winged orange

So I couldn’t make it to Maryland Sheep & Wool physically, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t get a haul! Last Sunday, Scott and I went to Cape May to celebrate my birthday. We did a lot of fun stuff: went to see the Lighthouse and small Cape May museum, went shopping, had dinner, and looked for Cape May diamonds on the beach. We also went to see alpacas. There’s an alpaca farm, Bay Springs Alpacas, right in southernmost Jersey. How cool is that?! They have a nice little farm store, and let you go out and look at the alpacas. We got some good pictures, including this one (click to embiggen all the photos in this post).

I also got some goodies at the farm store, of course. Are you surprised

On the left is an alpaca coloring book (!!!), a stuffed llama, and two brochures. On the right is 8 ounces of unprepped sheared alpaca wool in a medium silver gray color, from an alpaca named Brittany. Eight ounces for $16. Can’t beat that! I’m sort of flicking the locks out with a dog comb. Incidentally, Lori met the stuffed llama today. She was a little apprehensive. :)

And then my weekend got better. I had wanted to go to Maryland for the Sheep & Wool festival, to meet up with Elinor, and to see my friend Lizz. And then gas hit nearly $4.00 a gallon, and I decided it would be more economical to just drive 20 minutes to Mount Holly to get my wheel instead. However, unbeknownst to me, Lizz decided that she would attend Sheep & Wool in my place and buy me some things to play with. According to her note, she said she walked into several booths and said, “Hello. I know nothing. But my best friend bought a wheel for her birthday yesterday, and I want to get her something to play with.” And clearly she scooped up a bunch, put it in a box, and UPS-ed it to me.

(Follow the cut for crazy fiber pr0n. :D Read more… »

So. Meet my big birthday present:

My spinning wheel! :D It’s an Ashford Kiwi (you can click the photo for bigger), unfinished. I had a choice of the unfinished but already assembled wheel and one that was out of the box. I could finish that one but I’d need to put it together. Finishing + assembly would probably take three or four days, and I wasn’t waiting that long. It’s had a coat of tung oil put on it and it runs fine. This is my favorite feature:

My wheel also came with two extra bobbins and a lazy kate, but I got an extra extra bobbin because the original one for my wheel has a ding in it (even though it’s totally usable). So that makes four bobbins for me. I also got some roving to get the hang of the wheel with. Four ounces of Romney x Columbia, dyed by Woolbearers:

It still has some of the grease in it, which is interesting to spin. Makes my hands all moisturized. :) I’ll borrow Scott’s camera later to take a picture of what I have on the bobbin. My camera makes it all blurry because it’s 3 megapixels and it sort of sucks.

So that was my birthday yesterday - spinning! More spinning today, then dinner and presents at my mom’s tonight, and possibly Cape May tomorrow, weather permitting. Squee! :D I love birthdays.

It’s my birthday! I’m 24 today, which is both exciting and a little frightening. I’ll have a better post later, but I got an awesome birthday present today. Pictures when I’m sort of not attached to my new toy at the hip. :D

I caught a cold. In April. A no good, stuffy-nosed, can’t breathe for crap COLD. I thought maybe I would get lucky and it would be allergies, because my car is covered in green pollen and I’ve been sneezing like a banshee, but my swollen lymph nodes beg to differ. At this point, I’m hoping it IS a cold and not either the a.) stomach virus, or b.) strep throat that’s going around school. Occupational hazard of working with kids, I guess, especially special-needs kids who aren’t necessarily really great with the personal hygiene anyway. If I had a nickel for every time I said, “Go Purel your hands please, bud,” I’d be a rich a lady.

You know, I really like my job, but it’s amazing how my life has become like a game of leapfrog from one weekend to the next since I started working at the school. Part of it is that working my regular job and then working two hours at the tutoring center immediately after is kind of tiring, but most of it, I think, is that my kids are TOUGH. It’s a little crazy; we only have six kids in our room, and three staff (one lead teacher, two TA’s), and it’s still tough. Each of the kids has his own individual challenges that we need to keep on top of. Two of them are mostly just spacey; they tend to “delay their task” a lot by kind of zoning out and they need a lot of redirection. I mentioned the one that’s really work-resistant 90% of the time. I spend most of my time tricking him into doing his work, or sitting with him on his earned break because he didn’t do his work and therefore didn’t earn his break. We have one that’s more ADHD/learning disabled than Aspie, and he’s one of the toughest because he can’t seem to focus on his own work. He’s all over the place, all up in everyone else’s stuff, and he’s so used to individualized attention that he doesn’t work independently at all anymore. One of the little guys is one of my favorites; he’s such a cute kid. He has anger problems, though - in particular, he’s really NOT a good sport, and he’s been known to throw chairs when he loses a video game.  His deal mostly with work is that he gets really off-topic really fast. The last one is a pretty good kid, works pretty well by himself, but has some more classic Aspie/autistic behaviors and some pretty crazy family issues. He probably tries my patience the least.

Anyway. My whole point here was to say that even though I’m feeling icky, I’ve been assured by the lovely ladies at Woolbearers that there will be an Ashford Kiwi waiting for me on May 2, come hell or high water. Happy early birthday to ME. :D

Whenever I haven’t posted for a long time, I forget that I went to school for five years and I forget that I’m sort of able to connect events (however disparate) together in paragraph form. When this
happens, I write a list.

• Part of the reason I haven’t been around is that I upgraded WordPress. For the first time in the four or so years I’ve been running it…I didn’t like it. I couldn’t find anything, all of my nice little buttons in the Write interface (like bold and italicize and photo and blockquote) were gone, and it took me three days to figure out how Akismet picks up spam. Really, the upgrade wasn’t nice to me. Then it occurred to me that something might be wrong with my upgrade, and sure enough, there was. Today was the first day I had a chance to sit down and sort it out. I like it now. :)
• My birthday is in twelve days, according to my desktop countdown widget. I’ll be 24. I’m not sure how I feel about the “being 24″ part, but I love the part where I get free Cold Stone, and get to go get my spinning wheel. I’m probably just going to Mount Holly to get it at Woolbearers rather than driving to Maryland Sheep & Wool (sorry, Elinor!). I really, REALLY wanted to go to MDS&W, but with the price of regular gas being $3.29 a gallon in Jersey and much, much higher in PA and probably MD, I literally can’t afford it. I kind of figure a lot of the same vendors will be at Rhinebeck anyway, and I’m definitely going to that. Elinor, come to Rhinebeck! It’ll be fun!
• Lori had another yeast infection in her throat. I need to make an appointment for her to go back to the vet to be cleared.
• I still like my job. The kids are tough sometimes - one, in particular, is such a great kid when he’s in a good mood. But that’s one day out of maybe two school weeks. The rest of the time, he’s busy refusing to do any work, ripping up his homework, and being a brat. Our school psychologist says he’s one of the most disabled kids we have, and she’s totally right. He’s smart as a whip, but he’s lazy and he’s very rigid and if it’s new, he doesn’t want to try it at all. The other five kids all have their days, but usually they’re pretty happy and smiley and they’ll do their work without too much of a fight.
• I’m teaching Math now instead of English. Did I mention that?
• Know what’s weirder? I like it. And I must be okay at it, because four of my kids had tests so far, and three of them got A’s. The other one got a 59, but that’s because he didn’t show his work when he multiplied and got all mixed up, so I retested him and made him show his work, and he did fine - brought his test up to a 93!
• I’m moving back home in July. How suck is that? :P I can’t afford to live on my own anymore, though. I mean, I can, but Scott and I will never be able to save anything, and I am tired of working three jobs and having nothing to show for it. So he’s going to get a studio, and I’ll stay with him some nights, as well as pay his cable and his electric. It’s not ideal, but it’s only for a year, at which point I’ll hopefully either be back in school or in a better-paying job.
• I’ve been knitting! Not a whole huge lot, because it seems like I only really have time to knit on the weekends. But it’s something. I’ve been working on Pepto for one of my friend Kate’s boys. Whoever doesn’t get Pepto will get Tums. I went to visit the kiddos in March, and I had such a good time. I kind of wanted to sneak one home, but Kate told me I could only have one if I brought him back when he was through being colicky. Meh, not a good deal. ;) Anyway. Picture of the Pepto-in-progress:

If you click on the photo, you can see all my notes in Flickr, which are mostly about my spiffy knitting bag in the background and less about the knitting. ;)

And that’s about it. What’s been going on with you?

I’m not really here. I may not be here until March 21, when our school is on spring break. I have too fucking much to do. I work from 7:30 until 3 at my teaching job; then I go to the learning center and do two hours of test prep. Then I come home, snarf down some dinner, grab a shower, and do transcription until it’s time to go to bed. Lather, rinse, repeat. No time for knitting (haven’t even seen the new Knitty yet), talking, whatever. So I’m unavailable, and also really surly, both because I’m overworked and because it’s absolutely necessary for me to be that way to pay off my (godforsaken and totally not worth it) student loans.

To take your mind off a.) my bitching and b.) my absence, I present you with a bunny.

I wish I had a bunny.

Well, it’s finally happened. I caught the cold that the kids have been passing around the classroom. Three of them have had it, and I’ve been having them use the hand sanitizer every five seconds. Apparently that wasn’t quite enough, because yesterday my throat was kind of bugging me, and by bedtime last night, I was congested beyond belief. I think I may have OD’d on the nighttime cold meds, because I woke up at 9:40, got back in bed at 11:00 and slept until quarter to one. I finally decided I should get up and attempt to do something productive with my day, but I didn’t trust myself to work on my socks or the Argosy in my drugged-up state. So I hauled out my spinning, which I’ve sort of been neglecting since November or so in favor of Christmas knitting. Currently on my new spindle is the Party Favors wool I bought at Rhinebeck 07. I have a photo, but it’s kind of overexposed because my camera’s old and it’s only 3 megapixels. It balks a little at bright colors.

There’s a slightly more color-true photo of some of the colors in my original Rhinebeck post, if you’re interested, and you can click that one for bigger if your eyes can take it. Anyway, I’m spinning this yarn as singles and am not (nor was I ever) intending to ply it. It’s pretty consistent, and I think it’s a decent thickness to be knit and felted on its own without needing to by plied. Mostly, I bought the Party Favors to get the hang of my new spindle. I do love my Bosworth, by the way. I bought a mini, and it’s pretty fabulous. I learned how to thigh-roll with it, and half the time I can’t even tell if it’s spinning because it spins really fast and really smooth. Part of the reason this yarn is turning out so well is the spindle, and part of it is how well the wool is prepared…it’s SO SOFT. And I know I’m a huge loser, but it makes me really happy to look at the strips of wool and see how nicely all the fibers are lined up. It feeds my inner obsessive. :D The only thing I’m a little sad about is that I have no idea what kind of wool it is.

I’ll let you know next October when it’s finished. ;)

Again, one of the perks of working in the educational system: SNOW DAY! We got probably four inches of snow, but they’re expecting freezing rain this afternoon. It was snowing like there’s no tomorrow at 5:30 am when they made the decision, and our kids come from all different places, including about an hour and a half north and an hour south of our campus, so it’s easier to cancel school than to try to coordinate late arrivals and a possible early dismissal.

I wish I had some good snow pictures to show you. I had a really cute one of Ham Solo on my snowy car’s sideview mirror, but my camera ate it. :P My mom says that the dogs are outside playing and having a good time, and obviously I don’t have any pictures of that. I did get one picture of a small snow pig, though:

Also, a picture from the inside of my car, because I was sort of amazed at how thoroughly snowed-over it was. Ham isn’t in this one. I couldn’t get him to come in; he was making snow angels or something.

So yeah, snow day for me. :D And also, three-day weekend. Awesome. I shall sit in my house and knit and play video games. So happy! So as a parting note, I leave you with this:

One of the perks of working in the educational system is that you benefit from school holidays. I had Friday and today off for President’s Day Weekend, which is pretty awesome. One of the things that’s NOT a perk, however, is the amount of work that you need to bring home with you. Last week, the kids and I did dream catchers for art. Well, really, I did dream catchers for art. The kids bitched about how much wrapping the yarn around the outside of the hoop sucked, and why couldn’t they just get to the fun part?! Now, I know these have Asperger’s and most of them have delayed fine motor skills, but they probably could have done the wrapping. It’s boring. I know. And now I know really well, because I brought home and wrapped seven dream catchers. So this is kind of how I spent my long weekend:

And it’s also why my Spring Cable Sock (designed by the lovely and talented Elinor Space Kitty) looks like this:

It’s not really that violently blue. I’ll get better pictures when there’s more sock there. I finished the ribbing, but the dream catchers sucked up a lot of my “at home” time. Well, that and Harvest Moon: Magical Melody, because I am the biggest loser walking.

Sadly, I have to walk my loser self to my car to go grocery shopping. What a fun way to spend my last hours of break, right?

Not one F0, but two! The baby sweaters have been finished, all ends woven in, edgings crocheted, patches sewn on, and fire truck buttons attached. They were mailed out on Wednesday. I got one decent picture before I sent them on their way; you can click for the enlarged Flickr version:

I’m not sure which one I like better. I kind of think the green one looks more balanced, but the ribbing is more even on the blue one. My mom was nice enough to sew the patches on for me (after I sort of “basted” them in place with Stitch Witchery) because my sewing skills are really remedial and suckish. My seaming skills, truth be told, sort of suck too, but they’re passable. I really hope Kate likes them and that they still fit the boys. Even if she only plops the boys in the sweaters for one picture, I’ll be a happy girl. :)

So that’s one belated gift finished. I just have Scott’s mom’s scarf to go, but I’m going to alternate that with a pair of socks, because I want to knit something for myself. And I have that fantastic Smooshy [ravelry link] yarn in Blue Lagoon that Scott bought me, and that Lorna’s Laces I bought last year, and that Koigu I bought in college. Oh, and those Ravenclaw socks that I started. So yeah, I have options.

I also have a second job. I’m going to be a part-time after-school tutor at Huntington Learning Center, probably mainly tutoring test prep. I kind of don’t want to work eight extra hours a week, but I need the cash for my @!$#ing student loan payments. At least it’s a job that’s relevant and will look pretty good on my resume.