I haven't updated my blog in awhile, so here's a sock.

I was beginning to think I'd never post on my blog again, but then a flurry of productivity hit me and I finished four knitting projects in a week. Newly inspired, my dormant need to show off rose up once again and screamed LOOK AT ME.

Here are some socks I started knitting for Doug over a year ago, which I finally buckled down and completed:

This pattern was cobbled together from Charlene Schurch's "More Sensational Knitted Socks", using Patons Kroy sock yarn. I enjoyed knitting them, so I'm not sure why I procrastinated finishing them for so long.

Probably because in the earlier part of this year I became obsessed with spinning and knitting sweaters for ME. We all know how much I like ME.

The first is the Diminishing Rib Cardigan, pattern by Andrea Pomerantz featured in IK Spring 2009:

This is that merino-and-silk fiber I spun this spring and fought with a bit to get it the right weight. Now that I know better how to handle this stuff, I kind of want more to experiment with.

The second is the Shalom Cardigan (Windy calls it my "shawlter" because it is both shawl and sweater) by Meghan McFarlane. I dyed and spun this stuff intending to make something for Doug, but oh, look, ME. I think this is my favorite thing I've ever knitted. And it was FUN to knit; I did the whole thing in two weeks.

For the record, Doug likes it, too, and has entirely forgotten about his sweater.

Awake and Spinning

I know, I know. Everyone who reads my blog (or USED to read it before I slacked off) is fed up with me for not posting pictures of my remodeled kitchen. And I was going to put the pictures up today. I really was.

But then I realized, if I WAIT, I'll continue to have a captive audience for my riveting, adventurous tales of YARN.

Somehow, with everything going on - all the death and destruction and remodeling and packing and moving and cleaning - I have managed to spin 700,000 skeins of yarn and knit two mostly finished sweaters. I think it's because of the new wheel. I am pretty sure it is a time machine.

Speaking of time machines, at some point I'm going to have to give up my car because it is 10 years old and sounds like an airplane taking off and I don't think Dug is ever going to fix the ceiling fabric that is now drooping down so low it will soon cover my eyes when I'm driving. (Yes, I KNOW I could figure out how to fix it myself - that's not the point. I'm lazy, people.) Anyway, my car had this really nice feature of going back in time during transit, so that if a party started at 7:00, I could leave my house at 8:00 and get there at 6:30, making everyone feel super awkward and concerned for my social skills. When I first got the car, I named it Penelope (not sure why), but now with all the noises and the time travel and it being blue, I've rechristened it the ReTardis.

Eh? Eh? Get it? Sigh.

Oh yeah, yarn. I've spun and knitted so much crap, I didn't know where to start with the show-and-tell, so I've begun with the first stuff I spun on the Majacraft when I got it. This is the extremely soft and snuggly chocolate alpaca I bought on the trip to Illinois last year, when we stopped at Apples and Alpacas in Mexico, MO. That was such a fun visit. I can't believe almost a year has passed since then.

I love how this yarn turned out. I managed, miraculously, to learn how to do the long draw spinning technique (drawing back with the drafting hand and not smoothing down the fibers as you go - allows for a softer texture) and didn't overtwist it, so it turned out very silky with a nice fuzzy halo.

I DON'T love how I had to take 3000 pictures of it to get only ONE which is remotely the correct color - it's the right color on the bobbin shots above, but somehow it defies photographing once plied. Also, it is not blindingly reflective in real life - indeed, it is not shiny at all. Not sure where that's coming from. Cousin Mark? I'm going to need you to drive to Kansas to photograph my yarn properly. 'Kay? Thanks.

I also don't know what to do with it. I got 2.5 skeins of it...maybe 400 yards or so? Any ideas?

Remodelling & Whining Update

All of you - fine, both of you - who read my blog might well assume that, after two months with no posts, I'd decided to abandon the whole thing. No, no, I've just been so very busy. (Which is a nice way of saying I've been wallowing in despair and ignoring my own very wise advice to myself which was something along the lines of, "NO wallowing. Particularly in despair.")

I thought I'd more or less avoided the obnoxious grief thing, but turns out I only postponed it. Then it hunted me down and beat the holy living crap out of me. It didn't get me right away because I was cleaning out my mom's house and I had the hard work/focus on mom's stuff to exorcise my grief with. When the contractors started, however, I had to wait until they were done to resume my work over there...then two months went by and I can't remember a damn thing about those two months. It's like I was sleepwalking. Anyway, I snapped out of it, cried for two weeks, and now I'm okay and my (current) house is REALLY dirty because nobody cleaned it while I was sleepwalking.

I feel like...er, that character in that series of books everyone is reading that I will not admit to having read (twice), when, in the second book she is so upset that she just goes numb for a long time. Then, of course, when she snaps out of it the ouchiness is much worse than if she'd just faced it and run off with Jacob in the first place. I mean, uh...nevermind. Let's move along.

OH LOOK, my bathroom is done. Let us review the before pictures:

As you can see, the old bathroom was MARVELOUS, but there were a few things wrong with it. Some of those things you can't see in the photos, but I will not describe them here, in case any of you might be eating.

Here's a few snapshots of what it looks like now:

In my opinion, the new bathroom is a bit of an improvement. In my next post, whenever I get around to that, I will show the new kitchen. And also maybe some yarn. (Apparently, while wallowing in despair, I went a little sweater crazy.)

RePly

In the comments of my last post, Jennifer asked if, since we both intend to knit the "Diminishing Rib Cardigan," we're both going to spin the yarn for it, too. Well, sure!

As soon as I rescue the first two skeins of yarn I made.

I thought I was pretty slick, spinning my yarn and measuring it with my WPI tool. I was downright smug about it. Y'all know where this is going...

Naturally, after I plied and washed my yarn, it...bloomed. It fluffed up. Expanded. What was supposed to be an 8-wraps-per-inch yarn became a 4-wpi-yarn. Which mean not only was the yarn totally wrong for its intended purpose, but I wouldn't have enough yardage anyway. Plus, I just didn't like it at that thickness, so plying it all and use it for a different project wasn't appealing, either.

I went ahead and made a skein from the same singles, except this time a 2-ply. OF COURSE it was perfect. Just what I wanted. The thickness, the color, the character. Arrrrgggh. I consulted the website to see if I could buy more fiber and dye and perhaps recreate my results. They were out of stock on the lovely silk merino blend. More arrrrrrrgggh. Then I looked at my two hideous 3-ply skeins and lamented wasting such gorgeous fiber. Arrrrggggh, again.

Then I realized...why don't I just unply it? Oh. Yeah.

So, last night I unspun the one 3ply skein back onto a bobbin, I put one of the three plies on my ball winder and the other two on my skeiner and made Dug help me manage it as I took the yarn apart. It was a time-consuming pain in the booty because we had to stop and untwist the bobbin and undo snarls...but it worked!

I just have to cross my fingers that it still looks right once I re-ply and wash it. I want my green sweater, people.

Babble

With the Other House being worked on by contractors, we're taking a little break from all the sorting and cleaning, which is finally giving me some time for Fiber Therapy. I don't have any pictures to show you, because if I stopped to take pictures of stuff, I wouldn't be spinning.

I freaking LOVE my new wheel.

One thing it affords me is more efficiency. I'm a much faster drafter now than when I first started, and I'm discovering that, with the Rose, I don't have to slow down to match the pace of my wheel. Over the weekend I finished spinning and then plied 3 monster skeins of chocolate brown alpaca AND spun a full (giant, Majacraft-sized) bobbin-and-half of merino-silk for my next sweater. Days of work now takes hours.

OH YEAH, I've started spinning for the next sweater. I decided Malicious Salad would best be used for other projects, which left me still without a green sweater. The Diminishing Rib Cardigan by Andrea Pomerantz, featured on the cover of this spring's Interweave Knits, seemed like a good project for Spring knitting:
I'm doing something new and courageous with this project: I am attempting, with my spinning, to replicate the gauge of the yarn used by the designer. I ended up falling for this pattern because it happens that the yarn used (Savoy, by Stacy Charles) is a wool-silk blend, and I, coincidentally, had 2 lbs of wool-silk blend fiber waiting for my next project. I have dyed it green, but not solidly - I want the yarn to have a bit of a tweedy look when I'm done. (I also am spinning this yarn with a bit of "character" - not going for the ultimately smooth, milled look of the Savoy stuff - and I think this sweater design will really suit that look.)

The internet tells me that this yarn is an "Aran weight" and measures about 8 wraps-per-inch - that is, if I wrap this yarn around a ruler without pulling or squishing it too tightly, it's going to loop around the ruler approximately 8 times per inch. I started spinning the singles and then just 3-plied it back on itself, measured it, then adjusted the thickness of my singles until it worked out to 8 wpi. (Okay, fine, I didn't adjust and remeasure; I just eyeballed it and announced, "That looks about right!" and knocked on wood.) There is a wee bit of variation in my my singles, but that's alright; I'm just going for an approximation, not an exact science.

Maybe tonight I'll take pictures and then tomorrow I will go on and on about how much I like spinning this particular fiber. I could definitely see myself making more than one sweater with this stuff.

I got a(nother) spinning wheel!

So, after months of research, I finally settled on the Majacraft Rose. I ordered it from a local shop, and they told me that Majacraft would ship the wheel directly to me from New Zealand. (I'm going to have to curb my sudden love of all things New Zealand; I fear that if I force Dug to watch one more Flight of the Conchords video, he's going to inflict bodily harm upon himself and others.) Anyway, so, shipping from New Zealand takes awhile, and I hadn't received any shipping notices, so I just figured I'd see my wheel in a month or so.

Somehow, though, I wasn't surprised when the mailman brought me a little package yesterday afternoon!
(I think you can click on this photo and it will open in a bigger screen, so that you don't have to squint so much to look at all these fascinating spinning wheel parts.)

I spent the evening assembling and then briefly getting to know my wheel. It's so different and slightly more complex than my Kiwi, so the learning curve is more than I expected. There was a little troubleshooting as I had a few no-that-part-goes-HERE moments and discovered that I needed to break in the bobbins a little because they're very tight on the flyer at first and don't want to spin freely. I also discovered that you want to adjust the whorl position so the groove on the whorl and the groove on the wheel you are using are directly lined up with one another. Somehow all of that figuring-it-out stuff was really fun.

I only did a wee bit of spinning, just using leftover scraps of wool as I tested everything out. This wheel has Scotch tension, but it's quite different from my Kiwi. It's actually easier to use because it's quite precise and you can see exactly where it needs to be before you start spinning - a little too loose, the bobbin doesn't brake; a little too tight, the drive wheel doesn't turn. Not much guesswork there!

The treadling on the Rose is so smooth. Dug noticed that it's a little harder to get started than the Kiwi. I did, too, but then the inertia makes it easy to keep on treadling, and there's no position where it wants to "stick"; it's very easy to control the wheel with the treadles alone, versus needing to sometimes...wait...

Dug, what do you mean "it's a little harder to get started than the Kiwi?" HOW WOULD YOU KNOW? You have been treadling my Kiwi! HAAAAA! Busted!!!

I knew Dug would succumb to the spinning wheel someday. I mean, I don't think he's going to take it up, but I can't deny that I am delighted at the evidence that he thinks it's just a little bit cool.

Anyway, I imagine Dug will be taking more photos of the wheel-in-use tonight so that I can blather on about it some more. One thing I do need assistance with is a NAME. I don't want to call my wheel "The Rose" all the time; it needs a proper name. What should I call it?

Bathroom: Before

Joy! I have found some poor suckers to gut and replace everything in my bathroom, and they are starting tomorrow. I thought I'd celebrate by throwing up a little photo mosaic of "before" pictures. ("Throwing up" is definitely the right phrase, here.)
They are ripping the whole thing out, drywall included, replacing all the plumbing and wiring, and rebuilding the room from scratch. I hope to get some in-progress snapshots as they go!

I don't have any humor-laden commentary about this yet (I mean, really, the photos speak for themselves), but let us all hope that the contractors performing my bathroom transformation don't give me any REASON for humor laden-commentary. Okay, count of three: 1...2...3...begin hoping NOW. [unnnngggggghghhhhh]

Hoping feels a lot like constipation sometimes.

While I'm Cleaning

I haven't been entirely unproductive with my spinning/knitting while cleaning out The House; just mostly unproductive.

Anyway, I started spinning Malicious Salad a while back but never posted any updates on it.

Look, Jocelyn - I put it on a SALAD plate. I am so clever!

The color is a little darker and richer in both real life and in this actual photograph (why is it so washed out when I post it?), but otherwise pretty accurate. I have about 3 full skeins of it ready to knit, and about 487 skeins left to spin. Originally, this was meant to be sweater yarn, but the way the colors are working out, it's going to be divvied up for smaller projects; Scott has already requested a hat, I'd like some socks out of it, and I think the skein with the bright yellow in it might make a lovely baby cardigan. The merino is so soft, it's really perfect for garments worn next to the skin. I also might throw some of it up on Etsy someday and see if I can make some money for my Remodel The Kitchen fund.Also, it's a #$#%#$# #$#%#$# to prep for spinning; it's not felty, but the roving is very thick, so I have to tear it into many strips and then loosen it all up, inch by inch, and there's so much of it. It's the same wool I dyed for Nuclear Pumpkin, which also was tedious to prep, but I could do less of it in one sitting. With Malicious Salad, I'm trying to keep the colors stripey, so that means I have to prep one whole length of the roving at once and it's reeeeeeeeally long.

Jennifer recently dyed a batch of shetland and she doesn't have to prep it at all; she just grabbed it off the drying rack (read: shower rod) and started spinning. Can you imagine how pissed I was, after all my dyeing experience and the ordeal of pre-drafting this merino wool, when the very first wool Jennifer dyed for spinning on her new wheel required NO PREP AT ALL? I blame the merino. I don't care if merino is supposed to be extra soft - next time I'm getting a slightly less spongy wool to work with.

Okay, yeah, so "next time" is four days ago, when I ordered a wool-silk blend. Okay, so the wool IS merino, but blended with the silk, it should be a whole different experience. Right?

I did it.

Surprisingly, through all this housecleanerupping we've been doing, I haven't abandoned my spinning. In fact, it may be the only thing keeping me sane. (Well, okay, besides you people. Love!)

For a long time, I've been ready to move up to a wheel that's a little faster, a little more versatile, a little more sophisticated, a little more...BAD ASS. Yes, that's what I wanted. A BAD ASS wheel. I took awhile doing my homework, and after about a year of obsessive wheel research, I kept coming back to this one:
It's the Majacraft Rose. It comes with 4 bobbins, a lazy kate, TWO flyers (one regular and one for fine fibers, and two whorls with a huge variety of ratios (speeds) - you'd be hard pressed to find another wheel that comes with so much stuff. It's one of the most highly regarded wheels on the market and I TOTALLY JUST ORDERED IT.*

Mine mine mine mine. I feel so decadent, so rebellious, so GIDDY!

*Those of you who are Windy will be pleased to note that this means you can borrow my Kiwi.

Converts

Damn me for not having my camera with me last night, damn me! Yesterday Windy IMmed me to plan our weekly Wednesday get-together, and she said the sweetest, most beautiful thing anyone has ever said to me. She said, "I'm ready to learn how to spin."

And did she! I know she feels as if she was struggling, but I'm so impressed at how quickly she got the hang of things: threading the orifice, fitting the yarn across the flyer hooks, treadling, drafting, managing the twist, joining new fiber. The real treat for me, as I was hiding around the corner pretending not to watch (instead of looming over her and making her nervous), was the look on her face as all of the motions she was learning popped into rhythm and suddenly she was making yarn.

Best day ever! It gets better though: the whole time she was spinning, Joe sat next to her, staring at the wheel with utter fascination, and when she was done, he even tried it for a minute. I might have TWO converts!

Life is good.

Delphinium Progress, With Better Photos

When I'm not at work or soaking up all the attention my friends can give me or cleaning out my mom's house (okay, well, holding the trash bag while Scott cleans out my mom's house), I am sitting at home, sulking and feeling sorry for myself, and because I'm never one to pass up an opportunity, I'm taking advantage of my sulking time to knit away on this scarf:

I love working on this scarf. It will need a little blocking, but I'm going to have to take care not to block it too much because the stitches create a very three dimensional fabric and I don't want to flatten it out and lose that effect.

Again, my pictures just don't do this scarf justice, even when they are not blurry. Okay, look at the top two to get the idea of how the stitches and beads are put together, then look at the picture below to get an idea of the vibrant color:
See how it's a very rich, luscious pink, and then it has swirls of black-white-and-tan on top of it? A very nice color. Geezis, that window sill is filthy. Somebody get over here and dust. Yuck.

This project is special to me because my mom bought this fiber and dyed it herself when I first got my wheel. She was so excited about it. Naturally, once I started knitting something out of it she lost interest in it and I'm pretty sure she thought the beads were stupid. But we'll overlook that and just concentrate on the specialness, shall we?

We can also agree that the beads are SO not stupid. You can't tell from my deplorable photography, but these beads, which I bought at fusionbeads.com (see them here: http://www.fusionbeads.com/shop/product/27572/ ), are clear ruby pink but lined on the inside with silver to make them reflective, and they are gorgeous.

I'm really not a bead person OR a lacy pink scarf person; I'm sure I won't keep this scarf for myself, but my grandpa's new girlfriend Adorable Jan caught me working on it and said very casually, "Oh, I CERTAINLY LIKE PINK," and "MY, I HAPPEN TO, COINCIDENTALLY, LIKE BEADS. COUGH, COUGH," so I think I may have found a very deserving recipient for a project that is so close to me. Hooray!

Plug

Dug has updated his blog with Parts 6 through 9 of The Eternal City series. Hooray!

http://poeticsmoke.blogspot.com/

Freaking Out

I know, I know. I'm supposed to be fixing up my mom's house and also cleaning-purging-packing at my house. I know. But, despite the fact that I have three small knitting projects going to keep me sane, I'm silently freaking out because I don't have a sweater project going. I'm working on the Malicious Salad fiber very slowly, but while the yarn is absolutely gorgeous, I don't know if it's suited for a sweater. I might use it for very cute socks/hats/mittens instead; it would be great for those because I've plied it to be self-striping and the merino wool will be so soft next to the skin, just like my Nuclear Pumpkin sweater. (It's the same fiber; I bought four pounds of it.)

Not having a sweater in progress is really making me nervous. Really. Nervous. But can I justify buying and dyeing more "sweater" wool while I have so many smaller batches of unspun fiber and unfinished knitting projects filling up my house? On the other hand, the sweater on the cover of the last Interweave Knits is begging me to knit it. Can I justify ignoring it? I mean, how do you think that makes my unborn sweater feel, knowing that I'm refusing to bring it to life? Poor sweater. And that whole winter IK issue was about tweed, and I'm so wanting to learn how to spin something tweedy, and the challenge of spinning for a specific project would be so delicious.

I could do it slowly, too. I could pick out a nice, scrunchy wool and dye it and then I could work on it over the summer. I could let it dry and slowly work on prepping it before I move, and then begin spinning it when we transfer our crap to the other house. I could knit it over the late summer and have it ready for when the weather turns chilly again.

Some of you are asking: Why don't I just get on the innernets and order the yarn used in the pattern and start knitting? There are two answers: 1. Because that yarn, in the quantity needed for my ginormous plus-size sweater, will cost more than bailing out Wall Street. Spinning will save me money. 2. Spinning the yarn myself will bring me great joy. It's more about the yarn itself than the object made with the yarn.

Also, I've been letting my savings account build up, and after we move I am thinking of rewarding myself with a second wheel. I would love to spin for this sweater on my new wheel. I just have to decide which one. There's several candidates out there, and I may have to make the trip to Yarn Barn in Lawrence, KS and test drive some of them.

The Green Room

The House Part 3: The Green Room
When my mom and I moved into my grandpa's house back in 1993, my mom made me paint the sun room (formerly my late grandmother's sewing room) green. Goodnight Moon, Kiss-Me-I'm-Irish GREEN. And then she spent the next few years turning the woodwork I'd painstakingly painted white into a dark, dark nicotine yellow. The ceiling, probably once white, stayed dark brown. She didn't want me to change it because she liked the nicotine as a DESIGN element.

When Dug and I began our house-cleaning last Tuesday, we quickly identified the "green room" as the most difficult room (well, besides the basement and attic, but we're just working on the living areas of the house right now) to clean out, and started there first. There was junk piled up to the ceiling. The walk-in closet could not be walked in to. There were mounds of trash and debris that had to be excavated before we could see the floor. Somehow, in our fervor, we got all of the trash disposed of, the treasure sorted through, the drawers emptied and furniture shoved out of the room, and at 10:00 that night we found ourselves giving the room a good coat of kilz.

The next morning, paint swatches in hand, we went to Lowe's intending to purchase a sophisticated, creamy beige paint to start coating the walls. We stopped by the paint chips to be sure we'd made the right decision, and simultaneously we spotted the absolute perfect color for that room. I felt Dug's arm tighten around me. My eyes met Dug's smoldering gaze and I breathed huskily, "We're gonna ditch the beige and paint it RED, aren't we?" Dug grasped my hand passionately and assured me, "Yeah, duh, you knew we would." I jumped up and down a little and replied, "Teehee!" Then I did some clapping and squealing. Dug shook his head and told me, his voice laden with anticipation, "You are stupid." I gasped. "No," I said, "YOU are stupid." Then we said that back and forth about 347 times until the store guy said, "You're BOTH stupid, okay?"

Anyway, the important thing is, Dug and I still agree, it's a really good red:
And also that closet you see there? Scott came over the next day and totally helped me finish cleaning it out. Woo!!



Zoetrope was asking me if I'll have a good room for spinning when we move. Oh yes, yes I have.

The House (Or: Where I've Been)

I guess everyone who reads my blog is well aware that my mom has passed away, and that I've been MIA for a couple of weeks. I've been off work, at first taking care of my mom during her last few days of life, and then taking some time off after she passed away to put things in order again. It's been unpleasant - but that's okay. It's supposed to be unpleasant. We all have to go through it sooner or later, and hopefully we're all as lucky as I have been, to have so many friends to help us through it.

Speaking of friends. Wow. I know I am never going to get around to properly thanking all of you as thoroughly as you deserve to be thanked. (No, Scott. You won't be getting thanked THAT thoroughly. Even though you did clean out that closet.) I love you guys.

The House Part 1: The Mess

So, after all the craziness was over, Dug and family and friends and I began the arduous task of cleaning out my mom's house. Let me preface this by explaining that my mom did not clean. In the 33 years that I knew her, I never once saw her clean. A few years ago, I made the monumental mistake of deciding that I wasn't going to spend all of my not-at-work waking hours frantically cleaning her house in an attempt to keep up with her record-breaking speed at mess-making. I just knew that if I stopped enabling her, she'd clean. I know. Stupid.

When she got sick, I retracted this edict and tried to undo the damage that had been done. I spent every weekend cleaning at her house, but I never got past the dining room table and the kitchen. I'd work on the table for four hours, come back the next day and have to start over entirely. Eventually I gave up.

I was going to burn the house to the ground after she died, but turns out my grandpa still owns it. And grandpa wants me and Dug to move in to it. It is a bigger house with a basement and central air conditioning and a nicer neighborhood, my grandpa put a lot of work in expanding it over the years, it has 4+ generations of my family history in it, us moving in makes my grandpa really happy, and probably we were going to clean it instead of burning it down anyway. So, moving in is really the only possible decision. We're okay with it.

On the other hand...well. I forgot to take "before" pictures, but here's her dining room after Dug and I did some cleaning:

You guys might notice that the walls are PEACH. Years ago, mom made me paint the whole dining room and the whole gigantic living room PEACH. It's like when my dad painted everything in his house magenta and left it to me, except I think the peach is more horrifying. (Note: you guys will see prolific use of the words "horrific" and "horrifying" and "horrors" in the coming months while my blog is devoted to house fixerupping instead of yarn. Just so you know.)

Here is my mom's bedroom after my grandpa's girlfriend Adorable Jan removed 6 bags of clothing to take to the thrift store where she volunteers:

Here is my mom's computer room:

After a week of working on the house, we did get ONE room entirely cleaned out and painted. I'll post more on that later because I'm running out of room here, but it's coming together. That one room. Very nice.

The House Part 2: I Need A Contractor

No, seriously, do any of you guys happen to be or know a contractor? Because OMFG. Here is one little detail from my mom's bathroom:

I don't have to show you the rest of the bathroom. It's the same.

The most interesting part of my mom's house is the kitchen. Circa 1978, my grandpa decided to redo the kitchen, but alas, never finished. He tore out one side of the kitchen and put in new cabinets and drywall and a pretend window:

But never tore out the OTHER SIDE of the kitchen (also with a pretend window):Those are two facing sides of the same kithen. 1980 and 1920. Sexy, huh? I like how one side has drywall and the other side has plaster, but the whole room is unified with a thick patina of nicotine. I so want to cook meals in this room.

There are other things in the house that will require contractor intervention, but which I forgot to get pictures of. Like the giant fluorescent light in the dining room that no longer has a cover. That has to go. I'd like to remove the pipe in the living room from where there used to be a bathroom before grandpa remodelled - when Scott noticed it he began shrieking with joy because he thought it was a stripper pole. The utility/laundry room was tacked onto the side of the house in the olden days and is actually falling off, causing roof leakage and other horrors. (See, there's that word again.)

Unfortunately I am not insanely wealthy so I think I'm going to start with the bathroom first, for obvious reasons, and save the kitchen and larger stuff for later. The kitchen is perfectly functional; it's just...weird.

Stay tuned for more installments on The House.

PRO NUNTZ EEE AY SHUN

With Jennifer's permission (and a provision that I allow her to make fun of my driving and the fact that I frequently fall on my ass in parking lots for no apparent reason whenever she pleases), I am going to post a little pronunciation guide to help her out with a couple of problem words.

1. WHORL: Pronounced "wurl" or "worl".
A whorl on a spinning wheel determines how many times the flyer turns per one turn of the drive wheel. Although it is not pronounced, as Jennifer would have us think, "whore-ell" or "whore-thingy," I think Jennifer's way is better and I intend to use hers from now on.

2. CTHULHU: Pronounced "kuh-thoo-loo". A fictional character by H.P. Lovecraft, Cthulhu is a high priest of elderly gods, according to dictionary.com, and his name is not pronounced "CHALUPA."

I was so confused when Jennifer asked to borrow my Creepy Cute Crochet book so she could make a chalupa. I cannot tell you how delighted I was when I discovered she was trying to say Cthulhu. I may have squealed.

I am sure she is on her blog right now, telling all of you about the alarming number of interesting maneuvers I executed while driving at lunch today and describing in detail the time I spontaneously "sat down" in the parking lot of Jason's Deli in front of hundreds of stunned onlookers.

What Pisses Me Off About Dug

What pisses me off about Dug is that he can spontaneously belt out a rough draft of a piece of fiction he's only halfassedly committed to, and it's better than most of the stuff you can pull off the shelf at the bookstore. Whereas, I've always wanted to write and I struggle and struggle and struggle and write and rewrite and after five drafts my drivel is just utter crap compared to Dug's first draft note-writing. The words just fall out of his brain, perfectly composed, seemingly without effort, ready to be published.

Well, "ready to be published" except that he never, ever finishes anything, despite his undying passion to become an author. He passes a computer screen, projectile-vomits brilliance onto it and moves on, completely unaware that he's done something incredible. (Whereas, I'll never finish anything simply because I'm just not that freaking good at it and oh, look, yarn!)

I would like to express my displeasure at the unfairness of this, but it would involve a stream of very unladylike words, and you all know I'd never say anything impolite. Instead, I'm going to get a posse together to encourage Dug to finish a book, any book - he has three in the works, that I know of - and submit it to a grown-up publisher. (I'm going to call it the Finish Your #$#$## Book Posse.) Dug's writing blog, where he's posted some infuriatingly clever off-the-top-of-his-head first drafts of various things, including a working series entitled The Eternal City, can be found here: http://poeticsmoke.blogspot.com/

At last!

The day I thought would never come is upon us: Jennifer has started a blog. http://anythingbutsocks.blogspot.com/

Not only has she started a blog, but she's awaiting her very own spinning wheel.

Victory is mine!