Friday Flounce!

I admit to not always being a very nice person. I like to laugh at drama on internet fora. Sometimes it comes out of nowhere and makes me say, "BWAH?"

I think most people who read this blog know that I am a Rubbernecker on Ravelry. Some of the dramas are just too hilarious, too out-of-left-field, too insane to NOT laugh at.

What many people don't know is that I keep a folder of screencaps of some of my favorite posts. I call it my "Rav scrapbook".

I was revisiting said scrapbook, and came across one of my all-time favorite flounces. This one is from at least two years ago, and I'm not even sure I remember what it was about. I believe the original thread was locked, and the OP started a NEW thread just to say what she said in this post. I just had to keep it.

WUT? What in the world could make a person so pissed off that she would start a new thread just to call people twats? What would make her so angry that she would forget her grammar? (Actually, I do think the original drama was about someone calling her out on a misplaced apostrophe, so maybe she wasn't so angry that she forgot her grammar. She certainly forgot her religion there.)

Yes, I thought it was funny.

Sometimes flounces end up on a user's profile page. You gotta get those before the profile gets deleted.

Ah, politics. The killer of politeness. I tend to avoid such conversations, and just focus on the things I have in common with a person.

Good day to YOU, sir!

Blogging the Past

I need to play catch up on documenting my knitting projects. I realized that I hadn't finished my 2011 project posts, and I really need to get on that before I can blog 2012.

2011 was a long time ago, and as someone who sometimes can't remember what she had for dinner the night before, I will be sketchy on the details here.

Retro Redux Shrug.

The only photo I have of this is a semi-crappy cell phone photo that I took the first day I wore it, to my step-daughter's wedding.

It's from the great book Lace Style. I used Rowan Calmer, which is my favorite discontinued yarn. I always balked at the price of Calmer -- seriously, $13 for a cotton/acrylic blend? -- but knitting with it is always so pleasant, and it holds up to washing well (as Mike's favorite hats that were made with calmer show).

Dad's Christmas Socks.

I cast these on last year while my dad wasn't feeling well (complications from knee surgery; last summer was a very scary time for me) and gave them to him for Christmas. I didn't really use a pattern as they were just plain and simple socks. I used some KnitPicks Stroll that I had purchased a few years ago.

Soaring Heart Mitts.

I made these for my boss's wife, who always gives me beautiful things at Christmas. She's a quilter, and runs her own quilting finishing business. I wasn't sure how warm her workspace was in the winter, and thought some fingerless gloves would work well for her (if not for that, just for general driving and things). I put two photos because one shows the pattern better (it's a free pattern, too!) and the other shows the yarn color better. The yarn is Karabella Marble, which I purchased from Newbury Yarns near my work.

BFF Socks.

These were a Christmas gift for my mom. I love the pattern (I love knitting cables, anyway) from Cookie A, and I love the yarn (Regia Silk 4-ply; that shit is like crack to knit with). I know she wears these around the house, and I've seen them drying in the bathroom so it appears she handwashes them.

Oktoberfest Socks.

This was one of those projects that took much longer than it should have, because I decided to knit some Christmas presents last year and reluctantly put these aside because they were for me. I had purchased them as a kit at Rhinebeck, from the Tsock Tsarina, a few years ago and finally got around to knitting them. They may have been my favorite pair of socks to wear this year.

That wraps up things that I finished in 2011. 2012 may be coming up one of these days as well!

Happy World Turtle Day!!!!!

Today, May 23, is World Turtle Day.

To celebrate, I will share some of my turtle photos.

Spotted turtles:

Possibly the smallest painted turtle hatchling EVER:

Baby snapping turtle:

A very large snapping turtle, laying eggs:

Wood turtle:

More painted turtle hatchlings, bigger but with visible egg teeth:

Stack o' painted turtles:

Spotted turtle hatchling:

And a sulcata tortoise, taken at the Animal Planet Expo years ago:

That's all I have time for right now! HAPPY WORLD TURTLE DAY!!!!!

May 12, 2012 - New Hampshire Sheep and Wool

On a beautiful, bright, sunny Saturday morning, we headed out to Deerfield, New Hampshire for the New Hampshire Sheep and Wool Festival.

The Deerfield Fairgrounds were a new location for us, and I believe for this festival. If the festival didn't have a sign pointing into the driveway going into the fairgrounds, we would have missed it and ended up driving all over Candia and Deerfield. The driveway was loooooong, and the parking lot huge. I thought, "This place is huge. They must be trying to expand it, hopefully adding more vendors and making it more like Rhinebeck." It turns out, I was wrong.

There was the usual array of gorgeous hand knits:

And beautiful yarn:

And fiber:

There wasn't a whole lot of WTFery going on, but Mike did find this glove that looked as though it would fit a Planet of the Ape foot:

As you could probably guess from the fact that Mike is wearing a t-shirt, it was hot. This particular festival, which is always on Mother's Day weekend, often experiences cold and rainy weather, but sometimes it is beautiful. This day, technically, it was beautiful, but one complaint about the festival was the lack of shade. The walk from the parking lot to where the vendors actually start (which was a bit after the festival gates, and we both had to pee wicked bad and the bathrooms closest to the gates were CLOSED -- WTF is up with THAT?) was, as I said, long. It was also completely unshaded. They should really grow a few trees around there.

After many text messages and calls that I didn't get because the fairgrounds seem to be a dead zone for AT&T, I met up with my friend Lena and her friend Janice. We were all starving at that point. We stopped for Apple Crisp -- an annual tradition for us -- to ease our pain:

IT WAS MELTING FAST!!!!! EAT IT QUICK!!!!

I had pretty much purchased all that I was going to buy:

The two on the ends are Nightingale Fibers Ernestine (sock yarn) in Red Head (had to!) and Hadspen Blue. The other two are Mad Colors Fiber Arts Verity (DK weight) in Midnight Oil and Land of Oz (these two are planned to become a Mordor shawl).

Yes, these photos were taken on my lap on the way home from the fairgrounds.

I also purchased two bars of peppermint soap, but did not include them in the photograph. Those should be wonderful at the height of the summer.

There were some cute animals there, too! We all climbed aboard the Monorail Alpaca:

This alpaca reminds me of a Keane painting:

They are such adorable teddy bears before they are shorn (and after, too, but you know what I mean!):

These llamas would not take their eyes off a border collie that was close by:

There were some baby goats:

And one trying to make a jailbreak:

Plenty of sacked-out sheep saying, "I'm hot":

And a curious sheep as well:

Mike thought I was going to leave him behind:

But I was just in a hurry to get back to the bathroom before we left. I found him waiting for me by the fountain that was a source of torture when we had to pass it to get to the bathrooms that were CLOSED.

Then we were on our way home. We did make a pit stop in Andover, MA, for a quick nature walk, which Mike blogged about here. He's a much better blogger than I am. We got home, exhausted but happy.

This weekend is the Massachusetts Sheep and Wool in Cummington (hee, hee), MA!

Blogging -- How Does it Fucking Work?

Ah. I haven't blogged in a long assed time. Sometimes I wonder what the point is. Between Facebook and Twitter, does anyone really blog anymore? Does anyone want to read anything over 140 characters? Do people give a shit that I knit? Yes, I have been knitting. I more or less knit every day. It's been a while since I finished anything, but I do knit. I even may have spun a couple of months ago. I've also purchased yarn recently. I've been promising myself some blog posts (like the one for last weekend's New Hampshire Sheep and Wool Festival), but for some reason I am reluctant to blog from work. I don't know what the deal is -- I go onto Ravelry or Facebook several times a day; blogger would probably be the least of all evils, right? Maybe? Bueller? This week, hopefully, I will be making a nice blog post about the NHSW. After that, I can make a big post playing catch up on everything I have knit since the last project I posted (and I was way behind when I made that post). Maybe after that, I'll get my blog groove going and start making more and more posts, hopefully getting back up to posting like I was a few years ago. In the meantime, I leave you with a gorgeous Eastern Milk Snake that Mike caught recently in a local park and I held without getting bitten.