Life, Knitting and the Pursuit of Roller Coasters

I have been working on stuff, and I have some cool stuff to share, I just haven’t gotten it all assembled in blog post format. Shame on me.

First I have to thank Terri for my Knitter’s Tea Swap package! She totally rocks! She sent knitting fiction (yay books!!), an ass-ton of tea, seriously like 4 boxes or something crazy like that, plus 4 skeins of yarn in great colorways (how did you know I wanted to try the panda wool?) and some good dark chocolate.

Prior to that package arriving, my birthday order at the Loopy Ewe gained me membership into the Loopy Groopies. I got the great extra gifts that go along with having spent way too much money with Sherri. A really cool project bag, some chocolate kisses, some wool wash, and a black and grey skein of Opal. Plus the 3 colorways of Claudia’s and one of Lorna’s that I bought for the actual purchase.

However, I’ve been slowly inventorying the stash and getting it into Ravelry and I’ve come to the realization that I really really need to put the spending on hiatus for a bit. It’s taken me forever just to get the sock yarn stash photographed and entered into the system. I’ve got 63 pairs worth stashed on the site, and I still have 5 or 6 more to photograph and add. I haven’t even tackled the scary room where everything else lives. Or the mess of needles and crochet hooks. Reality is freeing in some ways and scary as hell in others. It’ll be nice to finally know what all I have once I’m done though, and organizing it all electronically might be the push I need to get some sort of organization system in place physically as well.

My biggest birthday gift to myself was a new PC, and I’m starting to slowly get that set up as well and making the move up to Vista.

I also haven’t been completely neglecting the coaster hobby either. I spent Friday at Cedar Point for Coastermania. There is one great crazy story from that that defies definition. I have a friend Kris who is one of those fearless people who will do absolutely anything and not be embarrassed. I also have some other friends who have no issues throwing money at something if it’ll be entertaining. The combo, deadly. We were standing in a shop and someone made a joke about those little girly shorts with the words on the butt. Kris made the offhand remark of “if you buy them, I’ll wear them. ” No less than 10 minutes later, he is in a light blue pair of short shorts with the words “Get in line!” across the butt with his polo shirt tucked in.

Same conversation at a different locale of the park landed him a set of light-up blinky bunny ears. This was his ensemble for the remainder of the evening. I haven’t laughed so hard in ages. People watching was hilarious the rest of the night as we caught everything from people trying to do the sideways-glance-don’t-let-him-see-us-looking-at-him, to outright pointing and staring, asking for photographs, and everything in between. He totally played it up, high fiving random people on the midway, waving to the passing train, and chatting up people in line. My ribs still hurt from laughing so hard.

My college roommate, Tandaina (I’m so not used to using that name, C!) tagged me for one of those random things meme’s, this one has 8 random things and since I haven’t done one yet (and its my first specific to me tag, woohoo), I’ll do this one.

1. Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
2. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
3.At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
4. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

So, here are my 8…

1)I’m a late blooming nerd. I had all the underlying traits to go that way in elementary school on through high school (heavy reader, good at math, etc), but didn’t truly embrace my geeky side til I started college. So, while I have a lot of the skills, I feel like I’m still culturally playing catch up to my peers.

2)I have been online in some capacity since 1994. I first got onto a freenet (leo.nmc.edu) in Traverse City as a way to keep in touch with a long distance boyfriend in high school. A weekend with friends visiting for New Years got me into that freenet’s irc, and my online presence took off from there. I met a lot of great people in that irc (many of them in real life also as it was primarily people in the state of Michigan) and chatted with them daily for years before the group kind of dissipated. I still keep in regular contact with a few of them. Despite some changing of hands and new naming conventions, that freenet still exists and I still have my original account there.

3)I am a mess. I’m a piler not a filer; I love to cook and hate doing dishes; I’m a packrat; And I tend to wear stuff straight out of the dryer after a “fluff” round in the morning. I’m mostly able to keep on top of the messy bad habits within reason, but when I slide, my place is often eligible for an appearance on that “How Clean is Your House?” show on the BBC. Which, coincidentally, is what I watch for motivation to actually get up and work on keeping it in a manageable state approaching clean.

4)However, once I latch onto something and really get into a hobby or a collection or anything really, I can organize it to within an inch of it’s life. My coaster count spreadsheet is a true sight to behold. So is the CD collection. I obsess over my netflix queue. I’ve set up a spreadsheet to track reruns of TV series I want to catch up on with the Tivo. So, things like Ravelry are right up my alley.

5)I have a hard time falling asleep, but I have no problem going back to sleep. I can have the alarm go off in the morning, get up, use the restroom, start a load of laundry, feed the cats and still crawl back into bed for another hour or more of sleep before getting up for real.

6)I’ve never lived outside of Michigan. I was born and raised in Muskegon, went to college in Kalamazoo, and have been living and working in Jackson since then. I’ve always dreamed of living elsewhere and I’ve made a few attempts to find work elsewhere, I just haven’t quite made it out of the state yet.

7)I’ve never been stung by a bee. I’d like to keep it that way.

8)With all the traveling I’ve done to support my coaster hobby and just travel in general, I’ve visited 37 states. And yet somehow, I’ve never once set foot in NYC.

That’s 8…

Not sure who to tag really, so I’ll leave that part open ended. I’ll wander back with a more full post later in the week as I should be overwhelmed with good blog fodder tomorrow.

I’m feeling scatterbrained and fragmented again, so I’m just going to let this post wander with that. I had a bit of a pre-birthday shopping spree on Monday and placed orders with both Woolgirl and The Loopy Ewe. I am one order away from being a loopy groupie, and I’ve placed that order this weekend so I can get into the “club” as a little added birthday treat.

Oh yeah, my birthday. It’s one of those obnoxious milestones this year. I’ll be 30 on Monday. I thought I’d be ok with it, the passing of time, the leaving my 20’s behind. And for the most part I had been ok with it until about a week ago. For some reason the realization just decided to wander up and smack me upside the head and say irrational things like “Hey, you need to get some of this childishness out of your system before you hit that actual adult age next week”. I know I can still be kiddish after I turn 30, and I certainly don’t intend to become a morning person or anything responsibly harsh like that. But, I’ve just sort of been unsettled by urges of irresponsibility and haven’t come up with any good ways to channel that energy.

So, that energy is kinda scattered too. And scattered energy has lead to an interesting week. I gave my hairstylist free-reign on Wednesday, so I’m a little more red than usual (although I still think she could have gone with even more red and I’d have loved it too, but if we keep with the heavy lowlights, it’ll eventually become my base color anyway) and we brought the length up several inches to my chin. I’ve also made a few purchases in addition to the yarn above, I took a little trip up to Threadbear this afternoon for some additional yarny retail therapy and I ordered a new PC last week to replace my dead desktop. Lots of goodies to spoil myself with.

More random stuff… I had someone contact me out of the blue last weekend who knit my dishcloth pattern! That made me all giddy and warm and fuzzy and stuff. Go check it out, I like how hers came out and how she played with the crocheted edging. I understand why people share patterns now. It’s so much fun to see them grow and cultivate in other people’s hands.

In the last few nights, partly because of the scattered brain, I had a fit of startitis. In the orders I placed early in the week, I bought more sock needles, and cast on for another pair of Jaywalkers in Apple Laine Carnival. So soft and knitting up beautifully. These will become my traveling socks once the purple stockinette socks are finished.

In addition, that defiant rainbowy Puyallup-inspired yarn I’ve been fighting with for at least a year finally told me what it wanted to be. Apparently it’s happy now in Monkey form as it’s doing the thin stripey good thing again like it did the first time when I tried the too-tight jaywalkers with it. I suppose it’s a testament to letting the yarn talk to you and tell you what it wants to be. Either that or Monkey is simply such a great pattern that it tames even the most disobedient handpainted yarns into submission. It doesn’t really matter how it works, I’m just happy that I finally made a sock match for the yarn. Plus I don’t know what it is with the Monkey pattern, they just knit up insanely fast. I cast this one on Thursday night and it’ll be done Sunday and ready for a mate no problem.

I finished a couple first socks this week too. The first pomotomous is done, and the first purple stockinette sock is done. Plus I was able to put in some extra knitting while my parents were here Tuesday night and during the hair appointment on Wednesday, so the second purple stockinette sock is on to the heel flap already. The Mad Weave sock and chevron scarf are still chugging along slowly too.

Aside from that, it’s really been pretty quiet around here. I’m still catching up on Bloglines from vacation, Ravelry is still sucking up my online time like crazy as now that all my projects are in there, I’m slowly working on documenting the stash and trying to figure out the best way to physically organize it as well as keep it all straight in the Ravelry world.