Yarnivorous

G'day all! Some kind person around here has free wireless so we are using it. How nice are they? Anyway, I have to share this news from the Onion with you: US Congress will raise alpacas to help raise money for the US economy. If you haven't looked around the Onion before, I recommend it. (But be aware it is satirical and most of the "news" reported isn't.) Once I have unpacked some more (everything is out of the boxes now, but we still are in the bombsite stage) I'll blog a bit and get some pics of the surrounds. anon!

G'day all! Hooray! We have a place to live! We are moving to Campbell. We have a two bed one bath place with a nice patio for growing plants and a bit of open space between us and the freeway over the noise barrier. Little whitter birds twitter around the area. So far we have seen birds that are almost the spit of willie wagtails and grey fantails. They even make very similar whitterings. We are there from tomorrow onwards for six months. Why six months? To make sure we like the place and the area. being locked in for 12 months would be Bad, mkay?, if we don't like it there or I eventually get a job 20 miles away. (Moving is a huge hassle too) Boo hiss - we are about to lose our net connection cos we are moving to a place where we don't have net set up (yet). Of course this means that my online access won't be that much worse than at present as DH and I are sharing this laptop = I don't get much online stuff in the evenings, and my days recently have bee...

G'day all! So Excited! I have a sore spot on the pad tip of my left index/fore finger! It appears to be a new callus from all the sock knitting that has been going on here at Chez Nous. (I'll work out a good name once we have a lease on a place, not this temporary housing.) You wanna see some sock? Yarn: Posh Yarn 's "Emily" 4ply sock weight 80% lambswool / 10% cashmere / 10% angora yarn. A gift from Dreamcatcher . Yarn is *very* cushy and a little larger than the standard sock yarn. Very bright too :-) Thanks so much, Dreamcatcher! Pattern: "Dove Socks," using Upstream architecture from Cat Bordhi's New pathways for sock knitters, book 1 . Whirlpool toes, well whirlpool toes of my own devising used. Note that they swirl in opposite directions :-) (No socks were harmed in taking these photos, though I thought the pool highlighted the aqua/turquoise... No leg hairs were harmed either, hence the marled legs ;-) I've been trawling through Cat...

G'day all! If any locals see a blonde woman gripping the steering wheel too hard in a new burgundy Sentra and randomly using the blinkers and the wipers, that will be me. I'm probably be trying to remember which is right and left, hence the random use of the wiper-washers as I'll be flummoxed and in Australia the indicators are on the other side of the steering wheel. The apparently random use of indicators demonstrates that I don't know where I am going and still can't tell left from right, so there are likely to be shouts of "NO! The OTHER left!" echoing from the car. I drove around for an hour and a half yesterday trying to find my way around town without a map. A map is a Really Good Idea. I still don't have one but we did find the enormous Wholefoods out in Cupertino without a map. And when I got lost, I did eventually find my way home - I had thought that the main roads are mostly a grid system, but I found some "main" roads that di...

G'day all! Feeling bored and isolated here. Poor widdle me is lonely. Not a very good introvert, am I? Some people would love to spend weeks mostly alone with a pile of spinning fibre and sock yarn but I've had enough of that! I need some social action! Now people will tell me of all the knitting meetups - that is half the problem! There are about 20 of them, with about half a dozen on Sunday arvos and some more on Thursday evenings. But which is good? Which ones can I get to by PT? I don't want to ride my bike at night on these crazy roads. I spent yesterday at Mountain View and Los Altos. In doing so I discovered: a) nice areas. Want to live there. Don't want to live there in a concrete box, which is probably what we can afford. They call them apartments but they are flats. Apartments are nice. Flats are cheap little boxes. b) nice yarn shops c) a good Wholefoods and a range of shops that meet my requirements, d) THREE bookshops all within crawling dista...

You never know where it is lurking!

G'day all! I am feeling much better than I did last week. The cold is mostly gone, just a bit of a cough and a little snuffle now. Odd question - has anyone else ever had skin that feels sunburned even though I haven't been in the sun? The skin on my back was tender in that fever-burny sorta way at the peak of the cold and it is still sore. I am starting to suspect that maybe the shower, yep the shower in the bathroom, is soooooo powerful here that I burned my skin a little (the water temperature varies rapidly and without warning, usually in the hot direction) and the water pressure coming out of the shower is irritating it along with sitting with my back against chairs, etc. It really stings, particularly when I goosebump! I've been knitting. I've knitted a LOT! I've finished 3.5 socks since when did I last blog? Friday? Thursday? No, Saturday! Crikey! That is a lot of socks! Alas, because we have had just one day of nice weather since then, I haven...

G'day all! I dunno if I should be called Typhoid Mary or Typhoon Mary. We had two glorious days when we got here(see in the pic of our area? The whole area is like this - a gazillion condos that are all alike. I kid you not when I say that "you are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike!" Nathan keeps getting lost and it took me a couple of days to work it all out) one average day and today? Rain rain rain! Rain ALL DAY! The Weather Channel is So Excited about it. Los Angeles is terrified as Stuff is Expected to Fall from the Sky! SF is being blown away by the storm front combined with a jet stream. We are just plain soggy here, but at least our condo is on the second floor so we shouldn't be flooded out. (Plus they have fixed our bath overflow we think as there are new screws on the underbath facing, so downstairs is less likely to be flooded, at least by us!) Plus I have The Plague. DH has a rotten virus, which we think he got from his dad, and he has pass...

G'day all! Before we get on with 2008, I thought I would have a look back at 2007. What a crazy, tumultuous year! It started off with me with no job. That was a continuing theme. In Feb, Nathan flew to the US to interview with a very large, Mountain View based company. He didn't want that job but did have a very nice Valentine's Dinner without me. In March, we flew to the US for Nathan to "interview" for another job. He already had the job, it was really just to sell Fort Collins, CO, to us. Over April and May I panicked a LOT. Moving to another country is a major challenge. Plus we had just started pulling the bathroom apart. In June, we got our visas for Nathan's new job in Colorado. On June 23 we flew to a New World. In July, Nathan spazzed a lot whilst I rode around Fort Collins a lot and fell in love with this hot, pretty place. In August, Nathan settled, as did I, and went to a conference. In September, after only three months, rumours started that...

G'day all! If you move into an apartment, would you expect the overflow on the bathtub to be hooked up to the drain or would you expect it to flood the apartment below yours? Is it reasonable to expect any drain-like things to act as drains or should such devices flood the downstairs apartment? Enquiring minds would like to know 8-) anon!