Annie Knits

Peeps and Happy Easter!

• Easter Peep show later... with green chicks this time.
• Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday/Easter Vigil, Easter Sunday.  Church peeps to the nth degree this week.  It was mostly just beautiful with a few glitches and a spate of what have become ubiquitous tornado sirens during the Good Friday service.  No fatalities that I've heard of here in St. Louis, but tons of damage to the northern suburbs.  We've had tornado sirens at least once a month since the New Year's Eve tornados -- we're getting kind of lackadaisical about doing what we're supposed to do which is take cover.  
• Knitting peeps make me happy.
• Ravelry peeps -- oi.  Every once in awhile I get on the forums and dispense my opinions freely.  Not poking the crazy but sharing the knowledge.  See, I learn something about knitting or crocheting every day that I work.  I get to experience customer successes and failures without actually doing any of the handiwork.  This morning I spent my time dissuading several people from subbing cotton for wool in projects written for wool.  Or wool and alpaca.  Peeps:  in my experience, nine times out of ten, seriously ... patterns are written with specific yarn qualities in mind.   Subbing kitchen cotton for a wool/alpaca blend with a slightly different gauge to boot will end badly.  Please take my word for that.  This spate of subbing is due in part, I think, to the pattern magazines' (both online and off) propensities to specify expensive, often difficult-to-obtain yarn.  **ahem, Vogue, ahem ** 'Nuff said.
• Hubsterpeep insists that 18- and 14-year-olds receive Easter baskets and that they are hidden enough to result in a search.  This search never happens while I'm still home on Easter morning as the urchinpeeps sleep until 11 or so given the opportunity and I go to Mass.  This year the baskets consist of grocery store sized bags of M&Ms, peanut butter eggs, Coldstone gift cards, and cash.  Really.   And the hiding was carried out in a very haphazard manner.  So, stick me in a microwave and blow me up.

Waterloo Wool: Southern Illinois Sheep and Craft Festival

Last weekend, I took myself over to Illinois for some wool therapy.  About a half an hour east of here, there is a little wool festival -- others have always gone, but I've never been -- I thought I'd try.

I got there early, about 8:45 a.m., and got the last bag of Finn wool (it's the white on the right) from an Illinois shepherd and a bag of her moorit colored Shetland wool (on the bottom of the picture.)  Both have been washed, but contain some junk and will have to be processed a little more to spin comfortably.  I also got a lovely Missouri fleece -- a coated Border Leicester Merino cross.  It smells like a barn and Monte is fascinated with it.  

After I got these three bags (for a total of $60) there wasn't much else to do and I was too early to the party and missed most of the locals I thought might attend.  I got my bag of kettle corn for the road and was out of there by 10.  

Here is the moorit up close.  It's very clean and soft.  I got 2 pounds of it -- plenty for a sweater.  

The Finn is super soft, and has been washed, but it needs more washing and some combing.  I think it's got what's called scurf in it -- lanolin soaked skin.  Yum.  It's impossible to get it out of some of the fiber, so I'll probably lose those locks.  I've got a lead on a kind of comb that works for slightly scurfy bits and I'll try that, but I need to look at the fleece a little better next time.  And now that I know what scurf is, I'll be able to avoid it.  Live and learn.  Caveat emptor.  

Here is the Border Leicester Merino cross -- still in the grease but lovely.  There's fleece washing in my future.  I have to wait for a sunny day to dry in on the back porch.  Wanna help?

Here is the gratuitous lock structure picture.  Moorit, then Finn, then BLM.  I'm looking forward to spinning all three and comparing them.  I'm such a fiber geek!

I Have an 18-Year-Old

Whew.  That I started parenting 18 years ago this morning is amazing to me.  It seems like an eternity ago.  And it seems like yesterday.

When you have little kids, the days and nights seem long, but the years are short.

Happy Eighteenth Dear Daughter.

I love you and I admire the person you've become.  

You make my heart sing.

Lifting the Cone of Silence

The past 2 months have been ... well ... not conducive to blogging.  At least not for me.

I'll break my silence with pictures, I think.

Dear Godson came over to play with us in mid-February.  This is the last picture I have of Sophie, my beautiful big dog.  We lost her quite suddenly to what the vet thinks was liver disease this past Monday.  

So sad I can hardly type.

On a lighter note, in March, we vacationed in Mexico at the Fairmont Mayakoba just north of Playa del Carmen.  This was where I had coffee in the morning, on the rooftop of our casita.  Killer view.

Here I am with my sunburn and my dinner partners in a Playa del Carmen restaurant.  Lovely.

Dear Husband and Dear Daughter parasailing.  Dear Son and I did it too.  So fun.

Here I am with Wilberth, my casita's butler.  More of a concierge really.  He made us reservations when needed.  Although, I do have to say that he was excellent at finding me on the beach or at the pool or anywhere on the property really to bring me a pina colada -- frozen with extra pineapple, just the way I like 'em.  Whew.

We flew home right behind a storm that dumped 5 1/2 inches of snow on St. Louis.  Most of which was gone by noon the following day.  And while my magnolia blossoms did not seem to mind the cold -- I did.

The morning after we got home from vacation, we did this:

and this:

For the uninitiated, that is all the crap from all 5 of my main floor closets packed into the family room and the man cave so that we could have NewSpace closet organizing systems installed.  Hubster was supposed to be out of town all week so that he wouldn't have to live in the mess.  His trip got cancelled and he did have to live in all the mess.  Poor hubster.  He loves his new closet, though... but he doesn't want a picture of it on the internet.  Go figure.  I love my new closets too.  Love them. 

While the new closets were being installed, my new curtains also arrived.  Love them. So grown up.  What does it say about me that I waited until I was 48 years old to buy myself some real (not inherited from a neighbor who died and left it to me) bedroom furniture and decorate my room?  Sheesh.  Each of the kids have had their rooms done twice.  Sheesh again.  Now I have my beautiful space (sheers still on backorder) and I'm all grown up.

And after a week and a half of crazy and mess and people in my house (not complaining really b/c I love my closets and my drapes but FFS it was debilitating!) and my dog dying for God's sake, I got this X-ray of my hip done yesterday (that sentence is a crappy one -- see?  I shouldn't be blogging -- can't handle it) :

Actually, this is an iPhone shot of the screen in the exam room that I snapped while I waited to see the doc, but even I could see that the right hip joint (on the left in the X-ray) is seriously not right.  Bone on bone.  Yeah, that's why it hurts to walk. 

So.  The only real treatment for this kind of degradation is a replacement of the joint.  No one will say that I shouldn't have gotten the cortisone shot last April, of course.  But, in comparing the X-ray from last April before the shot to this one, it's clear that while there was some arthritis last year, there was still space (i.e. cushioning tissue).  Now there is none.  And my reaction to the shot was so severe.  Well.  The shot was given in good faith and works wonders for many people.  For me?  Not so much...

And before I can get the hip surgery, the doc says I have to get any oral surgery or other minor things out of the way so to lessen the risk of infection.  Great.  2 root canals on split back molars coming right up (they aren't bothering me so we were waiting to do the work until they did.)  Yay me.  Yes, go ahead... laugh out loud ... I did.  Sheesh.  Then I dropped the f-bomb again.

See?  Crabby.  Shouldn't have lifted the cone.  

Nope.  Done wallowing.  No more wallowing.  On to spring, right?  And by the time I turn 49 in July, I'll be healthy again.  Something to look forward to.  

To cheer myself up, I'm going to go spin some of the new Hello Yarn club fiber that came Monday.  How about that?  I'll show you what I've accomplished tomorrow.  Promise.