Yarnivorous

G'day all! Happy New Year! Happy New decade! I thought last year was a fairly fertile knitting year but it appears I knitted no more items than the year before, according to Flickr. 39 in 2008, 39 in 2009. However, there are four or five items for which I have no photos. So that makes 43 or 44 FOs. Admittedly some of those items were, for example, two pairs of fingerless mitts for children but I think a pullover for Nathan well and truly balances that ;-) I've already started on this year's knitting. I'm knitting a hat in some yarn that is new to me - Sirdar's baby bamboo . I thought this might be a good yarn for chemo hats but it feels vaguely prickly against my wrist and neck. It might settle with a wash. Ah well, I'll find out sooner or later I guess! The weather has been totally amazing here over the last 24 hours or so. A big change blew through at around 9pm, bringing a fantastic natural light show and a dumping of rain. 25mm (an inch) at our curr...

G'day all! I finished up some projects overnight and today. It's been good knitting weather - stinking hot (close to 100F/38C with a wind from a furnace) and gosh I admit to enjoying the air conditioning at various places. Good knitting weather, as I said. As long as you have air con. Even without air con you need to do something apart from perish. You need to see pics of DH's new jumper/sweater. All handspun (by me!), roughly 1500m of it. The green was all hand carded by me from some corriedale cross fleece I bought at Black Sheep Gathering back in June. I used a substantial amount of the fleece dyed with Kelp from Landscape dyes in this jumper, blended with some moorit Bond Corriedale, some of the CVM Missy's black fleece, some yellow/green dyed fleece and some orange top. The same orange hand-dyed top that made up the contrast came from oh dear, umm, lady in Wyoming, Sheila, of Sheep Shed Studio? This is a very well travelled jumper already. It went to Europ...

G'day all! I just had to share this most horrid photo of me with you. (this photo really needs a caption but I've not got much opportunity to run a contest at present - most of my stash is probably still in Oakland and we have to be a little careful with our money at present) I'm probably spinning a yarn. I hope I am spinning a yarn (telling a story). I may be yelling at my father in law for using the flash on my camera in broad daylight. Just as well the wind didn't change! Note the ginormous hands. I think I got them from Pop. He was done with them and I needed some, etc etc. anon!

G'day all! I hope you all had lovely Christmases! Even better, all your Christmases came at once! I had two Christmases - one on Christmas Day at my brother's place, then one on the 27th at the PiLs'. Both were very nice days with lots of food. My brother was having two Christmas dinners on the same day - one with his side of the family, then one in the evening with my sister's in law family. She had the place all cleaned up and ready for the next invasion by 4pm. How organised! So I have eaten well. I must send a big shout out to my MiL. She has put up with us and fed us every day for the last week or more. I appreciate it and I guess that Nathan does as well. We've had a few nice sunsets along the way - hope I've not shown the pic before! I have to show off the Christmas knitting I've done but I have to redo some of it and also the laptop has nowhere to download the pics AGAIN. It needs a bigger hard disk. I only got three items done in time - Na...

G'day all! Starting to get over the initial shock of my new diagnosis and status. Now I have to wait for the next step in January. Thank you all for the encouraging words. I hope I can, ahem, live up to your expectations :-) But much more exciting this evening was this: taken on my PiL's balcony. That is a tawny frogmouth . They are not at all endangered (they seem to have worked out how to live with humans and their cities) but it is still lovely to see them. We only went looking cos they seemed to be saying 'hip hip HOORAY!' which seemed a little odd quite frankly. MiL thought they would be possums (proper possums not this opossum stuff that is quite frankly a little scary - I rode past a dead, bloated up one once and it was about as big as a medium sized dog!) having an argument. No, instead it was three tawny frogmouths. Two were flying around together and a third was trailing along. They looked like gargoyles on the roof nextdoor. They were all talking t...

G'day all1 I shall start with the good. I scored some Sundara sock yarn before I left the US. It came home with me on the plane. (I can't remember their names but the dark one is almost colour-correct and the light one is wrong but I can't be bothered wrangling the colour correction stuff any longer.) Hooray! Plus I got a lovely parcel from Dreamcatcher but that is for Christmas. So exciting! And nearly all the parcels I sent myself from the USA have arrived. Plus I worked out a nice pattern for the yoke of Nathan's pullover and it is coming up pretty well. I have hopes that I will have the thing finished for Christmas. The bad news? The tests came back positive. Unpleasantly positive. If anyone wants to know what a mammogram and biopsy are like, let me know and I'll get back to you - my online presence is flakey still (rather like me at the moment!). I will face a long and hard road over the next few months. Surgery, chemo and radiotherapy, in some ord...

G'day all! We are still on pretty flakey ground with the DSL (though we are told that it will be fixed by close of business tomorrow). I've got a heap of pics to upload but our link keeps dying and sometimes revives again by itself but mostly we have to perform artificial resuscitation on the router... Also I am not sure that we have a big dataplan - I might have to hie me around to the PiLs and upload stuff from there (they definitely have a big limit cos hello, BiL plays online games...). Hey, speaking of BiL, did I mention that I am going to have a new SiL? BiL proposed to his girl a few weeks ago. No longer will I have a SiS (sister in sin), nope she will be a SiL! Not much is happening here. Yesterday was deucedly hot - 100F on the old scale, today it is 11C at the moment after a cold change and lots of rain blew through. Ah Melbourne, how I love your weather. Tomorrow I have to go have some medical tests. I am hoping that it isn't bad news but well I gotta do t...

G'day all! Sorry for the radio silence but our net connection is a bit flakey (hardly worked at all for the first couple of days, now is working and I'm taking advantage of it!). We are Home! Hooray for Home! We are staying with a friend who lives 5 minutes' walk away from our place, which of course is still occupied by our house sitters. This trip's handy hint for travellers is: make sure you have enough time to make the transfer between planes, especially when transferring between an internal/domestic flight to an international flight on a different airline. We didn't book our tickets - they were booked for us and we had a scant two hours layover at LAX. That is not enough time to transfer between terminals and get into the international flight. We have brickbats and kudos for Southwest - brickbats for their excess luggage charges ($50 per overweight bag, $50 per bike, $200 charge all up, yikes!) and kudos for them getting us on an earlier flight which meant...

G'day all! Our stuff has gone! Now we just have the detritus of a life lurking around us. It is quite quite amazing how much Stuff we packed into a 750sq ft flat. I am rather good at spatial stuff, if I do say so myself. When it comes to packing a car boot (trunk) I can get a lot more stuff in than Nathan can. I didn't have a good night's sleep. We were up until after one am last night and I worried worried worried that we had Too Much Stuff (I forgot to take a pic of the mound of boxes...) until nearly 4am. Then I woke up at 7:30 (am!) and the removalists rang at 7:40... I don't think I'll be much good today! It is sorta sad looking around at all our stuff or what remains of it, the sad bits, the big bits, the stuff that we just plain can't take with us. Thank you to all those who have helped us dispose of stuff. I hope it brings you joy, happiness and/or peace. Or at least is useful. So in two days, I have to have the place emptied out. It has to be ...

G'day all! Things are coming together! Tomorrow our cargo leaves. We have sorted out the money problem. We have decreased the amount of Stuff in our place but OMG I have a LOT of Stuff to get rid of yet, and clean up before we have to pack the rest of our cargo. I hope I have not packed too much - I don't think so at this stage. I may have packed too little, just looking around the place! Nathan has to get off his butt and pack his stuff but that means losing his computer. We know how much he wants to pack that away! Oh dear. It is 20 past one in the morning and we think we have only one box to pack, the box of randomness that takes the last lot of anything that we realise OH CRAP! Forgot that! Forgot to pack that! Oh my, the fridge magnets! Crap. have to sacrifice my bright rainbow umbrella. Ah well. I can get another one back home... anon!

G'day all! Well we have tickets back to Oz. Dangit, if we had chosen the 9th, we'd be on another A380. Yes, they are better than jumbos. More space, less noise, higher cabin pressure. That adds up to less jetlag. But we are still leaving on a jet plane (don't know when we'll be back again). The cargo is booked in to be taken away on the 8th, I hope. I sent the form and the credit card off yesterday. I've just sent off an email to make sure it was received - I hate not getting any form of acknowledgement on these sorts of things. OK, it's acknowledged. I have soooo many things to fix up. And today I am going for a drive before I sell the car tomorrow. I need to get out of the house before the last round of packing frenzy hits and the freecyclers start coming through the revolving door. I need to go say goodbye to some places, have one last drive on that crazy end of Skyline Boulevard, the little narrow windy unsealed bit that clings to the side of the h...

G'day all! My heart is a little heavy this morning. Our stuff is flying out the door. I'm freecycling stuff. So far this week, I've given away about $300 of stuff. I hate giving away good stuff but I hate throwing it out more. I have no idea why I am attached to my stuff. Some of it, actually pretty much all of the stuff that has gone so far, came home either on the back of my bike or in the bike trailer. Maybe that is why I am attached to it. The cherry red round Black and Decker electric kettle was very popular. Lots of people wanted it even though one of the windows leaks sometimes and not others. I'm pretty sure I bought that kettle in Target up in the "market" area of San Jose (it isn't a market any longer). It came home on the bike - the box just fits in a shopping pannier. (Grand Teton NP) The silicone gloves - no attachment to them! I hooked them out of the dumpster, along with a plastic fishtank set. Both of those were extremely popular. ...

G'day all! You know what I said about those socks? That I couldn't finish them? Ta-dum! That's a shot taken in front of the laptop last night. It is one of the worst FO shots ever. But I don't care! Those pics will do, might have to do forever until I have time to get better ones. Currently I don't have time. By the time I got the camera to cooperate (ie I remembered to change the colour settings and managed to get the reflections of the lamp out of the clock corner of the screen), it was 23:58PST. But I finished them at 11:56PM, even wove in the ends! Honest! Yarn: old Vesper self striping, "Fire in the Sky" Pattern: my own, a chevron pattern, ever popular for self striping yarns, over 78 stitches ont he foot and some ungodly number like 86 on top. Though I didn't count. These socks kicked my butt last week. Man. They really had me stymied. Last night, having done one of them, the second one? One round I counted out where everything had to...

G'day all! I can tell I am a stress head at present. I can't focus on anything for more than about 10 minutes. I have not finished my pair of socks for the month, for the first time in over a year, maybe 18 months. OK, I only have to do another 5 rounds or so of ribbing on one and the leg of the other but I don't think I have time to finish them. We are into serious packing now. I have not yet booked sea freight for our stuff. I have a pretty good idea of how many boxes we are looking at so I reckon by the end of tomorrow I can get a couple more quotes from places that seemed reasonable. (If that is a repeat, please excuse me. It is from 9 days ago when we drove up to SF to get a drum carder and then drove around a lot not quite in circles) I can also tell I am stressed because I am shopping madly. Sometimes it is real shopping, sometimes it is online virtual window shopping. I want so many new fabric lines that I am seeing online that it isn't funny. I want th...

G'day all! Straight up, if you are not into fleece and spinning, this is a dull post. Go play somewhere else, cos it is also picture heavy. I have a *heap* of stuff I want to destash before going back to Australia. Most of this came with me to the USA. Not all. Some of it I can take back with me (but why? I can get more there :-) but I thought it would be nice to share around. Well with a little greenback action to grease the wheels of destashing... Most of the undyed fleece has been flicked and is basically ready to spin. Some hasn't. Scroll down, gentle reader, and see what lusciousness tempts you! Or what luridness, cos I have some of that too. LOL Note that I can't send unprocessed fleece overseas (ie out of the USA). Processed top is fine. I take greenbacks (from locals) and Paypal (at natielthreeoneoneatgmaildotcom). If I have to post the items, I will have to charge postage as well. Oh and colours will vary from monitor to monitor. Oh and it has all b...