Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Washington, a spinners limbo

I obviously live in the wrong state when it comes to spinning.
As advised by other spinners I called around to yarn shops to see if any of them carried spinning wheels. Only a few of them did. So I picked the closest one (still an hour and a half car ride), and went to try some out. There were only three that were up my ally because they're small and compact or fold up. Now of course I'm waffling between two of them, because at $600 and above per wheel, I want the most bang for my buck, so to speak. I received a bunch of great pro/con advice from other spinners and a few of them suggested I look into renting or borrowing a wheel. So I called just about every shop around the western side of Washington, and not a single one of them rents out their wheels. Not.A.One. How the hell is that even possible?!
So like I said, I obviously live in the wrong state...either that or these other spinners that have rented wheels to try them out live in a different dimension. That is the only explanation I have.

Sunday, October 2, 2011

I'm doing it for the baby!

My best friend  managed to get herself knocked up by a complete knobhead. I don't mind her boyfriend as a person, I do however mind him as her boyfriend; if that makes sense at all. And while my initial reaction was a mix of "Yay you're having a baby!" and "Oh god, you're having a baby..." I figured I would knit for the little bugger anyways, no matter what her ultimate decision would be (there was a lot of waffling going on for a while). Hence the title.

When she found out I was one of the first three people she phoned to share the news with. Now since I have knitted for my other friend when she had her first baby (and then was a complete failure on finishing her second child's blanket) I decided I would get started on Cierra's baby blanket right away. Since gender was not yet determined I had a smorgasbord of colors to choose from. There is a 9 block blanket pattern I have been wanting to knit since '06 and figured it was as good a time as any to knit it. And in the last 4 months since her announcement I have finished exactly....less then 1/9th of the blanket. I'm about one inch short on block number one.

Now I know that my friend is having a baby girl and so I want to go and buy mostly girly colors...but then I wouldn't know what to do with the 4 skeins of primary colors I have sitting in my basket. So for now I'll put my nose to the grindstone as they say, and will finish this blanket...hopefully before little Leah Irene turns 20. 

My 5k progress is going quite a bit better, if anyone cares. I'm done with week 4 now, which quite frankly kicked my butt all week long. The running portions are getting much longer (we're up to two 5 minute sets now!) and the walking portion might as well not be there at all.

I had to skip Saturday's run because I was too busy with other things and by the time I would have been able to it was already getting dark. And I for one would like to avoid running in the dark, in the woods, where crazed ax murders might lurk. So I ran today instead. Mind you, it's Washington so our weather has turned to complete shit in the last week and it was gray and damp all day. Looking outside I figured if I ran now (it was 4:40pm) I would be able to beat the clouds before they decided to rain. Yeah....I was so wrong. It started while I was running. And stopped raining all together when I was done. (hey, I was already soaked, there was no point in stopping before the podcast was done). Leave it to me to pick the only rainy 30 minutes of the day to go running in.