Archives for April 2005

Well, let’s talk fiber, shall we?

I forgot to mention that on Saturday, my sisters, Lala, and I drove out to Meridian Jacobs in Vacaville for their open house. On the Central Coast, where I’m from, that would mean a winery. Up here, it means sheep. Lovely sheepy-sheep, and little lambs. And a llama!

The llama had the softest nose of anything I’ve ever felt. Really. All day I kept thinking about soft things, and trying to remember if they were as soft as that, and no, they weren’t. Cashmere? No. The inside of a baby’s elbow? No. His muzzle was downy and snuzzly and did-I-mention-soft and amazing. And then I ran like hell because I was scared he was going to spit on me.

And there was wool for sale. You remember how many bags Baa-baa Black Sheep had? Yep. Like that. The stash is already getting embarrassing. While I shopped, Lala made friends.

That middle boy was SO cute and so very into showing Lala how everything worked.

So here’s some stuff I’ve spun:

And here’s some stuff I’ve yet to spin:

That fluffly stuff on the left is wonderful ALPACA that Ann in Minnesota sent me — samples from her very own babies. I’ll let you know if she ever starts selling it, ’cause it’s gorgeous, and I’m a very lucky lady.

And look! Product! I made a hat last night, one that actually looks good on me.

Hats NEVER look good on me, and I do mean never. The next hat I make from my own yarn will go right to Dulaan, but I’ve got my greedy little fingers in this one, and I can’t let it go.

I’m just going to jot down the pattern I used for the hat, since it worked well, and I don’t want to forget it:

At 5st/inch, on size 6 US, cast on 100, join, work k2p2 for six inches, then k7k2tog around, then one row in pattern, then k6k2tog around, then one row in pattern, continue like this until just about done, k2 around, yarn through remaining stitches twice, pull, weave in ends. Bam. Hat is done. Now your head is warm, right?

Even before I check email and comments from the weekend (I’ve been very offline), I need to make a very large, very loud public apology to Sylvia and Janine. We were supposed to meet today to spin. Sylvia, by all accounts (and I’ve heard from the East Coast on this one) is a master spinner, and I was thrilled to get a chance to learn at her knee. I was going to pick up sandwiches, then pick up Janine, then cruise out to Marin to spend a lovely day.

Instead, this is what I did. At Lala’s, I woke up early. I had a little sore throat and some major allergies going on. I thought, stretching, oh, what a lovely day to have a lie-in, since I have to go back to work tonight. I’ll sleep late. So I slept a few more hours, and woke up, came home, made coffee, turned on my email, ANSWERED AN EMAIL FROM JANINE, wondered idly what day it was and how soon Tuesday was going to roll around so we could spin together, and then I started saying, "FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK."

No excuse. None. Just forgot and went back to sleep. When I called, Sylvia was grace personified, just glad I wasn’t dead on the highway. I called Janine’s house, and her daughter answered hopefully, "Rachael?" Gah! She was out shopping (thank god she had reclaimed some part of her day), and will call me back and will hopefully still want to be the friend of a sleep-deprived wanna-be spinner.

What I hate the most is that I made them wait, made them give up their day for NOTHING. I know nothing irks me more than someone being late without excuse, but I can only think of one time someone just didn’t show up, and I didn’t take it well.

I’m sorry, ladies. I’ll try to make it up to you. Please forgive me for being a forgetful, sleepy jerk.

(Aside: I did have a dream in all that catch-up sleep that I was housesitting for my friend Monica who lives in Marin, watching her three-year old and her newborn, and that I was arriving at her house after work, realizing that I hadn’t been at the house all weekend, and that baby Luna had been lying in the crib with no food and water for days. I had forgotten to take care of them. I guess my brain knew I had forgotten something in  Marin, just wasn’t sure what. Aargh.)

**later: Janine called and was wonderful. I feel better. Still chagrined, but better.

As of this writing (Sunday), I’m on the cover of the LA Times! Right under the Pope! I’m right under him on the website, too. Permalink to article here.

David Streitfeld was a fabulous interviewer, and I had a great time "sitting" for the piece. Mom, Christy, I’m not going to lose my house — I hope for equity and cost-of-living raises. But David does raise some good questions about the newness of these interest-only loans. I live in hope, however. You know me. And I have a door and a key to it that I call my own.

Woot!

**added later: I will admit that I was not going to blog this, because I did NOT want my family to read it and get scared. They’re already tripped out that I have so much debt. But I got a call this morning from my mother saying to go out and buy the paper, "you sneaky kid," and she had seen it because her neighbor called her and told her about it. She then called the sisters, who called me. I think they were just stoked that there was a picture of me in there. And that’s good.

It comes down to this: I make enough money now to make the mortgage. In a few years, hopefully I’ll have made enough equity to refinance and change terms. If not, it’ll raise by 2% plus principle payment, and I’ll have to get rid of TiVo, cell phone, all extraneous yarn purchases (gulp), but I’d still be able to make it. And honestly, before David interviewed me, I’d had my head so far in the sand that there were grains in my bellybutton. I didn’t want to know what the rate could raise to, I didn’t want to know how high my highest payment could be — and it’s true, I would have signed anything. But now I know. It’s scary, but it’s do-able. Facing fears feels good. (Although turning away from them feels just fine mostly, too….)

It’s a cold, windy day here, and we just went on a walk through Mills College with the dogs, who romped all over the old grounds. It’s lovely. Later, The L Word with friends and knitting, in my little house. Happy.

Two quick things:

LOVE the new Vogue Knitting. I adore three or four things in it, and that’s three or four more than the last one. Also, fab article by our Leslie, and my Kira (of wedding lore) is quoted!

Also: Have you heard the tape yet? The 911 call from the woman having a problem with her cheeseburger? I’ve been sent it from several sources, and while it’s very funny, it’s also kinda bittersweet. People make calls like this all the time. The dispatcher let her talk way too long, I thought. But she probably had her mute-button clicked on in the beginning, and she was probably telling her stunned coworkers what the caller was saying while she figured out what she would say back. (We do that all the time. We say, "uh-huh," click to mute and laugh our heads off (uh-huh) or swear or give our coffee order to the officer making the run for us (okay), while still listening to the caller in our headset (uh-huh). Multitask it, baby.)

And working in a small, mostly white, affluent city brings this call home to me. I’ve taken calls from people on 911 who want me to call them a cab. Or they want me to tell their neighbor to move their car from in front of their house because the car’s ugly. Or they want a cop to tell their husband to stop sleeping around. It’s always funny when people call us to have us make their kids behave, change clothes, go to school.
"Can’t you just send an officer to scare him?"
"No,  we try very hard not to scare children, ma’am."

Or I get this one at least once a week,
"There’s a man walking around outside who doesn’t belong in my neighborhood. You need to move him along."
"How do you know he doesn’t belong, sir?"
"He’s black."
Yep, just like that, in the freaking Bay Area. My jaw drops every single time, and it’s all I can do to not blow my stack (but I get that insta-burn of rage in the top of my head, which I rarely feel any other time).

People just call for dumb things. All the time. I once got a complaint about a man coughing too loudly (turns out he had bronchitis. How dare he?). Once a woman called five or six times in a row, absolutely FURIOUS that we would do nothing about the frogs who were croaking too loudly in her neighbor’s back yard. I could not make this shit up.

Anywho. A brief lesson: 911 is not a room in the sky filled with people who answer your phone call. We don’t all work together. If you dial 911, you’ll talk to a person sitting in a room in your own city (or if unincorporated, your county).

When to dial 911: Call 911 for life or death emergencies, for medical problems, or when property is being threatened or attacked at that very moment. For example, if your house has been burglarized during the day while you were away, that’s not an emergency (look up the seven digit number for your local police department), but if you see someone actively breaking into a home, dial 911.

Check with your state, as things are changing rapidly, but try not to dial 911 on your cell phone (unless you see an emergency on the freeway): You’ll most likely get a highway patrol dispatcher, who will have to figure out where you are and then transfer you to the right city’s dispatch center. In Northern California, you can easily be on hold with highway patrol for more than five minutes, and then they still have to send you to the right agency, where you might be put on hold again. Program into your cellphone the seven digit phone numbers for every single city you’re routinely in, both police and fire dispatch, if they’re not combined (most are separate where I live). Best thing to do in any emergency: use a landline if it’s safe to do so — it’s answered immediately, and you don’t have to know where you are — the address will show up automatically on the dispatcher’s screen, which is good, because you’ll be too freaked out to remember the address of the house you’ve lived in since you were five.

Shoot. I meant to just quickly share that link, and then I got all preachy, huh? Comes down to this: Be safe, know where you are, have a great time, and knit a lot. (And for my sake, if you get a nice dispatcher, write her chief a note — in five years, I’ve only seen this happen once here. For the cops it happens all the time, but people forget the helpful voice who figured out what to do with your problem pretty durn quickly. It would be a really big deal for her/him, this I know.)

And this: Happy weekend, all!