10.22.07
Posted in random at 11:54 pm by wendy
Yeah, I haven’t posted in a while. Yeah, San Diego county is on fire and it’s a lovely little repeat of the 03 Cedar Fire with the incomplete and inaccurate reporting of fire locations and conditions and endless repetition of useless information–wheezing is a sign of smoke irritation! Really!?! Simply shocking. Let’s go back to Qualcomm! Oh, aren’t we San Diegans such amazing generous people! Oh, sorry, is there a fire in the East County? Do rich people live there? No, well…back to our reporter in Rancho Santa Fe!
So, I’m going to ignore this. I will catch up on everything else when I can, and I’m going to go for silly and useless and random and whatever I have on the memory card that doesn’t take much exposition.
So without further ado:
Look how fat Cristina has gotten! This alpaca just can’t believe it.
My Big Bunny soloed! (He piloted a plane at one of the busiest general aviation airports in the United States on a busy day safely all by his lonesome! I have to admit I was very nervous, but all his landings were beautiful.)Here he is post solo with his instructor, Bob Lewis, quite a handsome man himself:
This is my favorite pic of the post solo party–and I didn’t take it. My instructor did.
I know.a) he should be wearing a belt, because he is more bootylicious than this pic indicates,
and
b) I may have to kick my instructor’s @ss for Love Rights to the Big Man 
And this is a picture of a correctly oriented rudder bumper tang on my plane (well, not my plane, but the one I usually fly):
This is important. (warning: NTSB pdf) (I told you this post would be semi-random memory card stuff).Ooh, random & flipping back–here’s
Sophie looking cute in the handknit cardigan
Nancy made her:
Good facial expressions, eh?Anyway, so Nick soloed on the 12th, and I spanked it out on the 18th. Here’s the obligatory pic:
So that’s the best of the latest that’s been going on with us. We haven’t been able to go flying since, because of work and suchforth–we were house-sitting at my Dad’s in Deerhorn Valley and left to go to his place in Tombstone for a family gathering. We came back just in time for flames on both sides of the I-8 and the road closed to the way to his place. So we went to ours.
And that’s all there is until the smoke clears.
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08.04.07
Posted in random at 3:30 pm by wendy
…nothing to do with this post. Unless you are a follower of a cat-based religion. In which case, praise be to the cleansing lintbrush and the cloister of the Box!
I keep forgetting to post about this, but if you have felt the need for a lovely little kitten in your life from beautiful downtown Burbank, California, click here to see cute pictures of kittens.
If your reaction was “heck no!” click here to change your mind.
And if lovely, social, well-behaved and litterbox trained kitties aren’t your thing and you’d like to try your hand at living with a feral adolescent kitten/cat, drop me a line. Also, a friendly teeny mama kitty. Sans reproductive capability & all ready to go.
Ooh, and click here to check out this really cool fiber animal that’s small enough, and legal to keep in your home, even if you live in a small apartment in the city!
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Posted in random at 10:51 am by wendy
I forgot to mention this from my birthday. When we were leaving to go off to dog beach in the midafternoon, I found this tucked in the top slats of our gate:
And I have to admit, my first reaction was “Holy s—! Who did I piss off?”
It looks like it was written on the bits of cutup old scrap that libraries keep by the card catalogs with the little golf pencils; is it spur of the moment evangelism? [Did someone driving past look at the state of our front garden and think, ‘Sainted succotash! There’s an immortal soul in need of my help!’] Or was there a whole room full of churchgoers writing these notes over and over with boxes and boxes of old scrap paper, dividing neighborhoods into grids for delivery?
Anyway, I thought it was at least a little amusing because I can’t help but look at it and see this:
It’s like me and Jesus are back in fifth grade together.
(yeah, yeah, Jesus and I, yeah, yeah)
For a while, I used to collect religious pamphlets, and it’s a hard habit to break, I tell you. I mean, talk about a message. How do you convince someone, in such a small space, of something which is so fundamental to the nature of a person?
I just love the different styles of rhetoric, the range from a style of “peace, love, and Jesus” to “accept Jesus or burn in hell,” to Jack Chick’s style which could almost be defined as, “It’s a given you accept Jesus, because if you don’t you’re a tool of the devil and will burn in hell, yadda yadda, that’s just basic, but if you don’t preach the word to everyone you meet, you are a poseur Christian and still gonna go to hell you big faker!” [and if you and I are ever walking along and there’s a Jack Chick tract on the pavement, you better be wearing running shoes, my friend, and be darn quick to beat me to it, the comic book format of these hatefilled little things is appallingly brilliant and totally addictive like movie popcorn, with even that same shamed queasy feeling after you’ve finished the whole thing] to the pamphlet I picked up the other day, with “SMILE JESUS LOVES YOU” with a big yellow Smileyface on the front, but filled inside with passages on sin, hellfire & damnation.
I suppose they ran out of room before they got to the bits about forgiveness.
And don’t worry, I don’t keep them anymore. I just enjoy them and set them free again (usually in the rubbish bin).
I’m not so much into the evangelism aspect, partly because of the hate-filled drivel of the Jack Chick school, and partly because I think something so big is just too personal–I mean, talk about presumption.
But I can also see the point–I mean, we go on and on about our favorite new products, and how they “change our lives” on and on about Mr. Clean’s Magic Eraser (love it!) iPod (yay!) Kaboom (another cleaner that rocks!)…so why not try to help other people out if here you’ve got this thing which you feel is just, well, literally in some cases, the End of ends, the all-one, the faith which gives you strength, safety, everything…well, that’s it, isn’t it? It’s not cleaning, it’s not entertainment, it’s not even Knitting. It’s faith. It’s Big. It’s not lifestyle (though so many treat it like it is) it’s Life. Life everlasting.* That’s really BIG, yeah?
But I like reading all the LITTLE pamphlets.
*(the words change between faiths, but I think they all share common threads. So despite all the Christian-oriented jargon tossed around in this post, I bet you’d never guess what religion I’m most closely aligned with and identify as. Big fat awesome prize to the person who guesses it. Hell, if you’ve read through this dreck you deserve a prize. ;))
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08.02.07
Posted in random at 8:03 am by wendy
Guess what this is!
Yum, yum!
I’m on a bit of a Kombucha kick, read a little article in Craft about it and thought I’d try my hand at making it myself, sort of as the article describes but using starter from a bottle bought at the local Henry’s.
We’ll see. Definitely doing it in the garage next time, if this batch doesn’t make me violently ill and turn me off the whole thing. I do not like fermentation smells. Horse farts and sheep burps are one thing, but the kitchen smells a bit like a dive bar when you walk past where the culture is growing. It’s that nasty drunk person ketone smell. Yergh.
I was drinking some of this yesterday and got a mouthful of translucent gelatinous goop and realized: Dang, they could be putting anything into this (thinking of a specific male bodily fluid, although the goop was not bitter tasting nor chlorine-y smelling) and we happy little hippies would just be chugging it down and thinking, “Yum! Organic raw culture! Yum! Live bacteria! Whee!”
There’s lots of floaty stuff in there. Let’s just hope the bottlers are extremely gruntled.
It might be an acquired taste, I think it tastes like cider. Sour-sweet, like hard cider, not the kind you give the kids. Well, not the kind you give the kids if you want them to have any brain function when they grow up.
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07.26.07
Posted in random at 10:00 am by wendy
(Interspersed with pictures of a cactus at my Dad’s)
Yesterday was my 29th birthday, and despite being the first birthday without my Mom, it was a great birthday.
I got to spend nearly the whole day with Nick. He went to work with me, walked one of my favorite dogs around Lindo Lake while I walked Holly (who is like a giant Libélula, I love her so much, but being almost exactly like Libélula means she can never be home with us [it would be a supernova of bitchdom] but she makes you feel like you are the best human being ever, a superhero, the one she waits for, she is like my Wallyball was in this respect) and then we went home.
Nick’s family called to wish me happy birthday which was very sweet and I went briefly to the local spinning group. Nick washed my car and got flowers and we took our kids to dog beach. The weather was great, although the sun was so hot on the sand, Crivvie will need booties if we go around one again this summer. I took off my sandals in solidarity (she sat down and kept lifting up each foot, she looked so pathetic) and we both toasted our feet a little bit. It was great to swim in the ocean, and Libélula swam a little too, although she doesn’t like ocean swimming. She’s a lake and pool girl. We stopped at my grandmother’s and caught up on a little bit.
Then we dropped the kids off and went to a bike shop and got my birthday present–a 2007 Marlin GS WSD, yay, bike! And a spiffy helmet since I left mine on a train in Oregon and Amtrak’s customer service regarding lost and found items is pretty much nil. Anything left on a train is considered sacrifice to the Commuter Gods. But this is a much nicer helmet than the one I left, so it’s a good thing.
After that, we went to sushi with my Dad and stepmom, my uncle and aunt, which was very game of them, as my Dad and stepmom have very specific culinary habits which do not include raw fish. And then, Nick and I came home and fell into bed, tired, but not too tired. It was a wonderful birthday and I feel very loved.
Today I’ll fly for the first time since the summer of 1998, (I solo’d but never got my license) and my first time ever flying the brick with wings they call the Cessna 152 (we were made the same year).
I’m nervous but not anxious, I’m curious to see how much comes back. Not much, I expect.
Nick and I have been going to ground school on Tuesdays and Thursday evenings, and I’ve been surprised at how much I’ve forgotten, and how much sounds new to me. We’re doing it with Golden State Flying Club–there are lots of places in San Diego to learn to fly, but I liked the structure they offer and the fairly relaxed but not careless atmosphere.
While we were out at Dad’s, we had a little visitor. Sunny D was barking at something, and when we went out, we found a relatively little king snake.
These things bite like the dickens.
Not very big, and since they eat rattlesnakes, we just chased it off the patio.
Unfortunately, it seems our little buddy returned a couple days ago and tried to make himself at home amidst the finches inside the aviary. My dad dispatched him and the finches ended up eating king snake instead of the other way around. And so it goes.
In knitting, the sock has slowed down in the gusset, but progresses. Just not a lot of free time with hands free for knitting.
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06.18.07
Posted in random, spinning at 10:41 pm by wendy
(wow! what a creative title!)
I went to the fleece judging at the San Diego County Fair Sunday with Heidi and Lionel and Sophie; it was a fun day.
I went last year (pictures in a flickr set here).
(pictures from this year here)
I really like listening to the shepherds talking and the judge and all that. I didn’t realise it until I went through the piccies from last year, but there where much fewer entries this year. Still some serious gorgeousness going on. I snagged me some:
And like last year, I’m thinking of the ones that got away.But I have a fair amount of raw wool already…plus
Black Sheep this week, gotta take it easy, wait and score some of the doubtless premium fleeces that will be at BSG.
But, because I’m a dumb@ss, I’ve got classes during the wool sales, so I’m not sure how I’ll get my hands on them.
I’m in the final countdown of getting ready to go up–cleaning, laundry, packing…avoiding those by blogging & browsing…
and carding….
(red BFL, orange & red tussah silk & black dyed merino)
Um, I guess I should have a picture of the yarn here. Whoops.
Anyway, back to BSG.
I’ll be up in Oregon from Wednesday to Wednesday, the 20th to the 27th and I’m going to try the whole “roughin’ it” thing. Well, relatively. Remember, I’m used to sleeping cradled in the arms of love and all. 
I am so excited!
I’m taking Shearing On Your Own, Meat Cutting, Organic Certification for Fiber: Standards, and Emergency Treatment & Prevention. Wheeee!
I’ve been hesitant to try and make plans beyond the classes, but it’d be fun to meet up. (I got some good tips for fun things to do in PDX from vj and in Eugene from Martha and I’m looking forward to wandering and exploring with little plan) Call my cell at 892-9055 (area code 619) if you’re game, or if you see me walkin’ around all befuddled, please say hi. I don’t know if I’ll have e-mail access, but I probably will find a way (or face deleting a bajillion spams when I get home).
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05.20.07
Posted in dogs, random at 10:27 pm by wendy
It’s not that fun stuff isn’t happening, it’s just that when I sit down and bring up the post screen, there’s a distinct feeling of mehness.
So here’s the biggest most excitingest thing that’s happened in the last two weeks:
Belu bit Nick.
Belu likes to sleep behind our knees usually, and Tahoe likes to sleep in front of us, spooning with his head on the pillow or with his bottom in our faces. Because that’s adorable.
Tahoe was circling to lay down in front of Nick and Belu got tired of the jostling and snapped at him but nailed Nick’s upper thigh instead. She really didn’t mean to.
Really, she swears.
And, she claimed, “hey, it doesn’t look so bad!” But that pic is from that morning.
This pic was from a couple days later, when the tissues really had time to say, “M-therf-cker! Ow!”
Poor big bunny.
Anyway, he’s good now, but it’s at that itchy stage.
I have been knitting, but I’ve either forgotten to take a piccie or I just haven’t bothered.
Y’know. Just livin’ the life, not bloggin’ it.
Anyhoo.
Crivens is confoundingly cute.
Ooh, hey, I’m wearing the sweater I finished. Very comfy. I’m fairly happy with how it turned out but if I knit it again I’d make the arms even longer and make the arm gussets a little less wide. But it fits just like storebought, so I guess that’s good.
More Crivvie:
Closeup of the dead dog…
Also, check out this great way to use up odd balls of yarn or scraps–
Here kitty, kitty, kitty!
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04.29.07
Posted in books, natural dyeing, random, spinning at 10:02 pm by wendy
I blame Yul Brynner for my inability to say “etcetera” just once like a normal person.
First some etcetera:
A picture of a quiet evening in.Mom would love this pic, and really, it’s thanks to her that this pic happened. When she took Belu for the week because we had foster dogs coming out of our ears and Belu was seriously PO’d, Crivvie and the Weasel really worked out any issues they had over ownership of Mom/Grandma and with each other. We miss her everyday.
Ooh, that turned into a bit of a downer, sorry.
Um, here’s something that’s totally boring except for one person:
Knitters Coffee Swap Qs:
1. Whole bean or ground?
whole bean please. We have a grinder and we know how to use it.
2. Fully-loaded or decaf?
Caffeine is my bestestestestestest friend.
3. Regular or flavored?
Regular.
4. How do you drink your coffee?
Usually with 1% milk because it’s what’s in the fridge, but half and half when I’m out and about, black when we’re out.
5. Favorite coffee ever?
Hmmmm…not sure. The Wild Divine roast from a local merchant (Divine Madman Coffee–619-339-5379, they specialise in certified organic, shade grown, fair trade coffee and donate 10% to a local wildlife rescue) sticks out in my mind.
I get a 2 shot 12 oz. mocha in the morning before work because milk+chocolate+caffeine= perfect morning meal.
6. Are you fussy about your coffee or will any old bean do?
I’m not an expert. I won’t pretend to be some dilettante. But, um, some coffees taste manky, some don’t. I generally like something in the mid category–not french roast, not a mild breakfast type. So, mid acid, mid roast. I’m a moderate in nearly everything.
7. Favorite treats to have with your coffee?
I like lemon bars too, good accent, but um, most times it’s a donut or blogs with my coffee. Depends on if it’s a day off or not.
8. Anything else about your coffee preferences?
Local roasters rock!
9. Yarn/fiber you love?
It’s possible that I love everything and everyone.
10. Yarn/fiber you hate?
But maybe I hate nylon.
11. What’s on your needles?
A bottom up V-neck stash buster. Wear Everywhere Pullover in linen. Map of the World afghan. Baby socks x 2. Socks for me. Um, there’s more but what, I can’t remember. Ooh, a Sherwood in Pima Silk.
12. Favorite colors?
Blue and green (but not teal ;)) Red and yellow, like flames… Not really keen on pink or purple.
13. Allergies?
Cats (most). That’s about it. I don’t expect I’ll get sent anything dipped in pymethrin, so I figure I don’t need to bring that up.
14. Anything you really love, really don’t like, or just need to get off your chest?
Underpants!
So here’s the natural dyeing thing:
Carrot Tops & Copper Sulfate!
So, I took 3 skeins of the Henry’s Attic Inca Organic Cotton in Ecru, Sage & Desert, weighed them, scoured them (that’s where you fill up a big pot with water and soap and boil the shit out of it, then rinse it. Okay, maybe don’t boil it. Whatever your end purposes speak to) mordanted with alum (5% weight of goods as recommended by Michelle Whipplinger of Earthues for cotton) and eventually got around to getting some carrot tops with which to dye them.
I swung by too early for a farmer’s market in La Mesa, when they were just setting up but asked a vendor if she could save tops for me, so when I came back and bought several bunches I got 3 times more the tops–in fact, I ended up with a 1:1 ratio of WOG (weight of goods) cotton to carrot tops, which was just what I wanted to try.I put half of them in an enamel pot with enough water to cover and put them on high heat. When the carrot tops already in had wilted and browned out, I added more water and more carrot tops.
Eventually, I had something like this:
In smell and color it was just like my dandelion reduction (which I never used and never blogged) so I suspect a similarity of results could be had. A Handbook of Dyes from Natural Materials by Anne Bliss is a great resource–its only drawback is perhaps that it is organised by dyer’s name– not color, material, lightfastness, or whatever criteria might be most important to you.
I love it because it does consider lightfastness and subjects the end products to that objective test. Surprisingly, this is an important end step that many natural dye resources gloss over (or regard seemingly indifferently).
Anyway, it looked like tea when I dipped a cup in.
Alone, carrot tops on a material mordanted with alum make a strong yellow with a very high lightfast rating.
But add copper sulfate (blue vitriol) and you get a green:
Unfortunately, I forgot to document the weight of the blue vitriol/copper sulfate I added. I just poured until I liked the color of the dyepot. D’oh!
Here are the end results, after simmering and cooling, simmering and cooling. (perhaps a two day thing, I let it get hot and simmer for a while, shut it off, went to bed, and later the next day turned it on and up again and let it simmer/boil again and cool off when I had free home time). Sorry, good documentation would have specific times.
I didn’t exhaust the color in the pot. So far, in my experience, that doesn’t seem possible in natural dyes. But I was happy with the color I saw in the pot (my eyes and brain as a dyer have managed to do an automatic adjustment of the number of shades reduced to see the end color between dye pot and dried and expected washed/rinsed product. I am such a schmartypantz.)
So, from the top to the bottom.
Natural white (ecru)
Natural white (ecru) overdyed with carrot tops and copper sulfate
Sage
Sage overdyed with carrot tops and copper sulfate
Desert
Desert overdyed with carrot tops and copper sulfate
I let the dyed goods boil, washed them in a warm water machine with normal detergent, and put them through a hot dryer… I treated them roughly because I want them to be bomb/babyproof.
So, the undyed cotton is softer and more unprocessed than the dyed. But there it is.
And also, to prove I’m still doin’ it:
Here’s 2.1 oz, 184 yards of 2 ply, averages out to 1401 ypp, and sportweight. Corriedale roving from Dove & Jager (sheep names) in Pennsylvania and handpainted by Sue of Love Interwoven. I have no idea what I’m going to do with this but I enjoyed spinning and plying it and that’s what matters.
BTW, Love Interwoven is a new company in San Diego. I love talking to Sue. She’s my new Mary-Kay.
;P
Anyway, she’s become a Louet dealer too and is working on blending custom batts and handpainted rovings. Expect great things to be uploaded soon. But until then…she’s taking phone orders. Her prices are fair for the market, you can call and order yourself some schweet spinning surprises.
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04.27.07
Posted in random at 10:06 am by wendy
If you’d like to deal with an incredibly incompetent investment company that makes you go WTF at every turn, that turns $4K invested in an IRA over ten years ago into less than $3K, Morgan Stanley is the place to go.
Wow.
Let’s fee you to death.
Let’s make it impossible (or at least very difficult, I haven’t managed it in two years of visits and phone calls) for you to make changes to your account to preserve the remaining money.
Let’s make sure you can’t talk to a broker face-to-face because we took the money you invested and turned it into something so small you don’t warrant an appointment. You can call a hotline though and wait on hold, how’s that strike you?
Back when you could meet with an advisor, let’s make sure you meet with a different one each time and let’s make sure the forms you come in to fill out (to change the name on the account to the correct one, a form to move the money away from our incompetent clutches, etc.) just disappear. And now if you want to change your name on your account, because you don’t have enough money with us to be worthy of wear and tear on our branch office carpet, you’ll need to send us a certified copy of your marriage certificate. So what if those things aren’t free, it’s not us paying for it!
Oh and we’ll be totally useless on the phone but tell you you can look at your account specifics on the website. And when you go to the website and go through the sign up process, in the end you’ll get a screen that says to finish the enrollment you’ll need the info we’ll snail mail to you. Oh, and if the letter doesn’t come, say in a week or so, just call the oh-so-helpful hotline.
Ridiculous.
I might be a little cranky because I just spent an hour with the IRS phone system. Then Morgan Stanley. Before that, I talked with Vanguard. Vanguard rocks. Not much competition for them in today’s sample, I know, but they are definitely a much better company. Oy.
Sorry, I just had to get that off my chest. Morgan Stanley can bite my @ss.
Next post: Natural dyeing-pics finally, if I can get my camera and computer to talk, and the Knitter’s Coffee Swap questionaire. (sorry, Dawn, I am le suck.)
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04.25.07
Posted in random at 11:23 pm by wendy
heh.
There’s a point in blogging where there is so much to say, acknowledge, share, ponder, muddle through etc. that it becomes a fearsome task, something huge and intimidating…and maybe a little tedious, since it means rehashing and rephrasing events that maybe you’ve felt you’ve dwelt enough on.
So little by little, I might catch up, I might get to what I’ve meant to say, but maybe not.
But right now I want to just say this:
I am going to Black Sheep Gathering!
Woo-hoo! I have wanted to go to Black Sheep since we lived in Oakland, lo so many years ago (okay so maybe just four have come and gone without me that I’ve pined for), but it’s just always snuck up, the time hasn’t been right, money’s been tight, I’ve always put it on the wishlist for “next year,” and this year…well, I should put it on the wishlist for next year.
I should, and I’m not going to. One of the lessons of this year so far has certainly been Don’t Put Things Off, so even though I know the timing won’t be right, and I really shouldn’t spend the money, I’m going to go anyway.
Say it with me, and say it loud: Damn the Man!
Yeah, right, anyway.
So, I’m working out travel arrangements–I will probably fly in and out of Portland, for several reasons:
So I’m looking into when I should go to Portland, when I should go down to Eugene, what to do in Eugene–beside the BSG(!!!) and all of that.
I think I’ll be camping at the fairgrounds, both for the experience and the moolah preservation, but the rest of it is up in the air. I’ll have to decide what to do with the shop (close it for the time, or run it from the road with Nick as conscripted minion?) Is it practical to rent a bike to jam around on, or have enough Californians moved to Oregon I’ll need a rental car?
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