Feral Alphabets

(Couldn't resist, sorry, and apologies for putting that song into your heads.)


The tea-dyed and CW fibers are now plied together, and in hindsight it would have been a much better idea to have weighted the tea-dyed singles while they were drying; the overspin loops and kinks didn't want to smooth back out very easily in the plying, and even after having soaked all the plied hanks to re-set the twist, there's still kind of a rickrack-y effect going on, especially in the all-wool yarn where the looping and kinking was particularly enthusiastic. A lot of back-twisting during the plying took care of most of it, but obviously not all, and I suspect that it will be a while before my forearms forgive me. 

I can now understand why the boilable-plastic bobbins from Majacraft would be so handy to have, should I ever decide to do something like this again; not having to wind anything off the bobbins before it went into the drink, tea-stained or otherwise, would have been very convenient indeed. On the other hand, I'm not sure it would be worth buying a whole 'nother wheel just for that one perk, and since one company's bobbins don't ordinarily work on any other company's wheel, you'd pretty much have to go in for the whole kaboodle in order to have the kit*. 

On the whole, I think the dyeing experiment was successful, and for the most part I'm pretty happy with the results I got; I may revisit it later in the year, possibly, but for now (and the foreseeable future) I'm content to pay other people to go to the bother on my behalf.  




* Note: a healthy fraction of this is just me rationalizing not buying another wheel, because, I have to say, some of those Majacrafts do look pretty darn nice. But my Kromski is great and I love it! and one day Lois will have finished repairing all the problem areas on the Canadian wheel and also will have made the new bobbins for it, so that one can go into the rotation as well, which will be equally terrific. In the meantime, I just need to be patient and keep reminding myself of how much fiber I could buy with the kind of money a new-wheel purchase would command, not that I would necessarily turn one down if the fiber-fairies intervened and there was an awesome bargain to be had, because, c'mon. Also, maybe not looking too closely at the new-wheel pages in my spinning-supplies catalogs would be a good idea.



 

Which we are not waving at departing trains in sepia-tinted vignettes, sorry; actually, they're something to spin. What a shock, I know. These hankies (or caps or bells) are degummed silk cocoons that are opened out and stretched thinly, in many layers, over wooden frames or forms, hence the name(s). [If you want to know more, head to www.wormspit.com and learn away.]     

They're also something to spin that had been in the stash for WAY too long - the ounce-ish batches of She-Ra (dyed in purple, dark gray, white, bronze, and pink) and Cyndi Lauper's Hair (shocking pinks plus a little white and yellow) came from the Portland Fiber Gallery's Etsy sale when they were moving into their current digs in early 2010, and the half-ounce put-up, in candyfloss pinks, was included in the fiber sampler I ordered from Rabbitch back before I even bought my wheel in '08. Even taking my unreasoning fear of silk-spinning into account, that's much too long to let nice fiber sit around unspun, and since I had to let the tea-dyed stuff dry for a few days before I could ply it with the rest of the Copperpot Woolies goodies, it was clearly high time to get out of my own way and let the wild swearumpus* begin. 

Verdict: as with silk roving, not actually that bad to spin, at least not by the end of the undertaking when I had some vague idea of what I was doing, although (unsurprisingly) in the spinning I did not stick with the classic method of peeling off one filmy hanky layer, stretching it out from the center to attenuate and align the fibers, and then breaking through the loop to form a tidy length of pre-drafted silk, all drafted up and ready to go. This is partly because the silk in the hankies, just as in the roving, wants to catch on and stick to every last bit of rough, dry, cracked skin and/or fingernail on my hands, and since it's at least cold enough, if not entirely wintery enough, at the moment for winterskin to have become the norm, there was not going to be any reliable tidiness to those individually-drafted bits of silk. Also, my attempts to peel the hankies apart were confounded by the layers' tendency to stay in contact with one another for as long as silkenly possible**, as well as their previously-noted determination to stick to me, leading to a tangled mess and (again, unsurprisingly) quite the stabbity attitude on my part, well before I was even anywhere near the wheel.

So, in the interests of comparative simplicity, and of not becoming an axe murderer as a direct result of the experiment, I abandoned the one-at-a-time approach and just spun from the pile, drafting fibers out of what quickly changed from a fairly orderly stack to a semi-controlled clingy mass, and breaking through the thicker layers along the hanky edges only where the silk was especially thick and resistant to being drafted on the fly. Since I spun each batch by itself and wasn't worried about keeping to any particular color sequence, that approach worked pretty well; there were a couple of spots where the thread stretched too thin and drifted apart on its way from my hands to the wheel's bobbin, and subsequently resisted my efforts to re-join it with the usual overlap-and-redraft approach, but I'm sure that would have happened anyway. (Knots are your friend here, by the way, and once you've got the thread-ends under control, they will lead you to victory - or, you can take that bobbin off the wheel entirely and start the thread again on a new one. Either way, you win! muahahahahahahahahaha.)       

Plying was considerably less hassle, even though the thread still wanted to be a little sticky, and the resulting yarn is not too bad; being lumpy-beginner yarn, there are of course some wonky spots, and overall the impression it gives is rustic and down-home rather than elegant and sleek, but, y'know. It's spun, it's soft, it's a little bit shiny, and in total there's around 500 or so yards of it, including the PowerGrrrl composite I made from the plying leftovers. I should be able to work with that.   





* sorry, Mr. Sendak. It's pretty accurate, though.


** The hankies' (and caps' as well, as turned out to be the case for Cyndi Lauper's Hair) extended marination in the stash may have contributed to the difficulty I had in separating them, possibly, if they gradually compact over time the way long-stored wool roving can; if I were feeling especially daring, I'd order some more from somewhere and maybe not wait for years to pass before I then spun them, just for the purposes of comparison.

Not a happening new pop-music duo, nor to be confused with crouching tigers and hidden dragons - it's the smell in the kitchen, because despite being content to let other people deal with processing fiber into spinnable form for me, I apparently am still not immune to the pull of the primal urge to try dyeing it myself Just This One Time.    

This really all started at the local fiber expo last fall, when I bought (among many, many other things) some overdyed fiber marked as destash at the Copperpot Woolies booth: a 2-ounce braid of (fawn, maybe?) alpaca/silk and a 4-ounce braid of (possibly light-brown) merino wool, both dyed in dark shades of green, purple, plum, and gold. Lovely things, both of them, but since I don't want the colors to devolve into a muddy mess and I don't trust my ability to either divide roving evenly in half nor to spin those two halves so that the color changes might mirror one another and cancel out the potential muddiness, I thought it would be a better idea to find some unobtrusive solid-colored rovings to spin up and ply with them instead, as foils for the colors. And I still have in my possession a shiny shiny gift certificate for Halcyon Yarn, given to me for my birthday by The Mom - what better opportunity to spend it than this? 

Hmm, apparently there will be a better opportunity than this, because they don't presently carry naturally-light-brown merino, although there are a couple of medium-brown-shaded options in the solid-dyed merino department that could work; there's the alpaca/silk, too, so if the Internets don't find me what I'm after elsewhere, I'll come back here and order it up along with some of the merino.

The Internets did give me the light-brown merino I was after at Paradise Fibers. They also had three different color options in stock for the correct size of the suede slipper bottoms that the Doc likes for his slipper-socks, so that's another point in their favor; I struck out on finding the alpaca/silk roving, but there's an undyed alpaca/merino/silk blend that would probably work decently enough as a substitute, apart from being considerably closer to pale off-white than the straw color of the alpaca/silk. Maybe it won't be so stark, when I see it up close! I save my Halcyon gift certificate for another day and put in the order at Paradise. 

A few days pass, and the order arrives. Yeah, no, the alpaca/merino/silk really is as stark as I was thinking it was going to be, and the light-brown merino looks more gray to me than brown ... it's still a nice unassuming color and all, just not unassuming in the direction I want it to go. So I can add this fiber to my stash and order more, hoping that the colors on my computer monitor are close enough to what Halcyon's dyed merinos are to enable me to make a vaguely educated guess there, and pick up the fawn alpaca/silk at the same time 

OR

I can tread a few careful paces over the fibery line from IJustWannaSpinItThanks into IBetICouldDyeThatMyself, and try dyeing it myself.

This is where the strong tea comes in, as I saw no reason not to flout the advice given in reference books and pertinent websites and lay in extra not-for-food-use cookware for this little experiment. If I dye with a food(ish) item, and use food(ish) items in the mordanting bath that preps the fiber, I won't be leaving toxins in the pots, and if I never do this again I won't have the extras underfoot afterwards.

I thought I'd have fewer handling difficulties if the fiber was already in a yarny state, so I spun it up into singles, let it sit on the bobbins for a day to set the twist a little, and then wound it off onto the skeiner. Upon leaving which the skeins immediately retracted into masses of tendrils and twists, because of course I spun it in the knowledge that I'd eventually be plying it with something else, and now all that overtwist had nothing keeping it under tension. I'm sure this won't be a problem! eegh.

One website indicated that I could use vinegar added to a steeping bath to mordant the yarn, but (probably because that sounded attractively low-risk) I couldn't find anyone else verifying the idea. I knew I didn't want to monkey with the various poisonous salts I'd need for mordanting with copper or tin or iron, so we picked up a little jar of alum from the spice racks in the cooking aisle at the grocery store and yesterday I combined it with cream of tartar in the bath instead. While the skeins were slowly being heated to simmering in that, another pot held more water and about 50 tea bags contained in a pasta strainer, also eventually simmering away. It's February, after all! even with barely any snow to speak of, there's really not much in the way of fresh dye fodder out in the yard right now, and I already had the pre-cleaned, pre-organized equivalent in dried plant material right there in the tea canister. Simmering wet wool and a stockpot full of tea bags at the same time is, um, probably not a scent the candle makers are going to falling over themselves to replicate any time soon.

The pots sat cooling overnight on the stove, since the mordanted yarn had to be washed and rinsed before it went into the dyebath and moving it quickly from near-boiling water to appreciably-less-than-near-boiling water would incline it to felt - another noble fibery pursuit, unquestionably, but not at all what I wanted out of it. Also, I'm lazy, and it was much easier to knit and watch hockey on TV while it cooled down on its own. This morning, washing and rinsing finished, the tea bags came out of the pasta strainer and the yarn went in, and the tea-bath was yet again slowly brought to the simmer. I left the skeins in there for about an hour, by which time the alpaca/merino/silk was about dark-brown-sugar brown and the merino slightly darker, and then scooped them out with a wooden spoon and a plastic colander* to be washed again and rinsed and rinsed and rinsed some more. (Note: it's probably best not to do this during a drought.) 

During all the rinsing, I managed to sort out the skeins well enough to find their centers and pull them gently back into more of a looped shape rather than the formless blobs they wanted to be, and after they went through a spin cycle in the washing machine to get more of the liquid out I snapped them between my hands to open them up again. There's still a lot of loops and curls from the overtwist, I'm relieved to see, so (in theory, anyway) they shouldn't fall apart when I try to ply them, and the strands don't appear to have felted onto one another anywhere - also likely to be a plus when it comes to plying. I think I'll put them on the swift to ply, instead of trying to re-wind the singles; it will probably be slow going either way, but at least it'll save me a step [see lazy, above]. The brown shades will lighten up some as the fiber dries, but I think they'll be close enough to what I was after to call the experiment a success.

Now I probably ought to get the original fiber spun, and make it worth my while to have done all this in the first place! There's still plenty of alum and cream of tartar in the cabinet, in case I feel the need to do it again, but if I do I think I'd wait until summer and try sun-dyeing in glass jars out on the deck instead ... sure, it'll take longer, but it'll also keep the tea-steeped sheep out of the house. I'm pretty okay with that.
           




* there were some tense moments during the scooping-out portion of this procedure, since the overtwisty loops and tendrils had decided to snake out into one another's space while they were all simmering away, but a quick application of profanity and a generous portion of tea-bath spilled onto the stovetop did the trick.

Completely spaced on posting this, but I had a good checkup with the radiology oncologist before Thanksgiving - another check in the "plus" column, and further optimism that once the five years of adjuvent therapy is up, I'll be able to get off the Tamoxifen and not need to take anything else in its place. Since I'm not particularly deep into Year Four yet, that's kind of chicken-counting, I know, but, still. A little bit of medical encouragement is not necessarily a bad thing.

Also, there was a meeting of the Psychic Drivers' Collective that day*, so even more attention than usual had to be paid to people who were making turns and changing lanes without bothering to use any of the visual-signaling devices with which I'm fairly sure their vehicles were equipped - that's always a good time. The following day, the Right-Hand Turns From Left-Hand Lanes League had their mobile get-together while the Doc and I were out returning the rental car from his latest business trip; chances are good that both organizations are sponsored by some blood-pressure medication company, out to boost its bottom line.   



* no, of course no one else got the memo.

There's still some residual grump hanging out in my neck and shoulder, but for the most part that's back to normal; instead, the germ, or gremlin, or whatever kind of tricksy physiological sprite I'm dealing with here, has decided to relocate to my throat for a while. It seems to be making do with a transistor radio and a futon these days, so if nothing else it's leaving a smaller nastiness footprint than before. 

Spongy's good, right?


Headache South had an appointment yesterday with the mighty thumbs of K, Massage Therapist To The (Non)Stars, and that flat-screen TV and recliner definitely took some hits. Now when I turn my head, instead of getting the immobilizing "Im in ur muscles, makin em screechy" pain like before, I feel interesting (yucky, but interesting) grinding sensations amongst the vertebrae and can hear the occasional shkrunk of bones dragging across each other. So, progress! yay!

Yesterday's headache-in-the-ear has now moved its lumpy, sharp-cornered belongings to new accommodations at the back of my neck, with a patio view out towards the shoulder. I don't believe this qualifies as an improvement.

The local fiber expo was this past weekend, and naturally I put in an appearance there. So did my checkbook and my credit card, both of which were smoldering quite steadily by the time I left again ... when the wool fumes hit, they apparently burned off what little fiscal self-control I (might have) brought with me from home, but the process was painless and I never noticed it happening. Now I have boodles of lovely fiber on hand for all my swearing-practice needs, some of which was picked up with potential projects in mind (and one of those specifically for project finishing, as its colorway matches well enough to get me off the running-out-of-yarn-before-the-end-of-the-pattern hook for the shawl that's on the needles right now, even though it's not the same kind of fiber) and some because it was seller de-stash and the prices were irresistible (only $15 for nearly a pound of wool/mohair/angora roving! woot!) and some just because it was soft and beautiful and I had to have it (a hank of hand-dyed camel down/silk, for instance, and one of merino/cashmere, and three or four of overdyed honey-tussah silk that were also being de-stashed, and, when you get down to it, everything I brought home). And since I had also picked up some lovely de-stash goodies earlier this fall from Melissa at Wool & Honey, not that that slowed me down even slightly at the expo, I am now in excellent shape to face the upcoming wool shortage, just in case there happens to be one.   

Also! In addition to the usual arrays of yummy yarn and fiber and tools and notions on every side, this year the fiber-animals-you-can-grow-at-home display (generally consisting of two or three different breed varieties of sheep, some alpaca, a half-dozen or so angora rabbits, and the occasional llama) included a real live honest-to-god camel, I kid you not. SO COOL. I didn't think to notice where they were from, but chatter in the sales booths indicated that the camel people have been showing him (her? don't know about that either, come to think of it) at big fiber shows around the Midwest over this past summer and fall, so it sounds as though they're at least sort of semi-local, despite my reptilian hindbrain's insistence that camels only live in the Eastern deserts or in a circus train (said hindbrain is also convinced that the native environment of the hamster is the pet store, though, so yeah, grains of salt all around). The camel people were running handfuls of the camel's down through a drumcarder and bagging them for sale while discussing the finer points of camel husbandry with passers-by, and little kids were feeding the camel bits of straw that they'd scraped up off the floor at the edge of its pen next to the alpacas - just another (really big!) entry in the fiber-producing category, as normal as anything. Take that, hindbrain! What with alpaca and llama and bison ranching becoming more and more a part of the small-to-mid-scale livestock norm, who knows, maybe camels will be next in line for the backyard-grazing contingent. And even if they don't, that was still pretty awesome.

What was not so awesome was the wretched headachy germ I picked up somewhere in the crowds, which hunkered down within the day and established residence in my right ear - I think it's got its flat-screen TV moved in there, and a recliner and a mini-fridge, because it seems to be making itself very much at home. Bleargh, back to the medicine bottle.







   

- Yes, I realize it's been a long time since I posted anything. Busy.

- I did get those daffodils planted after all, plus some grape hyacinths above them, plus some transplanted daylilies above those; also transplanted more daylilies both hither and yon, and some water-iris divisions into a couple of boggy spots, and some Siberian iris divisions and a Japanese iris division from the Mom's gardens, AND another dozen peony roots plus two from the spring planting that I thought had died but when I dug them out still looked as though they had some viable roots, so they went back in to see if anything comes of them next spring. There are still plenty of weeds in the yard, but we've tacitly agreed to studiously ignore one another for the time being, and a whole new crop of weedy sandbar willows down in the water meadow that I ought to lop out again, but I'm having a hard time drumming up much enthusiasm for the venture at this point.

- The lacy top I was knitting for that work-related shindig of the Doc's in January is off the needles now, and by gum if it didn't turn out to fit after all - my apologies, negative ease, I never should have doubted you. As long as I don't gain an inordinate amount of weight between now and then (or lose same, I suppose, although realistically some sort of serious health crisis would probably have to be involved for that to happen), the only party outfitting I still need to take care of is finding a reasonably-dressy-yet-comfortable-for-standing-on-concrete-floors pair of black shoes, so as not to be crippled by the convention center where said party takes place, and some black stockings to wear with them - the last pair I wore (to a wedding a month or so ago) held up admirably throughout the evening, then snagged and ran irreparably as I was taking them off. I suspect that they're bred to do that. 

- We seem to have become real-estate poison in Maine, at least to a degree, and for reasons which are not at all clear. After the people selling the first plots of land we liked got huffy and refused to deal with us because we weren't offering them their exorbitant asking price right out of the gate, and the man selling Plot #2 took it off the market rather than agree to our perfectly reasonable request to have it professionally surveyed to settle those pesky boundary and right-of-way issues, we expanded our search window to properties with houses already on them and tried again. And it worked! or so we thought, when we found a 50-acre mountaintop parcel for sale with some astounding views and a fairly new three-season cottage already in place, its amenities including a wood stove, a drilled well, an installed septic system, a full poured-concrete basement, propane hookups for the kitchen appliances, and a diesel generator in the shed out back to run everything else. Again, the asking price was a trifle high, but the sellers (whom we met when we went back to look at the place a second time) seemed like reasonable people who could be negotiated with, and the positional quirks of the acreage weren't completely insurmountable - ten acres were in one township, the remaining forty in another, with an additional ten-acre chunk hacked out of the dividing line that belong to some guy in Massachusetts, according to the public tax records, on which he regularly goes into arrears with the tax office for two or three years, then pays up, then lets it go for another two or three years. The only current sign of his ownership is a falling-down shed at the edge of his property, offering haven to the raccoons and an eyesore to the people. That parcel is also involved in two rights-of-way, the first across the initial ten acres of the larger lot to get to it, and the second across it from the initial ten acres to reach the other forty. (Someone was apparently pretty drunk when they thought that was an elegant and finely-crafted arrangement.) 

So there are some weirdnesses to be worked around, but (we think) nothing that can't be dealt with, so we get loan pre-approval from our bank and make an offer that we think is reasonable, albeit on the lowish side, based on what we think the property is actually worth. The sellers counteroffer by coming down about $500 from their original asking price. Our second offer, closer to our idea of its worth but still not in the neighborhood of their ideal, gets another $500-less counteroffer. Oooooookay. We also have some aggravating conversations with our bank, revolving around the discovery that, despite not having mentioned this anywhere in the pre-approval paperwork, they're not actually willing to honor that approval after the fact, due to the cottage not having a furnace. The what, now? why does the bank care one way or the other whether a seasonal dwelling has a furnace or not? It finally comes out that the bank likely has no opinion one way or the other on this, BUT. The bank's lending guidelines are the same ones used by the federal Fannie Mae system, and Fannie very much wants everyone to have a furnace before they get any loan money. The bank dudes are very apologetic about this, and suggest that we contact a bank in the area of the property, as local-lending guidelines are more elastic than those at the national level, and see what they can do for us.

So we get back in touch with the loan lady at my father-in-law's bank who had worked with us when we thought we might be able to get somewhere with the previous properties, as the area where the property is located falls within their local-bank purview, and she sends us more paperwork for that bank's pre-approval processing; meanwhile we're still playing incremental-counteroffer chess with the sellers, wondering how long it might take before we finally get to within shouting distance of one another. Our pre-approval goes through, yay, lack of furnaces be damned, so we're again looking at an arrangement whereby we would be expected to come up with 20% of the purchase price, plus closing costs, and the bank would kick in the remaining 80% in a second-home mortgage. Our real-estate agent contacts the seller's agent and learns from her what the sellers' bottom-line acceptable price is (we were not yet in its neighborhood, no great surprise there); he suggests that we offer them that price, contingent on an acceptable appraisal of the property, just so that we can get off the counteroffer merry-go-round and find out what the bank would really be covering, not the hazy dreamscape of what the sellers are hoping to realize from the sale.

We do this; the offer is accepted, huzzah; the bank gets its appraiser on the job. We wait. And wait. And wait some more. The property is such, in its size and location, that there really aren't any other directly-comparable properties nearby for the appraiser to line it up against, particularly in terms of recent sales, given that a) it's a decent-sized chunk of land and b) (of course) the real-estate market crashed pretty hard all over and there aren't many recent sales of any kind for comparison, much less sales of similar properties within the kind of distance or temporal range the appraiser would ordinarily be using. She thus winds up going farther afield, as well as back farther in time, than might otherwise ideally be the case, but manages to ultimately put together a full appraisal. Her final accounting brings in a price much closer to what we think the place is worth than what the sellers want for it; we were anticipating this, and hope that it will provide a necessary reality check to the sellers on what their reasonable expectations ought to be. 

The sellers mull over the appraisal at their end, we assume not especially happily, and we make yet another offer to them, moving back to what we think is a fair price, given the appraisal results and our new improved pre-approval from Bank #2. While we wait to hear back on the offer, the Doc gets an e-mail from the loan lady, telling us that things may not be so hunky-dory with the pre-approval after all ... it turns out that the property-loan underwriters at Bank #2 have all drunk the Real Estate Prices Have Never Been Higher What Are You Talking About There's No Recession kool-aid, are very cranky about the lengths to which the appraiser had to go to find her comparable properties, and have decreed that if we went ahead with the sale, the bank would only be willing to cover a maximum of 65%, and more likely would whittle even that back to 60%, and the remaining 35-40% would be up to us to scrape together. Our loan lady is just as ticked at them as we are, but unfortunately they are immune to both reason and reality, and they will not be budged. Our real-estate guy thinks he knows another loan officer at a different bank who might be able to help us; we make initial contact with Man At Bank #3, still waiting to hear back from the sellers.

We hear back from the sellers! They are, reluctantly, willing to accept the latest offer, despite it being only on the periphery of their hazy dreamscape, and we prepare for yet another round of pre-approval paperwork from Bank #3.

But! the sellers change their minds again, and decide to take the property off the market for a while, hoping that economic conditions will improve enough in another year or two that they'll have a better chance of getting what they want from it after all. We wish them luck, and the Doc instead looks into refinancing our mortgage on this house, using the savings we were intending to put toward the land purchase to get a lower interest rate and a lower monthly payment. Those wheels are already in motion with Bank #1 (which already holds the mortgage, so at least that cuts down slightly on the necessary paperwork) when we hear back from our real-estate agent: the sellers are changing their minds yet again! they think they might be willing to sell after all! but they've decreed that the closing would need to be within about three weeks, if it were going to happen, and held on a Monday. We don't wait around for the added requirements of all the documentation being in Swahili only and the presence of a Druid notary public to politely decline this fabulous offer - we're officially retiring from the land hunt for the winter, but if they want to try again next year, they know where to reach us. 


- And there's been swearing practice in there, too, but then again there always is. Handy tip, by the bye, when grappling with top-whorl spindles and tussah silk top: your 2-plying will go much, much better if you have managed to spin both your singles in the same direction. Otherwise, your lumpy beginner yarn is going to be even lumpier and more horrible than that first stuff you took off the wheel, although, since the spindles hold less than your bobbins, at least there won't be quite so much of it once you get it skeined off. Still, keep it in mind.  



So, yeah. Busy.


       









 

And nearly over, for crying out loud. Where does the time go? well, this year, it's likely that the mosquitoes have sucked it dry and kicked its brittle carcass to the curb, snickering nastily all the while, because there are a metric skunk-ton* of the little bastards out there this summer. I even wore my Bug Baffler(tm) shirt to keep them off while weeding and mulching over the past few weeks, and ordinarily that only gets trotted out in the spring for black-fly season. Apart from the elastic at the wrists no longer being particularly snug, it did the trick admirably, and my work gloves took up enough of the space that the saggy elastic still wasn't much of an issue. They didn't get through the legs of my gardening jeans, either, but boy howdy, something sure did - ground ivy? poison ivy? weensy bunkers of mosquito-support artillery, firing microscopic caustic darts from the cover of the weeds? I still don't know. Whatever it was, and in spite of full coverage (the jeans, two pairs of relatively thick socks, and some pretty sturdy hiking boots), I had an itchy splashy-blistered rash on both lower legs that lasted, unpleasantly, for weeks. It's finally fading now, thanks to liberal applications of petroleum jelly before heading out for the yardwork and of Benadryl gel for the blisters after the fact; I hope not to have to go through it again before the ground finally freezes. Or ever, really.  

Either way, happy happy, I've gotten to the end of another ten yards of mulch, meaning that I spread twenty yards in total on the gardens this summer, the same amount as last year. There are still places out there that need it, but - thrilled though my mulch guy would likely be, were I to call him and order a third ten-yard delivery - I just can't muster up any enthusiasm for extending that job even farther than it's already gone. I've still got plenty of weeds I can pull, don't get me wrong, but for now there won't be buckets of hardwood bark getting dumped on the open spaces immediately afterward; instead, once the heat and humidity have abated somewhat (October, perhaps?), I have plans** to divide and transplant more daylilies, possibly put in some additional peonies to fill those newly-formed gaps in the beds, and finally get more daffodil bulbs planted like I've been threatening to do for at least the last three years. Hopefully at least two of those things will actually happen.  

There's been plenty of swearing practice going on, too, as I found myself still well-supplied from the fiber binge of last fall, plus, y'know, a few things that I just might have happened to have ordered online between then and now; some of the since-then fiber was actually ordered with an end project in mind, not just because I thought it was nice (although that figured in, too), and has already become the yarn for a silver-gray alpaca/silk version of Nikol Lohr's Date Night lace pullover from the latest issue of Knitty.com. I'm not completely convinced that following the pattern's sizing notes is going to lead to a garment that I can actually wear, but we'll see - it's on the needles now, and maybe about halfway done, so at least if it turns out to be too small after all I should still have time to rip it back and size up before the end of the year. Because I'm intending to wear it for the annual Detroit auto show's opening-night gala in January, don'tcha know, since it's a work gig for the Doc and this year he and his fellow management types will be bringing the arm candy along with them. Yeah, we'll see how that goes.  

Ziggy The Formerly Chubtubulous continues to be more Ziggy The Newly Skintinulous than not, but I'm pleased to report that he seems to have adapted pretty well to his new insulin-with-breakfast-and-dinner routine; he's on two units of insulin per injection now, and is pretty much back to his old self apart from not having put all his excess weight on again. He even went without the insulin for a few days when we rescheduled our trip home (delayed flights! more fun with rental cars! another potential property purchase! said purchase nearly derailed by our bank not approving mortgages for any buildings that don't have furnaces in them! yeah, that's all a whole 'nother story.), and did not appreciably lose any ground from it, so we're cautiously optimistic now about leaving the house every now and again in the future. Since he wasn't going to let K get anywhere near him when she came by to feed them, forget sitting still for his shot, that's probably the most encouraging outcome we could have had.     

Less encouraging is the summer cold that the Doc is still getting over, and which has just started hitting me over the last couple of days. Time for more medicating, which may or may not clear some of the stuff out of my very stuffy head ... it didn't the last time, but who knows. Wish me luck (and clearer sinuses).   




* grateful thanks are due to Ursula Vernon for this exceedingly useful all-ages-rated descriptor; I hope she doesn't mind my having appropriated it.

** big plans! big, big plans!  muahahahahahahahahahaHA!
         ... oh, I'm terribly sorry. Isn't this where the mad-science guild meeting is being held this week?