Friday bullets, Sept. 15, 2017

And it's Friday again...

  • Olive is getting bigger and bigger. I need to take some more pictures of her to show you all. It's as if A. puts her in the photocopier and enlarges the puppy by 10% every night. And she is growing at all uneven rates. Right now her feet and legs are very big and very long, and it looks as though her head needs to catch-up. 
  • In other animal news, P. is thinking of putting one of those locator tags on Midnight. You know, the ones they make for you keys. We spent nearly an hour yesterday trying to find him, and there just aren't that many places in our new house where he could hide. It turns out that he was inside a box which was inside another box in P.'s room. She didn't look in there because she didn't think that Midnight could fit in such a small space. Guess he could.
  • I've managed to get into my studio nearly every day this week. Right now I'm working on plying the singles I've spun into one yarn. It's less ugly plied together, surprisingly, but it's still questionable spinning. It's too uneven. I'll show you pictures anyway so you can see.
The plied yarn is there on the top bobbin, the singles are down there on the left.

I was using up various bit of unspun wool, with very little regard to color.

Here I got a little fancier and mixed together two colors that I had a lot of.

The thing that holds the two bobbins is called a 'lazy Kate'.

Another view of the plied yarn
  • Have I told you the saga of the trailer? That would be our little traveling trailer, not our new-to-us horse trailer. When we were driving through Arizona on one of our trips, we had a bit of excitement when the tire blew its tread on the interstate. We limped into the town which was not very far away, and after stopping at the furniture sales and car repair store in town, they fitted it out with new tires and we were on our way. Then this past June, when we had all of our worldly possessions crammed into every available vehicle space, including the trailer, after having closed the door on the Big Ugly House, we discovered another problem. We arrived at the hotel we were spending the night at, to discover that the nut that holds the wheel onto the axle had disappeared. This is not the kind of excitement one wants. The next morning, we went slowly to the new house, with me following in the car, staring intently at the wheel. I was to alert J. if I saw it do anything suspicious, such as look as though it was going to come off. We made it with no issues, and there the trailer sat for a couple of months. J. then found this past week a place to take the trailer to in order to get the tire fixed. As he pulled into the trailer lot, the wheel finally decided it had had enough, wobbled a bit, and came off. J. left it there. We now have the trailer back, with two good wheels, as well as a good spare. It turns out that the furniture and car repair store, in the middle of nowhere AZ, put the nuts on the wheels on backwards, and the other one was all set to do the same thing. These are things you are glad you don't know in the moment, as you are tooling down the highway at high speeds.
  • P., D., and TM spent over three hours at the stable next door on Tuesday, stacking the hay that was being baled. They stacked about 400 bales. There was a lot of hay that needed to be cleaned out of the bathroom and shower after they got cleaned up.
  • Does anyone else receive the National Geographic catalog with all the different trips listed in it? Does anyone else keep it around for days trying to narrow down which trips you would like to take if money were no object?
  • And speaking of that travel-thing. There are so many different aspects to my personality that would seem to be mutually exclusive, my love of staying home and my love of travel is a prime example. I had a dream last night that I think fixes that particular conundrum. I dreamt we lived in a flying apartment building. Yes, the apartment flew like an airplane, but it was just like a normal apartment. Wouldn't that be cool? When I told J., he suggested that some people manage to take their homes with them when they travel, they're called yachts. If the whole flying apartment-thing doesn't work out, I think I could manage a large yacht instead.
And that's all I've got this week. Have a good weekend.


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