Oh - and Statler and Waldorf (the two heckling old guys) have their own account too. They’re home.
Many thanks to Adam for showing this to me. I’ve not laughed so hard in a long time.
You suck.
Love,
Anna
Last weekend (the 11th of July-ish) I took a short jaunty vacation up to Seattle to meet up with some friends. I had a fantastic time, got almost no sleep (night owl friends plus 2 hour time difference meant going to bed when my body thought it was 5am… and still waking up when my body thought it was 9am), and managed to pick up a real humdinger of a cold in the airport on the way up.
I also had some of the most colorful airplane experiences on those flights.
Flying from Houston to Seattle on Southwest is a direct flight with one stop in either Phoenix or Denver where you don’t get off the plane but where about half the plane exchanges with new people for the second leg of the trip. This makes the trip a great deal longer, but also a good bit cheaper.
For the first leg (Houston to Phoenix) I was sitting next to a sleeping rocker dude with some seriously awesome dreadlocks and an older man who reminded me pleasantly of my dad (in a non-creepy way). However, that meant I was sitting in the dreaded middle seat, and even though I accomplished a great deal of knitting, the lack of armrest/legroom/place to put my head and snooze got to me.
So I tempted fate and swapped seats, moving up a few rows and snagging a nice aisle seat during the exchange of people who didn’t really want to go to Seattle on that particular trip.
My tempting of fate did, in fact, bite me in the arse. The people that ended up sitting in the window and middle seats seemed quite pleasant as they got on the plane(though one of them was screaming in his iPhone as he asked me if he could sit by the window). This illusion was broken after both of them had consumed two drinks without having any food. I was then subjected to said screaming man’s pictures of his (admittedly awesome) house, yard, greenhouse, motorcycle, campsites, touring pictures, and any other pictures he’d taken.
One more drink into each of them resulted in his going off on a rant about how men weren’t real men anymore, and what was wrong with women in the world (serious barefoot and pregnant vibe at this point) and the woman between us cracking obscene comments (”you can’t teach a d*1do to mow the lawn”) and smacking me on the shoulder in an attempt to get some sort of agreement out of me. She was, I think, too drunk to notice that I was tired, had been in airports/planes for nearly 8 hours, am relatively shy, and would really have liked to just get back to my book, thanks.
THAT flight couldn’t end fast enough.
Oh - that was the flight where the people in the row behind me proceeded to make all sorts of awful and disgusting bodily noises as they dealt with whatever version of the plague that they happened to pass on to me.
By Sunday the combination of talking to people (GASP!), lack of sleep, and IMPENDING DOOM of chest cold had me squeaking.
The flight home was entirely uneventful (the two screaming, incredibly sunburned infants that were making our lives in the staging area miserable both passed out within 5 minutes of boarding the plane) though didn’t help much with my being sick, and I spent most of last week holed up with cups of lemon and honey tea and bowls of chicken soup.
I’m finally feeling better now though (yay) and am back to walking the walk again. And, you know, talking like an adult woman instead of a 12 year old boy.
My last year of college I was fortunate to live right off the “Bear Trail” - a 2.25 mile walking trail that went all the way around Baylor campus. I also lived with two great roommates - and the three of us would go in the evenings and do two laps several times a week.
Around that time I found the Eowyn Challenge - a walking program where you track your miles based on the Lord of the Rings trip from Hobbiton to Rivendell. I eventually made it to Rivendell, and then kind of quit tracking miles (and for awhile, quit exercising all together).
This past week, however, I noticed that there was a new fitness place that had opened up - 5 minutes walk from my apartment. So I snagged a trial membership, and have really loved it so far. And… I’ve started tracking my miles again.
I’ve set out from Rivendell to Lothlorien - 462 miles.
My goal for the summer is to log 15-20 “miles” per week - that’s one day of Fellowship Travels for each week. I count miles either by miles walked (I did two on the treadmill today) and then one mile for every 15-20 minutes of good exercise I do elsewhere (walking to and from the gym, and weights).
I’m currently putting together a “tracking” widget for my sidebar, so you can see where I am along the road. I’m hoping you guys will help keep me honest - and on the road!
While I realize that it is not my fault that my husband chose to wear his four pair of dress pants to the point where the fabric utterly gave out in the seat before telling me he needed new work pants…
… I also realize that I had all day to do laundry, and that his new pants arrived in the mail, and I could easily have washed them with the other loads of laundry before, say, 2am, so that he could go to work wearing proper clothing in the morning and not have his boxers visible through the holes in his pants.
I really need to stop procrastinating on laundry.
One of the things I miss, living where I do, is a sense of community. My “community” right now consists of my husband and our two cats, and the container garden on the porch (which really doesn’t offer much in the way of interaction).
Blogging has helped that feeling of isolation a lot - particularly the wonderful people that I’ve gotten to know through my other, warcraft related blog. But, as I’m sure any of you who play video games know, there’s more to me than just video games, and so I’ve been looking for ways to find that kind of support in other parts of my life.
SCA, obviously, helps a lot. Getting to hang out with people who are also crazy and interested in stuff you like is really fun, and I’ve made some amazing friends. But that happens (at best) once a week - since those friends live somewhat of a distance away. The rest of the time, finding motivation for the myriad of hobbies/projects I have going can be tough. I’ve never really gotten particularly involved in Ravelry, because the forum structure is SO big, and moves at breakneck speeds sometimes (and crawls along like molasses at others).
Recently, however, folks such as TJ got me looking at Plurk (especially since Twitter had a bunch of downtime - and is still struggling with serious overload). And, oddly enough… there are knitters on plurk. And spinners, and crafters, and soap-makers, and weird twitchy cleaners and people that are strangely willing to converse with me on the finer points of making dill and cheddar beer bread. (and why, like every other thing I make in my demonic oven, it didn’t rise).
And through those wonderful, crafty people, I ran into a link that Miss Violet (of Lime and Violet) was working on starting - a plurk community based on Mary Jane Butters’ Farmgirl Sisterhood. And while, quite honestly, I don’t really care much for joining the official sisterhood (I did my girl scout thing; I don’t need or want merit badges, or someone to tell me that I’ve progressed enough to earn a (whatever) level in Underwater Basket Weaving), the idea of a community of people who were interested in similar things that I’m interested in - cooking, sewing, crafts, sustainable living, gardening, spinning - really piqued my interests.
That, and it’s a lot easier to stay motivated on the long slog through a stockinette sweater back when you’ve got other people who are a) asking about it and b) encouraging (as they’re also slogging through their own projects).
So here’s to friends, old fashioned goodness, baking bread, growing herbs (and veggies), sewing, knitting, and maybe even wearing an apron. (gasp!)
I do live in Texas, after all… (but no, I don’t have big blonde hair)
Took out a lock of the fleece from the indigo bath, squeezed it all out, let it dry, rinsed it well, squeezed it again, and let it dry some more.
It’s blue!
Soft grey blue right now. The chemical reaction is definitely going strong (most mornings when I go to stir it, the pot has a translucent film and is greenish, not blueish, until after I stir it up again).
The only thing I’m worried about now is whether this daily agitation in the indigo water will felt my fleece!
I’ve not made it yet, but this stuff sounds *amazing*. The ingredients are a little on the posh side (I don’t have a Kafir lime leaf >.>) but easy enough to substitute. Yum yum.
So my usual illumination stuff for Monday nights got canceled today. Instead, I went to go hang out with the fiber arts people, who have been having fun with raw fleece.
I thought I’d be safe, since they’ve already washed the fleece and would be dyeing tonight.
I was wrong.
I now have a vat on my back porch (ok, it’s a bucket) full of barely washed fleece, indigo, and the water that we washed the fleece in - yes, the dirty stuff. I’m apparently to let that sit on the porch in the sun for 7-10 days, stirring daily, in order to create an organic fermentation/chemical reaction that will bind the indigo (a non water-soluble dye) into my fleece.
So I’ll have blue fleece.
Otherwise, I’ll have dingy fleece and a really smelly bright blue mess. We’ll see what happens. Come to think of it, right now what I have is dingy fleece and a really smelly bright blue mess. I have blue-ish fingernails too.
I also got some uncarded wool, which - at first glance - is going to be a lot of fun. My wool cards create small rolags (rolag = fluffy bit of carded wool in a little tube), and I’m trying to spin this at a thick DK/thin worsted weight off the rolags, spinning woollen. This means I get about 2 drops per rolag, sitting down. However - the hand washed, hand combed fleece really does spin a lot easier than the commercially prepared rovings, I think because it’s not so compact - the lanolin might help as well.
Also, I’m not having to spin from the fold, since the rolags are prepared for spinning woolen.
Spinning takes a lot longer when you have to card all the wool first.
I need a do-over of this morning.
My blog post at Too Many Annas was like pulling teeth. I had to write a stack of bills. The cats decided to chew on one of the corners of the quilt my best friend made us as a wedding present. The blueberries I put on my cereal were rotten, and the mango I went to eat afterwards was both rotten AND unripe.
Maybe I’ll go make mint lemonade.
And pray I dont’ burn myself.
