Starting from the rear left, we have Yarn Pirate - Calamity; Sleeping Dragon - Mahogany; Sleeping Dragon - Winter Thaw; Sleeping Dragon - Mossy Frog; See Jayne Knit - Hunka Hunka Burning Love (and it is a hunka - almost 900 yards); in front of the hunk is Sleeping Dragon - Purple in the Sky; Sleeping Dragon - Purple Night; Doodlebirds Creations - Doesn't Play Well With Others; Doodlebirds Creations - Farmers Market; and lengthwise in the front are Dream in Color Smooshy in Beach Fog and Petal Flower.
I apologize for the end of the picture being cut off, but you get the idea of what the yarn looks like.
I have just discovered, after looking at this yarn and remembering what yarn is yet to come, that I need yet another container. I've just laid that fact on Hubster, prefaced by "You're not mad at me, are you?" Of course, I timed this carefully so I asked when he was ready to fall asleep. He said, in a very sleepy voice, "No, of course not". Whew. Dodged the bullet yet again. That will teach me to buy a smaller container because I had talked myself into the misguided belief that I really had cut down on my yarn buying.
I have to say at this point that Sheri at the Loopy Ewe is a huge enabler. She had a Sneak-Up tonight, which totally shattered my best intentions. I went over there "just for a look" because I had a credit; I wound up buying uh... well, some more yarn. I actually bought far less than I normally do, all in the spirit of cutting back. I have finally and truly realized that I have far more yarn than I will ever knit in this lifetime. But then again, stash isn't about actually using it. Stash is for comfort, for viewing, for the sheer beauty of the yarn. I do knit from it, but then I promptly replace the yarn I've used with four times as much. Oh well. I could have a drinking problem or something. That would endanger others. I'm just endangering uh... well... he doesn't like the stash. So maybe I really should slow down.
Someone on Ravelry was astonished at the sheer volume of my sock yarn mountain and proclaimed that I had more stash than she did, could you just imagine that? I was a little taken aback, and then a weird sense of pride stole over me. I look at each purchase as one less opportunity to go out to dinner in San Francisco. Big deal. I grew up eating in San Francisco, and I certainly have enough flesh landscape as it is. So there - I'm saving myself from getting even fatter. (I knew I could come up with a justification for all this.)
I can hear you thinking, "Enough with all the extraneous chit-chat - let's get to the reason for the title.". Very well. I teach knitting classes - lace, modular knitting, cables, felting, and all manner of other types, with a heavy emphasis on socks. Therein lies the reason for the post. Tonight was class two of the four-week series on how to knit two socks on two circulars.
The day didn't start out well. Hubster left early because his boss was in town from North Carolina, so he was meeting with her and some other people, then going out to dinner tonight. I hate when he's not here. We've been together almost every single day - all day - for many years, and it's difficult to adjust when he's not home. Anyway, I've been suffering from a major case of insomnia - I'm out of remission, and my pain meds aren't working. Whether or not that has anything to do with it is anybody's guess, but I hadn't been to bed since Sunday. Needless to say, I was a bit punchy. Around 1:00 this afternoon, I was sitting here answering e-mails, leaving feedback, etc., when it happened. I woke up at 2:00 with my face plastered to the keyboard (and it's a new keyboard with chichlet-style keys, so I thought they wouldn't indent my face so much - wrong). I finished the feedback I was leaving (Jayne, I'm sorry for the gibberish - I hope I clicked the "positive" box) and went to bed, setting the alarm for 4:00. The cat crawled onto my ass and I fell asleep. The alarm went off at 4:00, I woke up, and came out here to read stuff on the computer. I figured that by getting up at 4:00, I'd have time to wake up, dork around, and get myself in the shower at 5:00 - more than enough time to be ready to leave at 6:15. Then it happened again. I woke up with my face plastered on the keyboard, and with a bleary eye, I looked at the time on the screen. It was 6:00. SIX O'CLOCK. Oh shit.
I shot up from the chair, ran into the bathroom, and got ready in a half-hour flat. Then I called Beth at the yarn store and told her I'd be a few minutes late because something had happened (I didn't elaborate). I threw my things in a yarn bag and took off out the door.
I got in the car and realized that I couldn't see a thing. You see, I rarely drive my car - I've had it five years and it just turned 4,000 miles (that's not a typo), so I didn't realize how much dirt had fallen on it while it sat in the driveway. Rather than use the windshield wiper fluid, I grabbed the hose and hosed it down. That got all the loose dirt off, but succeeded in plastering all the leaves on the windshield. I got back in the car, backed out of the driveway, and zoomed off down the road. I'm sure people were wondering what the hell I was - all they saw was a turquoise blur zooming towards the freeway with a fan-shaped torrent of water and leaves blowing off it and being left in its' wake. I hit the freeway doing 70 and shot down the road like a bullet (thank goodness for big V8 engines and Jaguar suspensions - I drive an '02 T-Bird, and the thing is a screamer), and I thought that I might make it just a few minutes late. Then the inevitable happened. There's a chain of hills that border the Tri-Valley area and separate the Bay region from the gateway to the inland areas, and this particular area is called the Dublin Grade. I had just crested the grade and was hurtling downhill when I had to slam on the brakes. There was a MAJOR accident that had traffic stopped. Dead. Nobody was going anywhere. I reached for my phone to call the store to tell them I was going to be more than a little late, and then it hit me. I had left the house without my license, my phone, and any other type of ID. I had my smokes, though. So I rolled down the window, lit up (which I rarely do in my car), and waited to crawl by the accident. It was a bad one. Someone had plunged over the side of the hill, and somebody else's front quarter-panel was hanging off the guard rail. We finally made it past, and traffic just disappeared. It always amazes me how that happens. I got to the shop at 7:30 for a 7:00 class. Sigh.
Last week, I spent the entire class just getting these people (and there are eight of them) to get the hang of doing a long-tail cast on onto two needles. I couldn't even get to the toe - I just told them to practice the cast-on and left it at that. Thank goodness they finally had the gist of it. So we spent the entire class trying to do the next two rows. They just didn't get it. They didn't understand that they had to turn their work to get at the other side of the socks. They didn't understand that they had to turn their work in opposite directions in order to avoid tangling. They JUST DIDN'T GET IT. I finally gave up, told them to practice it, and moved on to explaining how to do the toe increases. It's all in their books, so I gave them the corresponding page numbers. Their homework for the next two weeks is to finish the toe increases and knit straight until they reach the point where they're supposed to start the gussets. Then they're to stop. I have no doubt that they'll finish the toe - barely. Will they make it to the gussets? Nope, and here's why. They JUST DON'T GET IT, and I don't think they know how to read, either. But the main problem is that they didn't fill out their measurement charts. In the first class, they measured their feet in several key locations. Those measurements were to be recorded on what I call the Big Foot Chart (it's a picture of a foot with all the measurements described and places to record them). It's kind of important. Argh.
After 2-1/2 hours of this torture, I finally ended the class and got into the turquoise bullet, praying that I would make it home without falling asleep. I had called Hubster to tell him I was on my way home, but he didn't answer the phone. He was asleep, which pissed me off. So much for him caring about my well-being. (Normally, I would have just brushed it off, but I was tired and cranky.) I made it home just fine, cooked my dinner (a hamburger patty on bread - yummy), and sat down to knit. I woke up around 4:00 a.m.
So here I sit, writing to you, dear readers. I apologize for the length of this post, but I had to barf out all the garbage that happened today/tonight. Tomorrow/today will be better. We're going to attack my studio. The really great thing today is that my scale will be delivered. Now I can accurately divide skeins of yarn in half in order to knit my socks without fear of making one ball larger than the other. This will also cut my yarn bill in half, since I usually buy two skeins of the same type of yarn in order to knit without having to rely on my crappy counter to divide a skein.
At least that's what I'm telling myself for the time being.
An addendum: I tried to post this thing over two hours ago. Blogger was down and told me to retry in 30 seconds. I did. Several times. So I went off and played a game for a while. When I came back, it was up. However, when I hit reload, all it did was reload the stuff that was already there. This post is long, and it appeared to be lost. I had to wake up Hubster aka The Computer Guru Blond Love God, to see if he could find it. It took him almost a half-hour, but he found the post. Thank goodness. I'll have to do something nice for him today.
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