Yarnivorous

G'day all! Had a very pleasant lunchtime - took a friend in to the spinners' guild and looked at fleece which I want but can't have (sob!) and had a good chat. I've applied for a couple more jobs. As a reward for trying to flog my skills like some sort of has been prostitute, I've spent an hour editing pics and getting them onto my fibre page. Now don't go looking for any bran there! I'll be putting up details of the alpaca fleeces I have, and I am liquidating the alpaca blend tops that I have - no point keeping them if I can't spin them! (I seem to be allergic to alpaca, the hypoallergenic fleece. Sigh. So typical of me!) I am sure that someone else will enjoy them a lot more than I will :-) So spinners and felters, go look. The rest of you might not find it so exciting. I'll be doing the wool page again very shortly now that I have the fleece page almost up to date (minus the hand spun yarn). I have the pictures, I have the technology.....

Not such a g'day all! You know how I have been totally stressing about money recently? Well Nathan didn't get paid this fortnight. This means by the time the visa bill is paid, we will have not much at all left in our bank account for the next fortnight. From this we will need to pay bills, buy food and oh of course the mortgage. Now hopefully google will reimburse us the hotel money for Nathan's accomodation but it will not come through for probably a month. I believe this is the sort of time that one decides to make use of the redraw facility on the home loan.... I am so overwhelmed by my own idiocy that I am almost totally powerless. Why did I keep focussing on two or three months down the track rather than what was about to happen? There are no guarantees that this Colorado job will come through and whilst we may have money in the future, we don't have money now. I have two online job apps to do, some other possible leads to follow up, and I really need to upd...

G'day all! I am told that Mercury is in retrograde. For that I can blame everything going backwards here (including our bank account? Or maybe I can blame my lack of income for that...). I am also told that in the year of the pig you should be greedy and take chances, gorge yourself on the punt. I am starting to wonder if I shouldn't take a ticket in the lottery for tomorrow night. It is usually at this stage of my bank account woes that I start dreaming of winning a million dollars and not having to worry about money for a while. A loooooong while. I only want a million out of the jackpot of $33 million. Is that too much to ask? I am quite fussed at present. Money is a BIG issue for me. I am going to ring up some temping agencies this arvo and see if I can't rustle up some work somehow somewhere. I visited one place this morning and discovered that I need a referral to get work through them. Weird. I also have about 50 photos of stuff to put online. I am clea...

G'day all! What busy days here at the Modest Manor! Friday night Nathan had invited a friend around to dinner. This is the chap that will be house sitting for us. I spent all of Friday skeining yarn, and tidying and cleaning the house. I had the public rooms sparkling by the time I was done, and I was dead knackered. We keep having horridly humid weather at the moment. We've had two days off over the weekend and now we will be back into it. We don't do humidity in Melbourne. We do honest dry heat or coolth. None of this humid crap. It is pretty horrid when you work up a sweat skeining yarn on a skein holder - all you need to do is stand up and wiggle one hand whilst holding the yarn in the right place for the skein holder to take it up. Things like scrubbing the shower and doing the dishes had me in a dripping lather! So we set up the BBQ with our meat on one side and his glutenous muck (vegetarian fake meat is all wheaten - like most of the ingredients are wheat ...

G'day all! Phew! Hot again today. Actually, it is not that hot just humid. We Melburnians understand dry heat but not humid heat. We live here cos we don't like tropical heat. However for the last two weeks, or more is it now?, we've had 30+ degree days and humidity. I've been a bit busy recently doing not a great deal. Funny how that happens, isn't it? I finished the lonely sock - it will never have a mate as there is only one skein of this yarn, which was shoved in the pot to sop up excess dye. Do you like the way the pooling changes up the sock? It started off as a 64 stitch sock, then pooled on the gusset (toe up with gusset), then after the heel went down to either 62 or 60 stitches and then I started a little cable. This sock was intended as a plain sock to check out if the 160m of yarn promised on the ball would knit a sock. Umm, yep, it did and I had about 10g left over after deciding I couldn't stand doing plain any more, how about a little ca...

G'day all! How sweet! DH did actually go into a yarn shop in SF but he thought USD15 for 50g of yarn was a bit steep. He must've gone to the classiest (or at least most expensive) one in town! He did buy me a knitting novel/anecdote book from the Stanford bookshop (plus a book of jazz pieces arranged for piano for him) but somehow or another the girl have him the WRONG BAG and instead he came home with two totally different books, one by Ralph Nader and the other an anthology. I think we should write to the bookshop and ask for a refund of the money - after all they did give him the wrong books.... (OK, he didn't check them either but you expect to have been given the right books when someone puts them in the bag and shoves them at you.) Well it looks like we *both* are going to the US in 2 or 3 weeks. I have to go get my passport replaced today. We doubt Nathan will go work for the big G. He didn't enjoy the atmosphere and would have to be paid a LOT to work ther...

G'day all! Stinking hot here. Dripping sweat. Yuck. DH is back from Silly Valley. He warmed to the place but not to the job. The big G would have to offer him a fair whack of salary for him to move us there to work for a number of reasons, not just the cost of living there. It seems they want him to be a code monkey but that is not what he is good at - attention to detail drives him insane. However, problem solving is different (even though it takes nitpicking and attention to detail but it is tracking down things and working stuff out, not looking for one mis-typed character in 2000 lines of code) and ideas? You want Ideas? DH is your man! Funny isn't it - Nathan enjoyed the area, which he was worried about, more than the campus and the people working at it. Anyway, it will take a week to make any formal offers. In the meantime, we are talking to HP as well cos there is a bloke there who would dearly like to employ Nathan at Fort Collins. And now Nathan gets home an...

G'day all! Stuff has been falling from the sky! We've just had an extra bonus thunderstorm! It's pretty much blown itself out now, but in an hour our water tanks jumped up 25cm (about 10 inches). Woo hoo! They are now only about 10cm off full! The lightning was flashing madly and the thunder banging and crashing, and here's me out washing my car with the rainwater and a dirty sock. One particularly close strike, less than a kilometre (maybe half a mile?) away made me reconsider my car washing strategy. (We aren't allowed to wash our cars even with a bucket of water under water restrictions, but we can go to a car wash place that recycles their water. I don't like the car washing places.) Only two hours ago I was lamenting the lack of rain this month as I stood outside watching my plants crisp under the harsh February sun. Still, they can crisp up tomorrow and Sunday - 38 is forecast for both days (or about 100F). Here 's an interesting tidbit for you ...

G'day all! (disclaimer - feeding ducks bread is Not Good For Them but gosh it is fun, especially for the kids who had the bread. Plus an apology for having a serious addiction to the landscape mode on the camera ;-) Hmm, I am not sure if I can squeeze in any fibre content to this post, so if you want to see fibre, look elsewhere! Last weekend, Nathan and I went up to visit a new friend who is starting up an aquaponics business. (note, if you read the wikipedia article, Nathan does not approve of fully closed-loop systems as toxins can build up in constantly recirculated water.) Aquaponics blends fish farming with hydroponics. The fish provide most of the fertiliser and trace elements for the plants, the plants in turn provide the fish with clean water. The drive was good once we got out of town up beyond Warrandyte . I like getting out of town and into the more rural areas, especially if the driving is challenging. The roads are twisty and turny, and it's very hilly in...

G'day all! Here's an interesting one for you. Colour. Another of my obsessions. This is what happened when I pot-dyed some red, yellow and blue in one hit. Dang, the water was a bit too hot so I didn't get good mixing. However, can you see the result is really different to what happens with yellow, cyan and magenta? DH explains it like this. Red, yellow and blue are pigment dyes. They are pure colours (well I tried to get at close to pure dyes as I can but they are nearly always blends). When you mix them you get mud. See how the blue and red mix to make a dull purple? The yellow and blue mix to make fairly dull greens? (Hand-dyed, hand-spun, hand-knitted not quite Fetching mitts show the colours off well) Yellow, cyan and magenta are used in the magazine industry to make coloured pages (along with black, and now they have at least six colours they use, but same diff). Yellow is visible light without blue. Cyan is light without magenta. Magenta is light without y...

G'day all! Just got a phone call from DH. Happy happy joy! He is in his hotel (a Hilton hotel, blah) and is jetlagged to all b*ggery. Apparently he didn't sleep much on the plane. His fight from LA to San Jose was cancelled after they had all boarded it - some engineers came along with a roll of duct tape (!!!) and poked and prodded at some stuff then said "Nope, can't fix it. This one is staying here." So it took an extra hour to get on another plane, one that was airworthy. Eek. Then he caught the light rail to Mountain View station, only it was about 5km from where he was meant to be staying and he ended up getting instructions on how to get there from the local Scientology temple. Apart from the accents and the sheer number of Starbucks everywhere, he almost feels at home - the street plants are Australian (blue gums, tea-trees and some others). He said there were a lot of car repair places, presumably for all those people who have to drive the 200m f...

G'day all! We are running around like headless chooks (chickens) here. Nathan is flying out tomorrow to his in-person interview with the Big G. Here's us, trying to reduce our use of the car, and G wants to fly Nathan half way around the globe to have one day in the G-plex. sigh. Anyway, I am going to go for a drive unless Cheshire's abscesses (yep, plural, on a cat who is not allowed out at night and can only be fighting her unsister...) get pus-ier. Most are looking better after lots of wiping with salty wet tissues and opening up. Annoying animal. I *need* this drive (although I am trying to cut down on use of the car) - the stress of all this job stuff means I have to run away a bit. But if I have to take the cat to the vet, not happy Jan! I have been knitting. I have been spinning, LOTS. I have been playing with a number of my fleeces. I am very much enjoying the dark brown one. Me, spinning brown! I seem to spin a lot when I am feeling stressed. I don...

G'day all! I am now on the new Blogger. Ooo, err! I've updated my shop and added some discounts. I have stuff to talk about but no time - it just took me half an hour to get googlemail to accept me and we are expected for dinner in 20 minuts and the place is 20 minutes away. To keep you occupied if you can't find better elsewhere, you can look at my trips page :-) Back with a real post soon! anon!

G'day all! One sock bad, four socks good! Those socks are now 99.9% finished. Only the ends have to be snipped. I finished both of them yesterday. Hooray for me! I only have what 18 lonely socks now? (If I can count I think I started off with 20 lonely socks not the 18 I thought I had in that post!) So that is a pair of Socks that Rock 2006 Sock Club "Marble Arches" and one pair of husbandly socks in Trekking in a pattern nominally known as Thuja from Knitty. As always, I changed both patterns. The STR pattern was done toe up and I played with the order of the mock cable pattern so the socks don't actually match. The Thuja pattern has extra ribbing and stuff, and I should go see if it was a toe up or a top down - I like toe up when I have no idea if I'll finish the socks with the yarn available.... I did a different cast off on the STR socks. Normally I do the knit one, knit one, pass the first stitch over the second, etc - a really really common cast o...

G'day all! Do other peoples out there, outside Oz, use all over the shop to mean that they are discombobulated, they are totally unfocused or incapable of doing meaningful stuff? Well that is how my weekend has been. DH was talking to a friend who normally resides in Silicon Valley. He is setting up a new operation in Fort Collins in Colorado and is angling to get Nathan to work for him there. So Nathan's put in an app for a job there. The other interview is still on and may be extended somehow to get him out to Colorado. For any people from Colorado, it seems to me that it is not quite as fruit loopy a place as Silicon Valley.... Can you confirm this? I've already looked up to see if it has any yarn shops, which it does along with a possible place for spinning stuff :-) I found out yesterday that my very favouritest shop (ok, maybe apart from Marta's) has been sold to a big big business, which is why it has not been open since before Christmas. I am very disapp...

G'day all! Long time no blog - the last few days have been a bit insane. Having spent most of the yesterday with DH in a computer science building, you would think I would have access to a computer. HA! Anyway, looks like I'll be applying for various jobs here - I have two that I have to get in today. DH is bucking up against the idea of flying to the USA for an interview mainly cos the company is not answering any of his questions about the process, they don't bother answering emails for days on end, they appear to want him to do a job that he isn't interested in (no interest = no performance), they have scheduled the interview without booking the flights and want him to pay for the car hire, drive to their offices in an unfamiliar country on the wrong side of the road, pay for hotel stay (and they will reimburse him) plus there is the greenhouse gas issue - that return flight will put more carbon out than driving my car lots for a year. I can drive a long way in a...