know a quote you like, throw it on out there. No limit on the number of quotes, and if you can't think of one, just skip on to the next item. I fear I will be long-winded, personally. Throw in whatever attribution it takes for the rest of us to know where it came from. (Wikiquote is good for this stuff. FYI.)


At the start of the quest, the hero/heroine/protagonist says:

"And this is the best that you-that the government, the US government could come up with? I mean, you're NASA for crying out loud, you put a man on the moon, you're geniuses! You're the guys that're thinking shit up! I'm sure you got a team of men sitting around somewhere right now just thinking shit up and somebody backing them up! You're telling me you don't have a backup plan, that these eight Boy Scouts right here, that is the world's hope, that's what you're telling me?"
"Yeah."
"Oh, Jesus." --Armageddon

"Although always prepared for martyrdom, I preferred that it should be postponed. " --Winston Churchill, about going to military school

"I aim to misbehave." --Serenity.

"I'm hung over, my knees are killin' me and if you're going to pull this shit at least you could've said you were from the Yankees." --Major League

"Oh I know what y'all really want is some gross, caricature of a woman to prove some idiotic point that power makes a woman masculine, or masculine women are ugly. Well shame on you for letting a man do that, or any man that does that. That means you, dear. Miss Marshall. Shame on you, you macho shit head." --Tootsie

"Well, without disappointment, you cannot appreciate victory."
"Did Eleanor tell you that?" --Gone in 60 Seconds

"Well, then, I confess. It is my intention to commandeer one of these ships, pick up a crew in Tortuga, raid, pillage, plunder and otherwise pilfer my weaselly black guts out." --Captain Jack Sparrow

"You can be my Spunky Girl Sidekick. I'm fresh out at the moment. Release me and we'll blow up the Baron's Dirigible of Doom, escape by the skin of our teeth and then it's cocoa and schnapps all round!" --Girl Genius, web comic



**After all hell breaks loose, there is a beat of silence. Then the protagonist/hero/heroine says:

"Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?" --Indiana Jones, Raiders of the Lost Ark.

"The whole world's going to hell, you gonna just sit there?" --Wolverine, X Men 3.

"Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker." --Die Hard.

"...this is my house, and I have certain rules about snakes and dismemberment." --The Mummy Returns

"Oh, I'm sorry, was that your auntie?" -- Men in Black

"How did you solve the icing problem?" --Iron Man

"I've got two girlfriends in the bar."
"They have 50 armed men."
"I know. It hardly seems fair." --Charlie's Angels II


**After a declaration of love/admiration/respect, the reply is:

"You're so cute."
"Women don't wanna be cute. We wanna be exotic and mysterious." --Bull Durham.

"I have a head for business and a bod for sin. Is that so wrong?" --Working Girl.

"The first boy I ever kissed wound up in a coma for three weeks. I can still feel him inside my head." --Rogue, X-Men, first movie.

"I love you."
"I know." --Princess Leia and Han Solo, Empire Strikes Back (it's a classic for a reason!)

"I dwell in darkness without you!" --Willow




**Then the villain says:

"I will know your blood, Slayer. I will make your neck my chalice... and drink deep." trips and falls into an open grave "Ow!" --Spike, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

"Curse you, Perry the Platypus!!" --Phineas and Ferb

"This is a good death. There's no shame in this, in a man's death. A man who has done fine works. We're making a better world. All of them better worlds." --Serenity

"Me, I'm dishonest. And a dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest. Honestly, it's the honest ones you want to watch out for, because you can never predict when they're going to do something incredibly stupid." --Captain Jack Sparrow


**General snappy comebacks and one-liners:

"...a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing..." --Thomas Jefferson

"So we'll integrate non-progressional evolution theory with God's creation of Eden. Eleven inherent metaphoric parallels already there. Eleven. Important number. Prime number. One goes into the house of eleven eleven times, but always comes out one. Noah's ark is a problem."
"Really?"
"We'll have to call it "early quantum state phenomenon". Only way to fit 5,000 species of mammals on the same boat." --Firefly

"That's what's so stupid about the whole magic thing, you know. You spend twenty years learning the spell that makes nude virgins appear in your bedroom, and then you're so poisoned by quicksilver fumes and half-blind from reading old grimoires that you can't remember what happens next." --Color of Magick

Plant classification.

(Laying the ground work now to make you guys really suffer, later, since many of you seemed cheered at the idea of more plant posts. One of these days I'll do a bio of Linneaus. He was raving.)

Now. The term 'plant' is, in fact, a sketchy one, and people argue about just what it means. If you ask ME, it's about some living critter that uses photosynthesis to 'eat', so anything with a chloroplast (the cellular organ that does photosynthesis) is a plant, and anything without a chloroplast is... something else. But according to the three kingdom system of taxonomy, that's not the case. Of course, not all biologists use the three kingdom system any more. Some use a five kingdom system. Some use a six kingdom system. And I heard about some wild-ass molecular biologist who developed a twenty-two kingdom system a few years back (oddly - ha - all but two or three kingdoms were composed of microbes), but I don't think anyone but wild-ass microbiologists use that one. These days, nobody really knows what to do, but they all do DNA testing and argue with each other. So I'm falling back on my personal definition "If it's got chlorophyll, it's a plant." (They used to classify mushrooms as plants. They must have been DOING mushrooms for that to seem right.)

The following groupings are - mostly - general, so there can be a bit of overlap. (Can too. Tell me where a slime mold fits, hmmm? Lichens? SPONGES?) But it'll do well enough for laypeople, especially considering my textbooks are all in boxes. (I love you guys, but I'm not digging out those boxes.) I'm also putting them in the rough order in which they evolved/first appeared. Again, there's overlap and times on a lot of them are approximate, but you'll get the idea.

Algae and related: Nuclei enclosed in membranes and chlorophyll and blah blah. These are simple plants; the ones that are not single cells, often function as clumps of single cells together. Unlike more advanced plants, where cells form specialized organs like leaves and flowers and whatall, algaes are just a buncha cells, hanging out. Sometimes alone, sometimes together in clumps. That's what makes them algae. These suckers have been dated in the fossil record back a billion and a half years and more. Most people think they go back much further, but there's no fossil record to support it; all the rock we have now has been recycled in volacoes since then. That's how damn old they are. As with so much else, biologists are still arguing over exactly how the algaes and their close relatives (like sea weed and coral reefs) are related. Personally, I think algae is so complicated it needs its own kingdom. Don't say THAT too loudly in a biology department. Someone will jump you.

Mosses/bryophytes (they're now giving liverworts and hornworts their own divisions, and I'm skipping them or I'll be here all damn night): This is another type of plant that goes back so far, no one's quite sure how old it is. And also like algae, it lacks a vascular system. (Remember biology class where everyone was obsessed over spinal columns? Well in the plant world, it's vascular systems. Those are best known to knitters as bast fibers; it's like a circulatory system for the plant, dedicated cells that do nothing but move nutrients and water around. Xylem and phloem in really complex plants.) Mosses, don't have those. Another thing that makes mosses freaky is, they're backward. I'll skip the diploid and haploid stuff, but in genetic terms, mosses spend most of their lives as egg and sperm. They don't have seeds, they have spores, which are... oh, forget it, just believe me when I say they're freaky, and insanely complex genetically, for how simple they are, on a cellular level.


Ferns and horsetails, AKA seedless vascular plants: Which are just what they sound like. Plants that don't reproduce with seeds and flowers, but are complex enough to have cells dedicated to moving stuff around - a vascular system. Without hitting my textbooks, I do believe ferns win the prize as the most genetically fucked up organisms in the plant kingdom. Possibly the world, but plants for sure. I forget which one, but some fern has 400+ chromosomes. (Humans have 46 - 22 pairs and some stragglers.) They reproduce by, well, a spore grows into a gametophyte, which grows eggs AND sperm, which fertilize each other and produces little baby ferns that honest-to-god remind me of tadpoles, that then take root and grow into fern, ferns. Told you they were complicated. They're also old. Show up in the fossil record around 410 million years ago.

Conifers: (We're now firmly into the realm of stuff you can identify. I think.) Coniferous trees go back about 360 million years. They're defined as vascular plants (again with the vascular stuff) that reproduce with cones. Mostly they're trees, but there are some shrubs in there too. (Quick. Define 'shrub'. QUICK! DARE YOU! Presidential slurs do not count!) It's thought that conifers evolved as a response to the fern life cycle needing so much water; conifers don't need any standing water to reproduce, unlike ferns. Instead, they're wind-pollinated. (Think about the shape of a pine cone, and imagine it needing to catch as much air as possible to reproduce the tree. Clever, no?) Most of the trees have male and female cones, one to release pollen and one to catch it and turn it into seeds. Some species have entirely separate male and female trees. The cones and seeds can take years to mature from little bud all the way through to producing seeds. Pine nuts, so popular in Italian food, are seeds from the cones of a specific species of coniferous tree. And no, they aren't domesticated.

Ginkgo trees go in here somewhere, but they are a blog post unto themselves. I refuse to take all night at this, and I don't want anyone's eyes to glaze over (well, worse than they are now). But ginkgoes are genetically unrelated to, well, anything we know of, and they go back about 280 million years. In China they are a symbol of longevity - I always wonder how the ancient Chinese KNEW THAT STUFF (if you're an ancient Chinese person, e-mail me and let me know).

Cycads (known as dinosaur trees at MY house): These are trees that are in many ways similar to conifers. Vascular tissue, cones, etc. The only difference is in structure, which is similar to palm trees, but not. (I do believe - again, not digging out the text books - the way to differentiate between a cycad and a palm is, palms are hollow in the middle, cycads are not.) Cycads have things that look much like pine cones growing up out of the centers of the leaves, which then pollinate and produce seeds much like the conifers do. These plants go back 280 million years, easy, and have a really unusual global distribution that may support plate tectonics and continental drift. Cool trees, kinda freaky looking, and I respect that.



Angiosperms, AKA "flowering plants": You know, the ones in your gardens. The reproductive cycle that you guys ALL studied in school, with the pollen and the ova and pistils and stamens and all that, allows for a HUGE genetic variance that then produces hugely varied flowering plants. And here we are at the end (ish) of our lesson, at a group of plants that have only been around about 140 million years, and yet have taken over most of the planet. Nearly all our agricultural output is done with angiosperm plants. Many of those have flowers so small you can't see them, but they're in there. You know when your yard gets overgrown and the grass grows little light yellow-green tufts at the ends? Those are flowers. Yup. Angiosperms also, not surprisingly, have the most well-developed vascular systems, and to my knowledge, all the commercial vascular bast fibers used today come from, you guessed it, flowering plants.

I'll skip the further distinctions of monocots and dicots. For today. (A friend of mine, a fellow plant freak, has taken to calling my only child 'the monotot'. We crack ourselves up.) I'm also skipping chloroplasts, but they need their own post. They're like nothing you've seen, this side of a bad science fiction movie. And possibly an annotated list of my favorite plants. And I don't think I've properly sung the praises of the humble potato... or the breadfruit tree... or the three sisters... and bromeliads - are they angiosperms or gymnosperms...

Yeah, I forgot.

The husbeast politely reminded me this morning that I forgot to post yesterday. It went something like this:

"You missed yesterday. You fail." (Perhaps it was "You suck." I don't quite remember, it was early and I hadn't had my tea yet.) Then he went on, speculating that perhaps I could change the date on my computer, go back and blog something. He didn't say the next bit right then, but it's one of his favorite sayings, "If you're not cheating, you're not trying hard enough."

Anyway. Trying to think of something interesting to blog, and fear it may be another day of plant postings. Anyone got a favorite plant they wanna know about?


(Besides. Bloglines uses the time and date in the Google servers, not what's on my computer... so I can't fix it. Ha.)

Nothing exciting to report.

I pretty much wasted the day. See, last week I burned my hand (big shock; that NEVER happens) while making dinner. Instead of applying common sense first aid like I usually do, I ignored it. Then I made a batch of cupcakes and washed approximately ten million dishes. It got infected. The damn burn's on an inconvenient spot, so I spent the day slathered with antibiotic lotion and wearing an awkward bandage. It's doing better, but every time I take the goo and bandage off, it goes funky on me again. So I've done nothing but read books all day. A nice enough day, if you ask me, but it doesn't give me a hell of a lot to blog about.

---

I'm considering a literary comparison between Sookie Stackhouse and Anita Blake, because they're nearly identical except for the sense of humor and the body count. (I'm talking the early Anita Blake, before she humped everything in sight. I've got nothing against smut, I even like it, but I prefer it with enough plot to make sense. I'm snobby like that.)

---

We have successfully rented a little hole-in-the-wall apartment (really, it's not bad, it's just... well... an apartment). The rental company wanted a photo of Sekhmet, since she's part of the lease. I sent them this one.

I saw no good reason to share her bitch nature.

---

The Goob is still sick with the snotty nose and horky lungs. All I got was a sore throat for a day, and no one else has gotten sick. I'm starting to wonder if it's some mild influenza strain the rest of us have been exposed to or vaccinated against. The symptoms are about right. So I'm watching her closely for signs of fever (secondary infection is usually what gets you with influenza) and otherwise just letting her take it easy and drink lots of juice. She's missed Story Time twice now, but I can't bring myself to take her and let her hork germs on the other kids.

She's a tough, ornery little kid. She'll be fine.

---

So, more breathing room. An apartment officially rented (mostly), a move-in plan (mostly), and a spinning class on the 24th to distract me. Not bad.

Notes.

There've been some questions...


Yes, that was Rammstein in the background of the one chain-plying video. The song is "Bück Dich" (yes, I know what the translated lyrics say, thank you). Those of you asking, no, you aren't the only ones who spin or do other fiber stuff to German Metal. Though I've got fewer pyrotechnics going. Sorry. The in-laws don't like me breathing fire in their house.

Though no one asked, the other video has "Great Balls of Fire" by Jerry Lee Lewis playing. Which I thought of as a match for the first - Jerry Lee Lewis once set a piano on fire while playing that song, and his attitude certainly matched Rammstein's. He was born in the wrong era.

---

I'm not a drop-spindle user (my hand problems make it impossible), but I know chain plying was first done by the Navajo, and they used spindles. However, they didn't use drop spindles, they used supported spindles leaned against their legs. So I guess my answer to "Can chain-plying be done with a spindle" is "Sorta." Any drop spindlers out there do chain-plying?

---

Yes, once you 'get' chain plying, it's really easy. You saw how fast I was going, before I slowed it down for the camera. At first it's awkward and you'll snarl up a couple dozen yards of singles, but after that, it's like walking and chewing gum at the same time.

My index finger sticks out rather awkwardly in all these videos, and after I watched them I realized, I don't use that finger much in spinning, or knitting either. The knuckle (the one where the finger joins the palm of the hand, the medial one) was damaged in my accident, it hurts most of the time, and now I realize I avoid using it for all kinds of stuff, not just the fiber.

The rest of you might want to consider shooting video of yourselves, spinning and knitting. Then watch it. You learn the damnedest things.

---

"Pigsbird" is now the official name for where we're moving. It's going to be added to the family slang terms, along with "hunormous", and "henno" (for hello on the phone), and Mumum and Dadad. The husbeast called his own father Dadad the other day, and my mother-in-law used the term "hunormous". Very cute.

---

Am considering, seriously, another round or two of Ohio history. It's not like I have much else to blog right now.

---

The husbeast officially starts his new job on November 2. We do not yet have the apartment locked in. These next few weeks are going to be... interesting. I was just thinking the other night, the one thing the Navy did for me was make me move so many times (this next move will be number eight), that I've become rather blase about the whole thing. And thank goodness, because otherwise I'd be a wreck. Upon thought, I'm not sure if I'm thankful or not, but it's nice to not be spazzing out.

---

Thanks to everyone who has chimed in with encouragement, information, glee at the idea of me moving closer to them, and offers of help, friendship, and book stores. That's the glorious thing I love most about the knitting community on the internet: you guys are everywhere, and when I get there, you're helpful and nice. I'm looking forward to meeting more of you in person.

From here to there.

Or, Ohio and Pennsylvania, and why they're actually pretty different. As the crow flies, we're only moving 75 miles/120km. But the culture's different, and not because of the 'big city' aspect - we're actually moving to the countryside outside Pittsburgh, so in metropolitan terms it's much like where we are now.

For those of you unfamiliar with the NE United States, here's the big picture:

There's Ohio, and Pennsylvania directly to the east. To give an even better picture, here's the to and fro - where we are now is the red circle, and where we're moving to is the green circle:

Sorry for the suckassery of the last image, but, well, me and GIMP, you know how it goes. Anyway.

(For the following, those of you going "duh", please remember I've got a lot of overseas readers and I'm keeping them in mind.)

If you go back to the 'big picture' map, take a look at all the states along the E coast. New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia (West Virginia was part of Virginia at the time) were all COLONIES. As in, they were founded at the very start of the history of Europeans in North America. PA (as we're gonna call Pennsylvania from now on - it is a local term taken from the postal code for the state and used in regular speech) was originally mapped by the Spanish (this matters later, really), settled by the Dutch, Swedes, and English, fought over with the French, and eventually deeded to the English. In 1681, Charles II of England formally granted the land of Pennsylvania to William Penn, who established a colony there. (The land was actually named after William Penn's father; the king did it on purpose that way, to embarrass Penn Jr, according to several accounts.) Penn was a forward-thinking kind of guy and put religious freedom in the charter of the colony. And that's how PA wound up with hordes of Amish, Mennonite, Shakers, Quakers, and, rumor has it, the last of the European witches who'd survived the witch hunts in Europe. (Can't substantiate that last bit, but I've seen it and heard it in a lot of places.)

After that, PA's history goes pretty predictably. They were a buncha revolutionaries (that Penn fellow, drawing all the liberals in like a freedom-for-all black hole) and leapt cheerfully into the American Revolution. Philadelphia was where they signed the Declaration of Independence, and became the nation's first capital.

The area around Pittsburgh was first described in 1717, and French fur trappers were in the area earlier than that. The rivers in the area were used for freight, and so Pittsburgh was a big trade and industrial city, very early on, because it was easy to get to. It was also a gateway to the entire Ohio river valley and from there the Mississippi river. It was the 1700s equivalent of being right on the interstate.

So, okay, PA was settled early and a colony and all that rot.

Ohio's another story. Here, look at this map of when the land was surveyed.

You can see the years that different areas were surveyed. Usually the surveys were done at whatever time they were encouraging settlers to move into an area, so it's a halfway decent rule of thumb. Of course there were people (particularly Native Americans, but that's another post) before the land was surveyed, but the surveying went hand in hand with official settlement, the foundation of cities and towns, and all that. The nearest towns to where I am were founded in 1827, 1838, and 1805. Which goes along with the area of NE Ohio being surveyed and laid out in 1797.

Ohio's kinda weird, because there's this horizontal line across the middle of the state around Columbus; those south of the line likely emigrated in from Virginia, and have one culture. Those north of the line (where I grew up) emigrated in from New York (along the shore of Lake Erie) and have another culture. Basically it's Yankees in the north and Southerners in the south. Two hundred years later, there's a good bit of cultural mixing, but the different foundations are still noticeable, if you know where to look. (Very cool book on the subject, "A Geography of Ohio" is in Google Books for free. It claims to be a preview, but much of the book is available.)

And then. Not only are the histories and geography of Ohio and Pennsylvania vastly different, but the physical layout of the states are different. Thanks to the formal surveying, the layout of Ohio looks mostly like this:

While Pennsylvania, much older, had settlers randomly moving in and around, and much of the state looks like this:

(Yes, I got the PA image from a part of NW Pennsylvania that's about as flat as the area of Ohio I got the Ohio image from.)

So, while I don't expect culture shock to the degree I had it in South Carolina, well, it's going to be interesting.

Chain plying.

Also known as Navajo plying. You make a loop, pull another loop through it, pull a loop through that. And so on. The first video here shows the big picture:



You can get the idea. After I watched the video, I thought it still looked a little mystical (cool!) so we (the husbeast is my camera man) shot another vid, this time in close up of my right hand.



...that didn't really demystify it much, but if you watch closely you can see I pull the single through the loop as soon as both hands get close together, then I pull a LOOP, not a single thread, back toward the bobbin to grab the single and then hang on to the loop and a single - looks like three separate threads, but it's a U of thread and then the bit going back to the bobbin. It just LOOKS like three. Then once I get up near my left hand, I loop it through and pull away again.

Hope that clears things up.

(If you're saying "DUDE! What's up with the rings??!!?" well, I think they're making my grip strength a little better. Sort of like one of those brace-things for tennis elbow. The braces re-direct the muscle 'pull' and make it more effective. Maybe.)

---

Sorry for the lameass posting the last couple, but I've been doing all kinds of crap the last three days, and by the time I sit down to post, it's evening and I'm too damn tired. I've been researching the Public Land Survey System for a blog post on Ohio and Pennsylvania history. (Specifically, what makes them so different, when I'm only moving seventy-five miles/120km.) It'll probably get expanded to two posts, but it's interesting in a cultural geography geek kind of way.

In the mean time, I've got two dozen cupcakes to ice (and I've got to make the icing) before I go to bed tonight, and it's already eight thirty.

Quote of the day.

So I'm talking to the Goob (who still has a head cold, remember, and lisps when she's excited to boot) about how we'll be moving. You know, give her time to think about it a little before we pack up everything she owns and haul it two hours away.

ME: So, what do you think? We'll have fun there.

GOOB: We're booving to PIGSBIRD?

ME: Yup. That's it exactly.

GOOB: Okay.

Call me crazy, I'm not quite sure she gets it.

The next step.

This morning we got up way too early and drove to Pittsburgh (well, near there) to meet the husbeast's future boss and get a tour of the area.

The husbeast's new place of employment looks like this:

It's cooler than it looks. Honest. He'll be inspecting things that go roundie-round.

Then we drove around the area. When I mentioned that I was planning to go back to school, the husbeast's boss detoured to drive me through three different college campuses. (Campusii?) He's a nice guy. I liked him. (Which is the polar opposite of what I thought of the husbeast's last boss. I'm considering this an omen. Bet this guy won't call the house and let the phone ring a hundred times.)

It's looking like the University of Pittsburgh will be perfect for me, if I can get in. With luck my grades from the last round of college will help, and if they like returning, older students, I'm golden. It'll be one of their science degrees. Chemistry, microbiology, or "Biological Sciences" which sounds like collegiate for "Lab Rat", which would suit me fine. I'll talk to some guidance counselors and look at the want ads in the local paper before deciding for sure.

We rented an apartment. It's way too small, but we don't have any furniture, so it should be okay. (I keep repeating this.) I'd include a picture but it's in one of those really boring apartment complexes full of buildings that all look the same. We're waiting for approval before signing a lease, but considering our last landlord loved us (we left the house in better shape than it was when we moved in), and our credit rating is fine, I don't see a big problem with that. (We also aren't wanted for any felonies, don't manufacture meth, and really just want left the hell alone. Also good for the rental application.)

The plan is to move on the 29th, 30th, and 31st, and take up residence officially on the 2nd of November. The husbeast wants to go to work on the 3rd. He's bored. He's fixing things that aren't broken. He needs a hobby or a job. Jobs are less expensive. For his hobbies he always buys lots of tools.

Then we went home again. It was all horribly scenic.


I'd forgotten how much I miss mountains and hills. I've lived in flatlands too long. Look! Pumpkins!



So, we had a productive day. I'm feeling much better about the move now, having gone to PA and poked around. I'd forgotten that Pittsburgh is like a giant pub. No, like a giant sports bar. I can deal with that, heck, I can even enjoy it. With luck this is going to work.

Now I'm going to sit and wait for the photos to load. Eeesh, blogger. (And, twenty minutes later, finally the photos are done. Had to upload each one separately.)

I win.

An all expenses not paid trip to PA tomorrow to find an apartment we'll also have to pay for.

How did I win? I was the first adult in the house to catch the Goober's cold. Yay me.

But I blogged today.

Too damn tired to research anything.

So I'm back to another lameass post.

The Goob's still sick, and is at that just-well-enough-to-be-evil phase. Today I swatted her on the butt and she turned around and blew a raspberry at me. Kid's lucky to be alive.

At this stage, I'm assuming that I've already had this germ and so am immune to it. It's the only explanation for why I haven't begun the same symptoms. (Now, having said that, I'll wake up tomorrow, sick as a dog. You watch.)

---

Saturday we're going for a tour of the small western PA town where the husbeast has gotten a job, and then we're going to look at a few apartments. Unless they're all crackhouses, we're going to rent one and move in on the first. I assume that's about when the husbeast will start his job, too; he may start early and stay in Auntie's guest room for a week or so. (Yet another reason to get moving on the Auntie Scarf.)

This is in keeping with my plan, which was to move to a small town near a larger city full of museums and colleges and universities. As I put it, "I want to move into a small town just like this one, except full of people I don't know." I think it's mission accomplished.

All in all, we finally feel like we're moving forward instead of treading water. Really, it's ALL been moving forward, but it didn't really feel that way until recently.

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I had some questions about yesterday's spinning video. So, the vaguely technical stuff. The spinning method you saw yesterday requires a faster 'spin' than I use for spinning wool; I finally, today, quit trying to treadle faster and changed the damn whorl size, which I should have done days ago. In the video, my right hand (left side of the screen) is controlling the feed of raw roving; if you look very closely, you can see it gradually moving the fiber through. My left hand (right/center of the screen) is the hand with the waggling fingers; yes, I'm using my fingers to control twist. My index finger is almost always hooked around the yarn and works as a brake for the twist, to keep it from moving down into the roving. The finger waving is my way of controlling how that twist does get in there. It looks cooler than it is. The Scotch brake is set for kind of a medium uptake; the single is definitely winding onto the bobbin, but it's not pulling the single out of my fingers.

There you go. Hope that helps someone, or is at least interesting.

Now, I think I need to go knit something. Like a lustkofe. Fast.

ETA: Those of you requesting smartassery, a conversation had here tonight - FIL = father in law.

ME: You need to get home by six so you can carve the chicken.
FIL: Oh, the husbeast can do that.
ME: Hell, I could do that. We don't want to. Get your ass back here by six.
FIL: Hahahahahahaha.
HUSBEAST: We call that "subtle like a brick in the face".

Odds and ends.

I've had a series of those days where you can't concentrate for shit because people (MY KID) keep interrupting me every five seconds, and it's not like my brain runs on all eight cylinders any more anyway, and... and... I'm mildly insane (insaner, okay?) and have nothing to blog about. So I shall comment on comments and like that.

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Apparently a lot of you know who Vivienne Westwood was/is, from the comments. And, well, no offense, but I consider my blog readers a bunch of fashion geeks for the most part, so... well. Of course YOU GUYS know who she is. It is interesting (but not surprising) that more English know of her than Americans.

Ask an everyday person off the street who invented the ripped clothes with safety pins look, though, and I STILL bet you most Americans at least wouldn't know.

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The Goober has been watching "Bully for Bugs" (the one in the bullfighting arena). Which is violent, but she seems to understand they're pretend, and, anyway. Just now she told me "You be the yak." and I'm sitting there thinking "Yak??!!?? Is my hair THAT bad?" She runs off, comes back with a blanket, waves it at me, and yells "TORO! TORO!" Rolled the R, and everything.

She's still not quite sure why I fell over laughing.

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In today's mail was a packet for the husbeast, containing all his official retirement certificates and letters and stuff. (Signed by Barack Obama, not "that other putz", to quote the husbeast.) Within the pack was a letter of appreciation to me. You know, the one I told them to not give me. Apparently the husbeast requested it anyway, stubborn, crafty old bastard that he is. He's refusing to give it to me, for fear I'll shred it up and use it for toilet paper and then light it on fire.

Having mellowed just a tad (a small tad) since getting the fuck out of Charleston, I've decided on another use for the letter. When we finally get this house we're shopping for, if I have anything like a studio or office (odds are high I will), I'm going to frame it and hang it upside down, just like Walt Disney did with his rejection letter from the US military.

I'd consider using it as rolling papers, but it's that heavy parchment-type paper and probably won't burn right.

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I had requests for more tales of smartassery, but most of the good stuff that's left is stuff I'm not publishing on the internet for God and everybody to see. But, hm, let's see.

In our first place in Hawaii, we lived 'out in town' and were thrown into the deep end of the multi-cultural thing. Mostly fun. Except we had these neighbors (Korean) who had this dog. The most evil, mean, nastyass dog I ever met. It would lunge at people with the 'I will kill you' body language and the idiot owners would hold the fucking dog back on his leash and say "oh, isn't he friendly?" I'd gotten into it with them more than once, and told them if I ever heard of the dog biting anyone, I would make it my crusade to get the dog put down because I considered it a danger.

One weekend morning the dog woke us up, as usual, at about six AM, yapping and snarling at something or other. I told the husbeast, "I wish they'd just eat that damn dog and be done with it." He started calling the dog Pot Roast. Our friends picked up on it and called the dog that - "Pot Roast growled at me, coming up the walk." The NEIGHBORS started calling the dog Pot Roast. It was never-ending. One freakin' stereotype and I never heard the end of it.

Months later, a game cock (fighting rooster? Cock fights? One of those) got loose from the farm down the hill from us and somehow wound up in the fenced back yard with Pot Roast. Pot Roast went in yapping and growling, and that bird kicked the ever-loving shit out of that dog. I didn't see anything, but it was one of the funniest things I've ever heard. "Yapyapyapyap. Bawk. BAWK. Yipeyipeyipewhine."

Knowing game cocks are big bucks, I was kind of worried for the bird, so I called down to the farm and told him his bird was loose. He came up and caught it, then came and knocked on my door to apologize and tell me the bird would never get loose again. (Imagine all this with a rabid chicken under his arm.) I told him it was quite all right, and if it was up to me, he could take his bird and throw it back over the fence and let it beat the shit out of the dog AGAIN.

We parted on good terms.

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Otherwise, I should be knitting, but instead, have begun spinning the alpaca. Intellectually, you know that different fibers need to be spun different ways, but this one was a kick in the ass for my technique. It's kind of a semi-worsted sort of thing and I think that's a long draw. I'm not sure. I'm improvising.

If you look closely, you can see my hair; it's the stuff that looks like it was cut with hedge trimmers. But the rest of the video impresses the hell out of me. It actually looks like I know what I'm doing. Huh.

Vivienne Westwood

The Grandmother of Punk.

Vivienne Westwood was born in England (Cheshire) in 1941. I imagine growing up there and then, with all the post-war shortages and upheaval had a bit to do with her attitude, once she got rolling.

She studied art at several schools, rattling around between colleges, and actually taught grade school for a while (good grief), before, in 1971, she was able to quit teaching and sell her designs exclusively in a shop owned by her husband (boyfriend? Were they ever married?), Malcom McLaren.

It was called SEX, among other things. You may have heard of it. It was pretty famous. McLaren's name may sound vaguely familiar, too. Because, well, he managed this band.

The Sex Pistols. Yeah. Those guys.

Westwood dressed the Sex Pistols for their first gig, with the ripped clothes and safety pins, and all that.



In 1975, Westwood and McLaren were fined for indecent exposure, and fame was theirs.

After some reshuffling at the shop (it changed names quite a few times) and I imagine some time spent learning the more formal fashion biz (you know, where you have clothes manufactured and name lines of it and do marketing and all that), Westwood had her first show, the Pirate collection show, in March of 1981.


Arrrr. (Please note the girls rocking out to their fancy awesome headphones.)

After that, well, Westwood's collections pretty much set the standard for street wear. All those years in the eighties, we wore ripped jeans and plaid? That's 'cause Westwood put them in her collections. Another hugehugehuge impact she had?

In 1987 she began selling corsets as outerwear. According to people who know (the V&A Museum), she was the first person to do that.




After decades of defining the youth movement, in 2006 she was given the Order of the British Empire (knighted, or in her case, damed). I wonder if you're less punk if you're recognized by the establishment you've railed against. Anyway, right after the ceremony, she told Prince Charles she wasn't wearing any knickers.

So I guess she's not TOO establishment.

Westwood is also known for designing shoes, mostly platform.


The blue platforms are particularly famous because Naomi Campbell fell while wearing them on the catwalk in, I believe, '93. I remember when it happened. I'm old.

What always amazes me about Westwood is that only fashion geeks have heard of her. She's the one who made all the clothes we wear cool, has pretty much dictated street fashion for forty years, but if you challenged someone to name a fashion designer, most everyday people would never think of her.

Here's some more of her work. Enjoy.

Lame blogging.

So I joined Blogtoberfest to make myself blog every day.

Here's today's entry.

Unfortunately all I got done today was plying about ten yards of orange merino. The rest of the day was spent doing laundry, doing dishes, cooking dinner, going shopping, and all that other annoying crap you do day-to-day.

The Goober has caught a cold from running around in fifty degree weather (which is winter, to her, being raised in SC). There is nothing in the world funnier than hearing a four year old kid with a stuffy nose say "Snuffleupagus". I'll tell you that for nothing.

I have also discovered that fleece-lined jeans keep my knees from hurting so much in winter. I assume because said knees are warm. You'd think I would die of heat stroke, but I'm nice and toasty. Maybe I'm a reptile. It would explain a lot.

Have acquired all I need to try knitting some jewelry; wire, beads, wire cutters, hooks and doohickies. No one will leave me alone long enough to try it.

Today I mailed off the check to pay for my place at a workshop/class sort of thing run by the local spinning and weaving guild. It is on how to spin novelty yarns. The class is October 24th, and I'm already looking forward to it. After that, I won't be entirely self-taught! In the mean time, there should be another spin night. This time I'm going to take cupcakes.

A fun day.

Today we went to the 27th Annual Atwood Area Fall Festival, held at the Atwood Lake Resort area. (Resort is a rather fancy term, but, yeah, okay.) Around here, if you want to see arts and crafts, you go to the Great Trail Festival. If you want to see steam engines, you go to the Algonquin Mill Festival. But for generalized fall festival stuff, Atwood is pretty good. Plus they have an antique car contest to keep people occupied.

There was a petting zoo (hopefully photos of that tomorrow.) The Goob got to meet Charlotte the pig, Gertrude the camel, a baby goat, a bunny, a bear, a freakin' white tiger, and a panther that put Sekhmet to shame. (I love my cat, but damn.)

There was the Society of Creative Anachronism, Revolutionary War re-enactors, Civil War re-enactors, and Appalachian general-settler-type re-enactors. They had all the re-enactors in one place, and if you pay attention to clothes (hi!), it made the head swim. Especially the mountain men from the 1840s talking to the Revolutionary War guys. I almost went up to the Revolutionary War guys and asked them if they were ready for Valley Forge. Really should have.

There was a cannon, set off hourly. Eep.

In among all the craft booths, there was one run by the Lana Bella Alpaca Farm. There was prepared clothing, mostly made in Peru, but they had yarn harvested from their own critters. They also had roving.

Score. (That's 4oz/112g each, cream and oatmeal pencil roving. Soft as a baby's butt, and they fit well into my Nefarious Plan for a hand-spun sweater for myself.)

They had a really nice Thunderbird at the car show, too.



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We got home late, with a tired kid, and I stowed my roving in an easy-to-get-to place. You see, I finished spinning the singles of the second (of three) chunks of orange merino.

It needs Navajo/chain plied. Then, one more to go.

The merino chunks are only 50g/about 2oz each. It won't take long. Then I bust out the alpaca. Bwahahah.

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The Goob is tired, but still able to ham for the camera.

LICE!!