Where I get my chocolate covered cranberries

What I need per Google

Dr Mel did this meme where you type in your name followed by needs in the Google search box (I did "Duffy needs") and note what comes up. Since I share a name with a Welsh pop star I got a number of references to her, but there were some others that were interesting.

1. Duffy needs kids wellies for her little feet at Glastonbury.

2. Duffy needs no mercy at Mojo music awards.

3. Duffy needs numbers. Especially those printed on legal tender.

4. Duffy needs to be aware that a six centimeter wallet is putting more than his posture at risk. That's why I carry a purse.

5. Duffy needs a permanent loving home. Who's peeking?

6. Duffy needs to get out more. Really?

7. Duffy needs to find her place.

8. Duffy needs to be removed from our senate. Et tu, Brute?

9. Duffy needs to ready herself for stardom. I'm ready for my closeup Mr DeMille.

10. Duffy needs to stick to bartending. Ack my secret's out!

I'm trying to remember

Dear Supreme Being, whatever your name may be:

Hey there. I know -- you're thinking "It's that agnostic again. Make up your mind: do I exist to you or not?" Well I went deist some time ago. I just didn't pick one of the various faiths that offer their version of the path to Enlightenment/Salvation/Nirvana/whatever. So we can get that out of the way right now.

Anyhoo, I've been wondering lately just what it is that you decided that at the point a woman starts losing her hormones she loses her brain. I don't mean the mood swings or psychotic episodes that come with that (and by the way thank you for NOT having me go through that, since I went through enough of that prior to the hysterectomy). It's the memory loss. The DUH moments when you know exactly what that word is that you want to say and you're a perfectly intelligent person that has a college degree and a huge vocabulary but for some reason your brain misfires and the word just simply escapes you and you're stuck sitting there with your friend waiting for you to tell you the word as you sit waggling your fingers to try to FOR THE LIFE OF ME WHAT IS THAT WORD?? remember what you want to say. Yeah, that thing.

I'm sure you've heard from a multitude of women who have already gone through this and nod sagely. They look at me and nod. "Oh yes, she's going through THAT part." The big sisters of the grand sisterhood just watching you suffer as you try to remember what the last ingredient of that drink you had last night was -- it begins with a "c" -- or was it a "g"? Just what in hell was in that drink? They tell you later about all the post it notes they use and send you emails telling how you intended to go take the trash out but through a series of distractions ended up watching TV and going to bed.

Thank you for the Internet, Big Guy. It at least tells me I'm not heading for a life of sitting in a wheelchair with a vacuous look on my face and a big bib as my brain slowly rots. It's supposed to be normal for me to be like this. Perhaps not this soon but since I hurried up the process a bit I'm getting the results. Like remembering the routines of George Carlin word for word but heaven help me if I can tell you what I was doing with that handspindle last night is supposed to be normal.

So what did we do to deserve this? I know in the Bible it said that women were to bear children with the pain of leaving Eden. But did it have to include this? You'd think that the one thing you'd want us women to do is to remember. It was the point, right? But we don't. We forget, then recall just before we drop off to sleep that we left the groceries out on the back porch because we got distracted by a phone call from Maggie.

I tell you what. Do me a favor and for the next few generations test drive the possibility of allowing us women to remember things when we hit menopause. If you don't like it you can always undo the work. But I think you'll find that it will make your life simpler. After all, I can't imagine you'd want to hear the same prayers over and over again.

On the Fiber Front

Word reached me through Twitter that Phat Fiber is doing a giveaway. All you have to do is name a very cute baby goat and you get a chance to win a pound of lovely fiber samples. I've put in my entry after giving it thought. I hope I hope I hope I win!

In the meantime, I've been working on various things. The Queen Sized QAL is resting for the moment on row 75 (a little less than halfway rowwise and a third stitchwise). I'm back to work on the secret project and am very happy with the results. Earlier in the week I washed the remainder of the baby alpaca fleece and spent last night picking the locks apart into a big soft cloud. I'm less than halfway through the picking. I can see this being a very nice shawl.

I must make a recommendation to my fiber readers because these bags can be hard to find. I like to keep my projects in zip-closing bags to keep them clean and protected from potential snagging, but the gallon sized bags are sometimes just way too small. I use the Hefty Jumbo zip bags for the big projects. Shawls, sweaters, you name it. They hold a lot. But the tricky part is that they're not found just anywhere. This evening when I did my groceries I found my local Safeway had them in stock, so I snagged a couple of boxes. Surfing on the net yielded no results, so if you find them, BUY 'em! You'll be glad you did.

And you thought I was nuts

The Yarn Harlot was surprised that there were flowers in bloom here when she came in from Toronto. The garden thinks it's spring. These are the daffodils in the front yard. There have been some nippy days this week, but they're still pushing their way upward. I'm waiting for the andromeda to start its popping of its flowers.

The needles have been clicking away now that the data entry days have passed by. I finished the UO colors hat for the Bossman, who was pleased as punch when he got it. I learned later some were commenting on his Rasta hat. What, there's no red in that! Who said that? I'll set 'em straight.

What's really coming along is the Queen sized QAL. I took one of my extra long circular needles along so that I could spread it out to show how far I've come on it. It's going to be huge. I'm only on row 57 and there are 159 rows to the thing. It's not even fully stretched out. When I showed Dan the artsy sidewise pic, he said it looked like a picture from the National Weather Service. "Warnings are posted for Hurricane Duffy, which at this time is a Category 2 but can easily develop into a Category 5 if that high pressure system doesn't come far enough south to make it veer off to the east."

Still churnin' on

Thanks to all who sent emails and comments of encouragement re: my bout with the Black Dog. Like I said then I get them rarely fortunately and so far doing well with my current regime.

Hints of spring are appearing already. My daffodils are several inches up out of the ground and buds are starting to swell on some of the trees. It's too soon, though. Oregon weather has a tendency to be sneaky. You'll get a stream of days that promise warmth, then before you know it a storm comes plowing in from the Pacific bringing in colder air and days of sog. I don't garden like my mother did but I did learn from her about the Oregon weather sneak. Hopefully it won't be such a destructive sneak that it kills some of the buds on the fruit trees.

Yesterday was a lovely day to head to Woodland Woolworks to take pics of spinning wheels. I kind of felt like a spy up in the wheel room. I didn't want to make a mess or arouse questions. I couldn't get a good light background for taking pictures against so I did what I could and sent the pics off to Judy. Hopefully she'll be able to transform them into a logo for PDX Spinnerati.

I didn't leave empty handed. The Bossman has become quite the Oregon Ducks fan, to the point where he has a Duck jacket. He wears the Dale Sisik hat I made him several years ago, saying it's the warmest hat he has ever had, but it's heathered red with blue stripes. I told him he needed a hat to go with the jacket, so he told me that if I made him one he'd pay me for it. While at WW I got some NatureSpun and started to work on it. It'll be black with green and yellow stripes. I thought about making the Tychus hat but the more I thought about it the more I thought it would make him look like a gnome. So he's getting a watchcap instead.

I'm still working on the Queen Sized QAL and don't have a pic of it. I know -- I should be smacked as a bad blogger -- but I gotta tell ya the grey skies do NOTHING for the purple this yarn is. I beg you to be patient and you will be rewarded. If you're impatient, look at this and know this is a pale imitation. I also have the Christmas sock going on, but the hat's taken over because it will have more of an instant gratification reward to it. I'm hoping to have the cap done by the end of the week. The Christmas sock will come to work to be done during breaks and lunch when the cap is completed.

It was good though to get out of the house Saturday and go bobbing along to Carlton. It was a pretty day with the sun going in and out between clouds. The grapevines on the hills were all bare and the landscape had the look of drear that people tend to assign to winter. The scars of past storms had yet to be covered or removed. But it was also a look of promise, that when the weather changes and the warmth returns there will be fruits to reap. I hope that this section of the valley remains untouched by the developer. The houses of the bedroom communities are fast growing and taking over farms and their appearance adds nothing to the landscape. For me, that is the drear that holds no promise of bounty.

The coming week at the office will be nice with my focus mostly being on the old part of my job that I neglected while working on the big project during December and January. It's kind of like meeting up with an old client you've lost contact with and getting reacquainted. "Well hey there! You're looking a little -- um -- larger than when I last left you. Oh, I see. Well, let's see what we can do about that."

Have a great week!

I'm here

I missed my usual weekend posting. Saturday I was intent upon working on my projects to get as much as I could done. Sunday was not so good. The black dog of depression came visiting and hit me hard. By the end of the evening I was a mess, so was glad to finish the day. I rarely get days like that but when I get them it's miserable. I can only attribute it to a combination of frustration with my asthma and whacked hormones. When the week started up again, the blog sat in idle while I worked at resolving the latest setback. Today I'm doing much better moodwise thanks to getting a change of asthma meds and focussing on other things. I've decided to go on leave from the chorus so that I can use the time to get stronger and pursue projects that can give me a little spending money. New filters are on the furnace and things are getting picked up around the house. We're moving on.

I finished the dickeys! They came out very nicely too. I'm hoping the recipient finds them comfortable to wear. Her response will help me decide whether to add more sizes to the pattern write up I did to see if it would be salable. The Christmas stocking is on the needles but is a bit slow going only because I'm not looking forward to doing the intarsia portion.

I was reading an article the other day about photo editing software. There's MS Photo Editor and Photoshop, as well as a bunch of other software out there for people to tweak their photos with. I've used Photoshop in some things and for some editing it works really well. But for the most part my photo editor is MS Paint. Yep. That primitive little software residing in your Accessories file. About 99% of my photos that I post here are edited in MS Paint. It doesn't matter what computer I'm on -- as long as it has a Windows OS it'll have MS Paint.

Case in point is the latest project I've posted in my Ravelry projects. I couldn't wait until summer to start MMario's Queen Anne's Lace shawl. I didn't want to do it in laceweight because I didn't want to work with a super light yarn. I knew I had in my stash a bunch of Elsebeth Lavold's Silky Wool I had picked up a few years ago with the intention of knitting a sweater out of it. It had enough yardage to do the QAL. So I cast on last night.

Now the beginnings of a lace shawl are pretty puny. This thing has over 150 rows. I'm on row 16. So instead of leaving a blank pic on my project page, I figured I needed a placeholder. Buster's an excellent stand in, so I created this:

Ravelry has a habit of loading the pic so that you can't use the entire picture, so I centered the writing so that it's positioned well for making this an avatar. And it was all done in MS Paint.

Tomorrow's a new day. More rows to knit. More fiber to spin. And my fourfoots to love.

Did you look over at the counter? Twenty thousand looksees. And some come back. Thank you for coming over to visit. Mwah! Mwah!