Yarnivorous

G'day all! Another manky day in Seattle.  We didn't get much rain but we certainly got plenty of cloud! The sun is somewhere out there! This date is a public holiday in my home city and I may have decided to take it as such.  I don't get American holidays and I have a lot of cleaning and tidying to do. And it is a good thing that I am cleaning and tidying because I found that we have a teensy infestation of carpet beetles.  Interestingly, we don't have any carpet, just a few small cotton rugs and no rugs near where I found the only infestation that I've seen so far, just some dust bunnies, neglected paperwork and some escaped yarn.  As I continue cleaning things out, I'll keep checking for more unwanted house guests.  I'm fairly sure that my stash is okay as I haven't seen anything in the yarn I've been playing with and re-organising recently. You know the flower people at the market are running out of flowers when they start using or...

G'day all! Today was a very dull and boring day.  The weather was intensely bland - we got another load of rain, drip drip drip, grey skies all day long.  I didn't go for a walk - see rain.  I did do my rehab exercises and felt very virtuous afterwards.  The weather forecast isn't exactly grand either - rain tomorrow, probably not raining on Saturday, rain on Sunday, Monday (my birthday), Tuesday...  you get the idea!  Welcome to autumn in Seattle. So, seriously people, don't come and visit in late October or any time in November unless you like grey skies and rain.  Cos you surely will get a lot of them! If you were a baby cardigan, which button would you like on you?  Ducky?  Yellow flower or white flower?  I haven't bothered trying to find matching colours - the blue ones are all tractors, the purple/mauve ones are all disgusting ucky colours so I decided contrast was good! Choices, choices.... A friend invited us out to...

G'day all! So this morning I swatched (me, swatching!) the lovely pansy golightly colourway of my wonderfully squishy Dream in Color Smooshy and I looked at it and I looked, and... So pretty in the ball I'm making the baby bolero in some light green Bendigo Woollen Mills baby yarn instead. Still cute!  Probably will go with more stuff too than a purple and grey one. Since this morning I've knitted only that much.  I'm not used to knitting to gauge either - it feels so thick and squishy!  I'm using two strands to make the weight up.  It is a quick knit but I feel slow, possibly because I've been doing things other than knitting today, like going for walks, doing laundry, spinning some yarn, helping DH with the garage, dealing with my Oz taxes - oh bob did that take a long time! I walked up to see the Olympics. Alas the clouds were low I use the ATO's e-tax to do my taxes.  It is easy-ish and it gives you hints along the way.  It just ne...

an addendum to the last post (of mine, not the music!) I stopped at a petrol station today to fuel the car up, ready for its return. I decided to pump the tyres up as they have been going down every. single. day. The tyre inflator thingo was out of order as someone had stuck it on 60psi (yes, we still use psi even though we are in all other ways metric). The guy at the petrol station said go tell the guys at the tyre and auto place next door - they look after it. The manager at the tyre and auto place said one of his boys would check my tyres. How nice! The "boy" comes out and looks and says "Those tyres are bald! I'm not touching them. They are sh*t. You'll have an accident with them in this weather!" Ahem. And the rental company says they will give me a free day's rental. I think I want something more than that. Company starts with B by the way and is something that we do each week with our households and governments do each year...

G'day all! Today I thought I would take it easy. Well maybe. I woke up and got up early so that I'd be showered before the plumber arrived. Argh. Hang on a moment - I'm going back to Firefox for my blogger stuff. I've started using Chrome. It is made by Google. It does not support keyboard commands in Blogger! How stupid is that? And I want to italicise stuff properly not use the old commands with greater and lesser than symbols and an i and a forward slash... oh and I'm lazy too. Ah here we are in Firefox. Hooray for keyboard commands! I'm finding Chrome limiting in some ways - I hate the lack of history (on some websites I use the history list a LOT). But I thought since I use gmail and I use blogger and DH said it is good, I should use Chrome. Anyway, back to the topic at hand. The plumber didn't show up. Didn't answer his mobile either. I had to leave at 8:15am to get to my sister's place to snaffle her washing machine (and it is a b...

G'day all! I am now involved in a wrangle with the mob we used to move money from the States to home. We've triggered some money laundering thing and now I have to provide evidence of our US income and address for the US government. Well we have no income in the States (or here for that matter). I've been moving money from the US account to here to help us survive. I haven't even paid the mortgage for the last two months (we are still ahead though due to shovelling money onto it in the past). We also do not have an address in the States so proving residence is going to be awful hard when we are not residents. Argh! Stupid regs. I know why they are there but I simply cannot provide the evidence they want of income and residence. We have none! Argh grumble mutter. All I need is a wrangle with the US govt thinking we deal in illegal stuff or some such rot. We are horribly law abiding. Heck I won't even speed or park illegally or run orange lights. It's a d...

G'day all! I haven't even started chemo yet and already I am b*ggered. We moved into our place on Sunday night. DH has been madly ripping up more carpet with the help of his father and sanding floors. I've now helped with oiling one of them (orange and tung oils, nowhere near as lethal smelling as tung mixed with petrochemicals). We've been washing walls and ceilings and painting them. The bedroom is mostly done (enough that we are sleeping in it) but we need to do the second coat of paint on one wall and above the pelmet and also rearrange the furniture when we haven't got half the study in the room with us. The place looks like a bombsite but at least two rooms are mostly done. There's a fault in the lighting wiring that DH has not had time to track down. So far he's found shorts or evidence of arcing in three different lights. (The shorts are not the sort you put on, btw, just to be clear.) He has to get into the roof to see if there is a problem ...

G'day all! Today was such a nice day until I tried to book us some tickets to the other side of the US. Nathan has a week off at Easter and we hatched a hairbrained scheme to visit half a dozen friends over there. "Tickets - $218 return!" trumpet the websites. Bollocks! They say tickets are available but by the time you manage to get all your details in, gosh darnit, no more fares at that price! Nope, how about these more expensive fares? Where I come from, that is called bait and switch. And it's illegal. Suck them in with cheap prices then make the item unavailable and offer one that is more expensive. I have spent four hours trying to find cheap tickets. I've used three different "cheap tix" websites, two of which said here are some cheap tickets, oops, they're all sold out! (I'm talking to you, Expedia and Priceline). I've looked at three different airlines. So I am peeved. I wanted to get a hat done so that I would've made lot...

G'day all! If you live in California, Texas and possibly other places, and you shop at Fry's, why? They will find any way they can to weasel out of their "price guarantee." It supposedly runs for 30 days, but half the products they sell they will only honour the thing for 15 days and if the competitor's ad ran out, well you can go jump! Their customer service is about as good as a slap in the face with a wet fish. Actually, if you did get a wet fish slapped in your face, you might be grateful cos it means someone took notice of you. But just don't expect them to have any knowledge of the products or of customer service. In a hurry? Well they will fix that! By the time you've queued with all the other suckers and then discovered the cashier you are lucky enough to have has scanned your item twice and cannot figure out how to cancel the second scanning, whatever it is you were in a hurry for is long gone. (Five minutes it took one chap to fix up the ...

especially car alarms that keep on going for FIVE MINUTES in the middle of the night. Between that, the baby upstairs, the RAIN!!! and the downspout outside our bedroom trickling water (am sensitive to trickling water sounds, usually means Bad Things), I may be a little grouchy today....

G'day all! Just got a message from JetBlue. I had to report the damage to the suitcase at the airport or within four hours, or by about midnight on Monday night. I should've reported it at the airport. Given that there were no people who obviously worked for JetBlue there, just airport people, and I was VERY VERY VERY hungry, I just came straight home. The only things I found to eat in NYC and the airport were two munchie bars, a soyghurt and a drinkable soyghurt, and nothing at all in the SJ airport. I hate airports for that very reason - everything they offer is wheat based or cheese stuff, and the few fruit offering are likely to cause me embarrassing gastro-intestinal problems. Now we are down a suitcase. Spewin'. All cos they have rules that they set without telling people. I am not from this place, I don't know what the rules are but I am expected to know by osmosis or something. I wonder if we can find a decent set of new wheels for the case, or if it would...

G'day all! Still no knitting pics. Lots of knitting happening. I want a shopping trolley so's I don't have to ride to the shops every single time. I want something like this . But the US doesn't like the idea of walking to the shops - one must drive and therefore the only little shopping jeeps that are available are crufty folding ones (either fabric or metal and given that I've seen a number of homeless women pushing the powder-coated or bright chrome metal laundry carts, as they are marketed here, I don't really want one of them cos then the cops will pull me up too and say I'm a vagrant or some crap). If I lived in Australia I could use the one there, or buy a really pretty one cos they had heaps of pretty ones a year ago. If I lived in the UK, I could buy a pretty one there too. But cos I live in the USA and it is too advanced for this walking to the shops bizzo, I can't get one here. (OK, I could buy this one but I don't like the plaid on ...

G'day all! At the moment I am totally surrounded by decisions. Completely hemmed in. I don't "do" decisions. I am having to plan everything, work out what fits in with what and work out what is best. This doesn't come easily to me either. Funny, isn't it that whilst I am rather laissez faire and prefer to take things as they come, the fact that we are in visa limbo AGAIN, for the second time in a year, is crippling me. Y'see we have to fly to Calgary to get our visas. We don't know how long it will take to get the visas after the interview. It might take a day for processing and a day for delivery (but there is a weekend in the way) or it might take a week or longer. Now I am sure Calgary is a nice place but it is going to be winter and we are going to be a long way from home with absolutely no friends or people we know nearby. We have limited funds (people have offered us loans if we need them but y'know I am really loath to ask for money) s...

G'day all! DH has kindly passed his cold to me, though I am still fighting it off. No dripping faucet for me quite yet. Still I am not exactly bright and perky. In the meantime, I need to scour my fleeces. I have about six left to do. Unfortunately the new scour at the guild is extremely alkaline and it tends to burn the tips of the fleece (which are usually damaged anyway). I'm a bit grumpy cos I bought two bottles of it and it is crappy. The old scour was about ph6. It didn't burn the fleeces (or make my hands go all dry and chapped). I need a neutralish detergent that is nice to my hands and therefore nice to my fleeces. Some people use Amway's LOC but I don't know any Amway distributors and am not exactly willing to get on an Amway distributor's list. I suspect it is not cheap either. I could use shampoo but the old scour was quite concentrated and only cost me $4.60 for a litre. I don't know where I can get a good, plain, unscented shampoo that...