February 28, 2010
Last minute Gold, sorta like the Canadian Men’s Hockey team. Himself apologizes (in true Canadian fashion) apparently the tie goal was his fault for watching the last 2 minutes of the game. He patriotically took one for the team and turned off the game for the overtime period, allowing the win.
I finished my socks in time. Photographic proof – Olympic Flame is still burning and completed socks are on my feet. Cat Bordhi’s Sky Sockitecture master pattern using my Forest Analogy Fractal sock yarn. Lots went wrong – broken spinning wheel, wrong fibre, broken knitting needle, do-overs on the first toe and second heel, but I plowed through it and now my feet are toasty.
I’m enjoying the closing ceremonies as I type. Canadians have a special kind of national pride that allows us to make such fun of ourselves (with inflatable mounties, moose and beaver, no less) and not feel the least bit foolish. We can even make a big oops into a “design feature” – l loved the opening with the fixing of the cauldron and Catriona Le May Doan getting to light the flame after all. I hope the world has learned more about us. At the very least they’ve figured out that we don’t live in igloos, but we know how to make snow when it counts (volunteers 1 Cypress Mountain weather 0).
February 20, 2010
Well, at least it’s well on the run. The time off achieved what I needed, control over something, anything, in this case the common areas of the house – kitchen, dining, family room and the “pool room” where we can now actually play pool! There are still a few hotspots, and a few of Thing Tall’s things are still under the pool table, but all in all I’m quite pleased with myself. My friend Karin was very surprised and proud of me when she came for Jam Night. The bedrooms, computer room, office and fibre space are a bit scary, but those I think I can cope with a bit at a time. The concentrated time spent on this first chunk has given me a sense of accomplishment that will hopefully keep me going in small bites of time that won’t show quite so much progress for a while.
Thing Tall played for the entire session (more than can be said for his mother, who gave up on her guitar halfway through the first piece…). He does really look like a bass player – he stands dead still with a very intent look on his face:
That’s his new (to him, he got it used) Epiphone Violin Bass. He’ll be paying that off by helping to renovate the shop. There are now almost 2 guitars per person in the house. Thing Tall has 3 Basses, I have an old classical acoustic, Himself has 2 electric guitars and there’s a steel string acoustic originally bought for Thing Tall but which no one claims at the moment.
In Olympic news, I think my Olympic knitting is cursed. I finished the yarn I was intending to use late on Saturday night, but it wasn’t right at all and there wasn’t enough. Another program change to some Fractal yarn I had. The sock itself went fairly well this week and I like Cat Bordhi’s “sockitecture”. Then, yesterday I sat down to knit for a few minutes and found that I had broken the Harmony Knitpicks needle I was knitting with. I really like the feel of these needles, but they keep breaking at the metal sleeve which attaches the wood needle to the cable. I couldn’t find my Addi in the same size so I’m stuck using an old Aero needle, the cable is stiff which makes magic looping a tad less magic. Despite that, by 3:30 this afternoon:
It’s bedtime now, but I’m done except the toe grafting. Which means I’m half done at the halfway point of the games. Which means I might just finish in time.
February 16, 2010
When I was little my Nana had a name for me. She called me the “Ring-Tailed Snorter”. Just let your imagination ruminate on that for a bit and you’ll get the idea…I was a bit of a handful. 43 years ago they didn’t diagnose ADHD in girls. They should have. As I grew up I gradually shifted from the hyperactive type to the “primarily inattentive” type. Which is another way of saying that while I am less physically restless, my brain makes up for it by being quite unable to sit still for any length of time. Still, I managed university and graduate school, and I have found jobs where I can show my strengths and get around my weaknesses, at least most of the time.
As I hit my forties, however, the strategies that had worked for me to that point became less and less effective. I was frustrated, tired and unhappy. My doctor suggested anti-depressants, but I didn’t think I was actually depressed, I felt that what looked liked depression was the result of not being able to accomplish what I thought I should be able to. My sister was diagnosed with ADHD, and I started to wonder… I work with a lot of psychologists, so I asked one if I should be tested too. She rather blurted out “of course you’re ADD, but you can get a formal diagnosis if you want”. Another one’s reaction to the diagnosis was “no kidding!” Apparently they had all caught on long ago and assumed I already knew… I decided to try meds and they have helped a lot, but they can only do so much. They can’t change behaviour, you have to do that yourself.
Which brings me to the last few weeks. I have struggled with keeping up with housework ever since I left home at 23. I also struggle with staying in a routine both at work and at home. The last few weeks the house has gone to H in a handbasket. Thing Small also has ADD and you can’t move in her room despite repeated attempts to help her. The kitchen counters were only visible with mammoth effort. I haven’t seen the top of my desk for weeks and I can barely crawl into it over the stuff piled in front of it anyway. We have a beautiful pool table we aren’t playing on because the room is piled with stuff that I don’t know what to do with. Thing Tall cleared out his room in August by putting everything he didn’t know what to do with under the pool table. He was supposed to deal with it quickly but he hasn’t. The Master bedroom is a mess, my FibreSpace is a wreck etc etc. Himself is frustrated, I’m frustrated and embarrassed and all four of us are stressed and grouchy. Work hasn’t been much better, as I can’t seem to concentrate and get things done there either, last week I spent a good part of one day in tears I was so angry with myself for not being able to accomplish anything. With Himself’s final day as an employee looming, with all the stress that that is bringing, something other than my sanity had to give.
I tried to work on the worst spots this weekend, but I also had to finish my InDepth Study. The round robin approach (20min intervals cycling through several tasks) helped a bit, but the Things did not. Instead, they squabbled all day Sunday and Monday. I got the study revisions done, but didn’t get them into the mail until this morning. I got the living room floor and tables tidied up, but the kitchen, dining room and pool room were still awful. Last night I realized that the only way I was going to start feeling better was to do a really big declutter and reorganize. My dear boss reads e-mail at night on holidays, bless her, and gave me permission to take a few days off to get myself back in control.
Today I started on the kitchen. I did “equipment” first. I pulled everything out of the cupboards and drawers and forced myself to rethink where everything should go and what we really need. I put out the recycling bin and a garage sale/give away box and emptied the garbage. 4 hours later I sent several photo texts to Himself, I think he was a bit surprised that it looked pretty good. I still need to sort through the container drawer, and force myself to recycle some more empty jars, and deal with the pile of things that should probably never have been in the kitchen in the first place but it’s a really good start. I’ll finish what I can tonight and do the rest tomorrow before tackling the pantry cupboards. Then the dining room, the pool room and the kids computer room… I’m hoping I’ll get the whole common space looking reasonable before “Jam Night” on Saturday – it’ll be easier to play and enjoy the music if the space is tidy.
Wish me luck.
February 13, 2010
Last night Christine and I watched the opening ceremonies of the 2010 Winter Olympics together. She cast on for her Knitting Olympics Project and I started spinning the yarn for mine. My Olympic goal is to finish a pair of Sky Architecture socks from Cat Bordhi’s New Pathways book starting from roving. Part of doing this is a promise to myself that I will spin or knit instead of playing silly games on my iPhone.
Just like in the real Olympics I had a few technical glitches to overcome in the form of equipment failure (the orifice bearing of my favourite wheel snapped off the maiden) and program changes (the fibre I chose did not work out as planned). The wheel problem was solved temporarily by borrowing the orifice bearing from Chrisine’s traddy. Hopefully, her DH can glue mine back together today and it will hold together until I can get a replacement part. Once I got the wheel going I found the fibre I had taken to Christine’s to do my socks with didn’t please me at all. Digging in my bag I realized I had some other fibre that I had been spindling with that would do for socks. Quick program change and I was on my way. I got 1/2 the singles done by the time Gretzy got the outside torch lit (at nearly midnight EST!).
My plan today is to spin the rest of the singles and hopefully get it plied so that knitting can start tomorrow. Other plans include finishing my InDepth Study revisions (due in the mail on Monday) and digging the house out of the mess it has gotten buried under in the last few weeks as life got away from me. I’m trying a strategy that sometimes helps me keep on task – setting a timer and focusing on one task for 20min, when the timer goes off I go to the next task and spend 20min on that, lather, rinse, repeat… By rotating through the tasks I hope I’ll get all of them done by the end of the day.
January 31, 2010
Yesterday I taught “Painting Roving for Predictable Yarns” at the Ottawa Valley Weaver’s and Spinner’s Resource Centre. It’s a 1 day workshop in handpainting rovings that will spin into something other than mud or clown vomit. My goal is to teach how to plan and execute a multicoloured roving that will spin into a beautiful yarn that can then be made into a beautiful finished object. Yes plan, I know many artists think that’s a nasty word, but I’m not really an artist, I’m an artisan, meaning I have solid technical skills in my craft that allow me to create things that are both beautiful and functional. Later this week I’ll post about why I think that planning is important, but for now, let me show the fun we had yesterday.
Things always start out neat and tidy…
 
After I got through all the information about the washfast acid dyes, equipment, etc and talked about the factors that influence how the finished yarns and objects will look the students started planning their rovings. Each student had 4 60g skeins of roving to dye, it was up to them whether they made all different or some the same. I had neglected to mention that planning for painting requires arithmetic… Once we got that over with it was time to have fun with colours:
 Measuring out the Dye Solutions  Putting the Dyes on the Fibre  Smooshing to Distribute the Dye 
 Painted and Ready for Heat  Microwaving to Set the Dye NB: this is an elderly “free to a good home” microwave I was lucky enough to find for the guild to use for dyeing. It’s labelled “not for food”. We have another one for lunches.
By the time everyone was finished painting and heat setting it was time to go home. The rovings need to cool before rinsing so most of the students took theirs home to rinse and dry. Hopefully they will bring them to the Guild meeting tomorrow night so I can take some pictures of the finished product. We (that would include the intrepid instructor) learned quite a lot about colour mixing. Not all the colours came out quite as planned. There may be a little bit of overdyeing on some to get closer to what we were expecting. Many of the colours looked very, very different before and after heating. We also learned that it is important to pay careful attention when mixing the painting solutions. One student wondered why her lavender looked so very red. It turned out we had forgotten to add the blue!! Amazingly, it was an easy fix to add the right amount of blue to a little bit of water, then spread and smoosh it into the stripe that was supposed to be lavender.
It was a long day, but we all had fun. I can’t wait to see what yarns result… Stay tuned for follow up.
January 26, 2010
Yesterday was Robbie Burns’ birthday. Unless you are either Scots, a Scots wannabe, or me, this is not likely important to you. For the Scots (and Scots wannabes) Robbie Burns is important because he is their national poet. His poetry is important mostly because he wrote in the Scots dialect of the time, making some of his poetry a bit tough going for the modern Canadian English speaker and because he often wrote about very ordinary things, like Haggis. Auld Lang Syne is probably his most familiar poem. Grinch is very fond of Robbie Burns and was quite pleased that his first child chose Robbie Burns Day for her birthday. For my part, I like that Grinch never forgets my birthday, tied as it is to something to remind him.
To celebrate, people like to gather for a “Burns Supper” complete with Haggis, Scotch and the reading of the poem “To a Haggis”. This we did at Heidi and Steve’s on Saturday night. Steve has been threatening to put me on “THE LIST” of people Heidi is not to associate with, something about being an expensive influence (under my guidance, she’s bought a spinning wheel and a loom in less than a month). In an effort to keep myself off THE LIST, I offered to provide Himself, complete with kilt, to properly “Address the Haggis”.
 Heidi has a better picture here. Himself actually practiced beforehand, as it’s not really easy to read. His reading passed muster and will keep me off THE LIST for a little longer.
The Haggis itself was a wonderful thing. For those of you who think you don’t like Haggis – have you ever actually seen it, let alone tried it? Haggis is really just a kind of sausage, cooked by poaching it whole and then served by opening the casing and scooping out the insides. The filling is actually light and almost fluffy – a mixture of ground meat (traditionally lamb, but often beef), finely minced organ meats, oatmeal and spices.
Steve got the one we ate at the Glebe Meat Market, but next year (if all goes according to plan) it will come from the Manotick Village Butchery, courtesy of Himself and the Butcher (who we just hired), and made from Steve and Heidi’s own lamb. Steve served many other lovely things for dinner and shared a very, very nice single malt I hadn’t had before (Edradour). I was a very well behaved guest who did not pocket, nor even ask to open, the tiny bottle of one of my favourite single malts (Tomintoul 27 year old, not available in Ontario). Steve and Heidi’s other friends made for lovely company and we enjoyed ourselves very much, rather late into the evening, prompting a phone call from Thing Tall: “Where are you? Do you KNOW what TIME it is? It’s 1:15!” He sounded rather like Grinch, or Nana, or FIL or MIL for that matter. We found it hysterically funny.
Having had a lovely Burns’ Night, I spent my birthday at home yesterday with a somewhat miserable Rags. She had a sudden, violent, allergic reaction to we have no idea what which caused her to start running about the house like a mad fool at 4:40 in the AM, scratching so hard that she was pulling out wool by the handful. I took her to the vet as soon as he was in, she’s on prednisone and antihistamines which are working well, but I wish I knew what caused it. Nana made it a bit better by making meat pie and my favourite cake for supper. My Mum is very good to me.
January 17, 2010
As much as I appreciate Canada Post’s patronage of Himself, I’m none too thrilled that they raised postal rates the day the stamp came out. Having an Etsy store means shipping to customers, and that means fathoming Canada Post’s shipping rates. The on-line rate calculator was most helpful as I tried different shapes – the rates are based on both volume and weight, so if you can reduce the volume you can reduce the shipping price. In the process I discovered that if you can make the item flat enough to fit in a large envelope such that it is less than 2cm thick you reduce the price considerably – like about 75%!
Roving compresses quite a bit without coming to harm, so I tried putting it in a ziplock bag and squeezing all the air out. This made it quite flat and thin…but only for a little while. At this point, I learned something new – zipper bags breathe. This would be why things don’t keep in the freezer as well as I think they should and why, by the time I got to the post office the envelope no longer qualified as an “oversize letter”. Back to the drawing board.
Thinking about it, I remembered seeing vacuum sealers at Costco. Nana and I had considered buying one a while ago for improving storage in the freezer. I stopped considering and went and bought one. Thus, I present, flat packing for roving:
 Roving to be shipped  Rovings in the Vacuum Bag  Flat as a Pancake Well, at least flat enough to ship as an oversize letter once inserted into a large envelope. The recipient reported that the roving arrived none the worse for its squashing. I’m pleased because it allowed me to reduce the shipping rate a little bit. The vacuum bag material costs more than zipper bags, but it’s worth it, both in reduced shipping cost and protection of the contents. As an added bonus, food should keep better in the freezer now.
BTW if you are buying the vacuum sealer and/or vacuum bag rolls, the best price is definitely at Costco.
January 16, 2010
Sister Tina got Himself and Rags a little present for Christmas, to whit, a warning sign to post when he is working at home:
“Beware of Attack Poodle”
Rags takes her job as guard dog very seriously, as demonstrated by the following photo:
She really is the best dog.
January 11, 2010
Canada Post released the new series of definitive stamps for 2010 today. Normally, this would not be breaking news, however, the theme of the new series is “Mills”. Himself is a very accomplished photographer and one of his favourite subjects is Watson’s Mill here in Manotick. He often does event photography for them and has given them many pictures for their on-line gallery. In the Fall of 2008 he got a call from Canada Post, they had seen one of his pictures on the Watson’s Mill site, could they buy it to use as a stamp? To say he was tickled is an understatement, we couldn’t get his motorcycle helmet on him for weeks. There will be 70 million!! of the Watson’s Mill stamp printed, watch for one on a letter in your mailbox soon. Himself took the above picture of the mock-up of the stamp when Canada Post announced the new series at the Mill in September.
Here is the original photograph:
We’re quite proud of Himself today. Even though his wallet was a tad lighter when he left the Manotick Post Office this morning – he’s planning on doing some interesting matting and framing with the original photograph and the first day covers.
January 10, 2010
I may have mentionned, on occasion, that I have awesome friends. My friend Gabriel made me a New Year’s gift this year – mamaliga, which is Romanian for polenta which is Italian for cornmeal mush. Gabriel serves it with butter and Bulgarian (sheep’s milk) Feta cheese. While it is lovely fresh, I like it just as much in subsequent days when I cut it in cubes;
fry it olive oil;
and eat it with more cheese:
Bon Appetite.
Mamaliga: Mix 1 part cornmeal (preferably coarse) with 2 parts cold water and some salt in a pot. Gabriel likes a cast iron pot that is wider than it is tall, but all I had was a tallish non-stick pot, both seem to work. Put the pot on medium high heat and stir just until it starts to bubble. Turn down the heat so that it simmers. Stir often as it thickens. It will start to spout steam out, highly entertaining (why yes, I am easily amused), just keep stirring every minute or so so it doesn’t stick until it has simmered about 40min – it should be nearly solid depending on the coarseness of the cornmeal. Gabriel usually dumps it on a wooden board to serve it, but my cornmeal was a bit fine, which made a softer mamaliga, so we left it in the pot this time.
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