Life as a Spectator Sport

Two days of absolutely perfect weather, hundreds of yarn and fiber vendors, food of every kind, wine and cheese, a gem and mineral show, spinning wheels and looms on every hand and all I can think of is, oh, my aching feet. The fairground at Rhinebeck is on very hilly terrain, and it felt as though we had to walk uphill to get to everything.

There were multiple barns of vendors (sorry, I'm not able to be more specific than that!), multiple barns of sheep, goats, llamas and alpacas, an agricultural museum, and an outdoor exhibit of old hit-and-miss engines running the same kind of things they were used for in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Sorry, I know I should be posting pictures of yarn, or fiber, or at least fiber animals, but that's the engineer coming out in me. Kay took more pictures of the critters than I did, so I'll post some of hers over the next few days.

I was good and bought only a bag of undyed merino roving for me, and a couple of bags of hand-painted Corriedale roving to spin up for Kay. No yarn at all, but some stuffed sheep for Kay, a handful of knitted finger puppets for her friend who is trying to get pregnant (I assume they are intended for the baby, not for the friend!), some smelly herbs to keep moths out of the wool goodies, a small tri-loom, and a pair of hand carders that cost me less than half of the usual price. The woman who was selling them said she was moving across the country and didn't want to pack anything--she was selling everything she had and intended to leave with just a suitcase. That takes guts, so I helped her clear out her tools by relieving her of the carders.

The only thing I didn't like about the festival was the noise level and the huge crowds. I don't do well with either of those, and I think that next year I will come early on Saturday, wander around until it gets crowded, and then retreat until some of the people go home. Looking at yarn and fiber was much more pleasant without having to fight a mob just to get close to a vendor's stall.

Now I just have to get Kay home to Baltimore and myself home to Virginia, because on Tuesday, the work starts up all over again. That's the only problem with a vacation weekend--you need another couple of vacation days at home to get over the weekend

Friday, October 19, 2007

Here we are at Rhinebeck, sort of

Thanks to problems with the hotel in Saugerties, we are not actually at Rhinebeck, but 30 miles north in Catskill. Not much was going on tonight anyway, but I had thought we might meeet up with some other attendees. But when we got to the hotel, we found that the whole floor reeked of stale cigarette smoke, so bad that even though I am not usually bothered by the odor, my eyes and throat were stinging after just a few minutes on the premises. Kay could hardly breathe at all. The desk clerk tried to fluff off the cigarette odor by saying that someone must have lit up in the hall, but it wasn't fresh smoke. It was the nasty odor of years of smoke settling into carpet, bedding and curtains. On top of that, their internet wasn't working properly.

I called Choice Hotels and told them we could not stay there, even though we arrived after the cancellation cut-off. Fortunately, the hotel agreed to cancel the reservation, and we ended up in Catskill, the next nearest city with any vacancies at all. Our room here is on the far side of space from the front desk, but it's quiet, only slightly musty, on the ground floor, and much larger than the one in Saugerties. The only real problem is going to be tomorrow night, when I have to drive 30 miles back from Rhinebeck after attending the Ravelry party :-(

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Taking a midnight stroll

This evening, I returned a computer that I had fixed to its owner in a remote area of the county. As I was leaving the house, she called out, "Be careful about the deer!" and I assured her that I would.

I didn't see the first deer anywhere in the 30 mile trip back home. But I did see a coyote.

They're not unheard of here, and it's a good thing that I knew they'd been sighted before. I'd have thought I was imagining things otherwise. But I spent part of my childhood in the west, and I know what a coyote looks like. This one was ambling down the middle of a well-traveled state highway as though it had just as much right to be there as the cars. I wish I'd had my camera handy.

Then I got home and found two boxes of lovely knitting things on the doorstep, one of them the miscellaneous knitting accessories I had ordered from Patternworks, and the other from my coffee swap partner!

A pound of organic coffee imported by a company in Luray, Virginia, a monstrous coffee cup from the University of Georgia (I had asked for something with a logo or name on it), a skein of beautiful Tofutsies sock yarn, and the most luscious merino fiber in a colorway aptly called "Rose Quartz."

Darn--now I'm going to have to decide whether to finish spinning up the Cotton Candy so I can go ahead and ply it, or start in on the Rose Quartz!

Sunday, October 07, 2007

The "M" Word

For most fiber people, the "M" word is "moth." For me, it's "mouse." I have lost so much fiber and fabric and so many books to the mice in this place that my feeling for them borders on murderous rage. So you could have heard me holler from here to Timbuktu when I found mouse droppings in one of the nylon bins that holds my yarn. I dumped everything I was doing, ran to our small Walmart and came back with some stacking plastic bins with pullout drawers, which I pray are going to be mouse-proof. Bins with close-sealed lids would have been safer, but I hate having to unstack a pile of bins just to get a single skein of yarn, and all the bins they had were too deep for the shelves I need to keep them on. So we'll try the drawers. I did get one large food container for the small amount I have of really pricey stuff--the Koigu, the Claudia Hand-Paint, the Rowan Kidsilk Haze, the Louisa Harding Angora, etc.

Unfortunately, while the drawers fit well on the metal shelving where I had the nylon totes, they don't hold nearly as much. I could easily use twice as many drawer sets as I bought. But I'm not getting any more until I'm sure these are going to keep the mice out.

There doesn't seem to be any way to keep the mice out of the house altogether. They are coming in around the plumbing in places that are inaccessible to me, like underneath the bottom of the kitchen cabinets. I've stopped up every place that I've found, but they just chew more holes. So all I can do at the moment is to keep everything in glass, metal or heavy plastic.

One of the perks of living in the country, I'm afraid. The only real effective preventative was a cat, and even if I wanted a cat now, I'm not home enough to take care of one. Maybe I'll try one of those electronic rodent repellant thingies.

Tuesday, October 02, 2007

This is so cool

My mother is on Ravelry now too! I wonder how many other mother/daughter pairs there are on Ravelry. I'll have to post a question to one of the groups and see what turns up.

I'm halfway through the Wavy Scarf and another repeat of the Clapotis, but haven't had much time to knit today. Clarence and I will hit the road early tomorrow morning for a three day swing through Richmond, the Northern Neck of Virginia, Washington DC and environs, and then head straight out to West Virginia. So I've spent most of the day getting ready for the trip, and much of the rest of it fixing a system for someone who called out of the blue and wanted to know whether I still worked on computers.

I'm not sure how I feel about that. I said I'd tackle it, and indeed I did fix it. It had about twenty different viruses and Trojans on it, and once those were removed, it worked fine. But I'm not certain I want to go back to doing a lot of this. For one thing, I don't want to sell hardware any more, but sometimes you can't fix a broken computer without replacing something. I haven't had to fool with collecting, reporting and turning in sales tax for several years now, and have no wish to go back to it.

Another reason is that I'm not really up to speed on XP, and certainly not on Vista, which I've never even seen. I held out on using XP until I had no choice, and I'll do the same with Vista. In fact, when things slow down a bit more, I'm going to put Linux on my other computer and work toward dumping Windows altogether. So I don't have the facility with Windows that I did with 3.1, 95 and 98. I also don't have all the fancy diagnostic tools that I had when I was working on four or five different computers every day. My workbench is a big computer desk that I was planning to get rid of in favor of using the laptop on the kitchen table.

And then there are the nasty little surprises you sometimes get when you bring other people's things into your home. I wouldn't have worried about this woman's computer, but we took one in to the shop years ago that turned out to be full of roaches. As soon as I realized that I carried it outside, called the owner and asked her to come get it. She was thoroughly snotty about it, insisting that her computer couldn't have had bugs in it. But it did, and we were twitchy as all get out for a couple of weeks after that, waiting for the anticipated onslaught of roaches in the store. We were fortunate that time, because there wasn't much food for them to eat. If something like that happened here, it would take me forever to get rid of them.

So this is going to take some thought. I have to ask myself whether the money I'm going to make for a couple of hours work on this computer today is worth the time it took away from knitting and housework, and I suspect that it isn't. That's a strange feeling, to be willing to turn down income.

Monday, October 01, 2007

More spinning fun

I'm off to West Virginia today, but I wanted to post one picture. This is the first skein of Cotton Candy singles, hanging inelegantly from the shower curtain rod to dry after I set the twist. I think I used just a little less than half of the roving, so another full bobbin should be just about the same amount. I decided to ply it with itself rather than combining it with anything else, as I really like how the colors worked out in the yarn.

I'm really looking forward to knitting this up. It will be my first sock yarn, and the first real garment I've made of my own yarn.

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