Last weekend, Hobostripper stayed with me. I’m not sure what else needs to be said about that. How often does one get a Hobostripper and her well-trained dog hanging out for a few days? I don’t know about you all, but this doesn’t happen to me all that often. We played in the woods, went to visit Rusty Cock Ridge, talked a lot. She wants to start some sort of wilderness education program herself, so we talked a lot about the things I’ve learned in the last few years. She made a fabulous beef curry stew that we ate for every meal for about three days straight. After that was gone, we resorted to eating amazing salads mostly from the garden in the backyard (just add cheese and hearts of palm…mmmmm).

The day she left, Preston got back from driving across the country. According to Mapquest, it should take 45 hours to drive from South Carolina to here, with no stops. Preston did it in 70 hours, including a 12-hour stop in Boise to hook up with some old friends, in addition to all the gas stops, construction slowdowns, and the occasional rest area nap. We have a conception in our culture that if you love someone, you should love them without reference to their actions. I’ve heard this called unconditional love, though it’s rarely actually without condition. Anyway, I love Preston for lots of reasons, and I would still probably love him if he didn’t have mad driving skillz, but it’s definitely one of the reasons I Like him a lot. And it’s not just about the driving, but about the capacity to take care of oneself (and beyond that, to act graciously and gracefully) in unfamiliar and uncomfortable situations. He’s pretty cool and I’m glad he lives with me.

And then, two days after that, several pounds of alpaca fiber showed up in my mailbox!

Altogether, that’s 4 pounds of alpaca fiber. You can’t really appreciate the color of the grey/silver in the background, but it’s quite lush. My mom totally hooked me up. There was an ad in her local newspaper from a local alpaca ranch. They were looking for folks to spin up their fleeces. They will send me all the fiber I want, I’ll spin it all up and send them back half. I can do whatever I want with my half, including sell it. Wow! I was thinking that if I could spin a pound of it in 6 hours, then I could make somewhere around minimum wage for selling my half of the spun yarn. I tried it out last night. Haha! I spun less than an ounce in 1 hour. (For those of you who don’t live with an engineer who knows these conversions off the top of his head, there are 16 ounces in a pound.) So maybe I’ll have to go back to looking at it as just a great way to get fiber for personal use. But the alpaca is really nice to work with, so soft and really seems to want to spin thin. My first spindle is coming out to be a two-ply light sportweight, about 15-16 wraps per inch. This is definitely thinner than I usually spin without some effort. Here’s a close-up of the four colors, although you still don’t get a good sense of the grey fibers.

So far I’ve just been spinning the white fibers. They are really clean and un-matted. I haven’t had to wash it or card it, just pick out the occasional bit of hay as I spin, so I’m basically spinning right from the animal. He also sent me a half pound of suri alpaca to play with. I haven’t ever worked with it before (see my previous post about alpacapalooza for pictures of the two different kinds of alpaca). Their hair is longer and straighter and seems to matte more, so I will have to wash that stuff.  I’m also going to try washing some of the regular huacaya fibers, even though they don’t seem to need it, just to see what difference it makes.

And just to top it all off, Preston’s economic stimulus check showed up this week, so we are feeling even a little richer than usual. He’ll be putting his into surfboard shaping supplies (…”maybe a router,” he’s been musing…). I’m waiting impatiently for mine, with which I plan to buy a digital SLR, probably the Canon Digital Rebel XTi. And speaking of cameras, I’m motivated again to put some more effort into making something happen with selling photos. I feel like my current job has given me a lot of tools for online marketing and sales that I didn’t have the first time around. So I’ll be working on updating the main Whoa! Photos website and posting a new series of pictures that I’ve taken of a beautiful pin-up girl type. Lots of beautiful nature shots for all you pagans out there

We got a new kitten! We decided that Magoo was starting to get sort of complacent, and she needs someone to jump on her head from time to time. She doesn’t seem to appreciate it when Preston swoops her upside down and gives her noogies (he doesn’t believe me, but he SO needs a dog!), so a kitten it will be. We picked him out at the shelter on Saturday, he got fixed on Monday, and Preston brought him home last night. He is staying locked in the bathroom for the first 24 hours or so, in the hopes that Magoo will start to get acquainted through the door. So far, she has managed to pretend that she has no idea there’s any other cat around, let alone inside the house. Even last night when the kitten started meowing plaintively in the silence of 2am, loudly enough to wake us up to go check on him, Magoo stayed curled up on her chair and looked at us curiously, like, ” Meowing? No, I wasn’t meowing. You all can just go back to bed.” And then she closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep. You see why we think she needs someone to jump on her head every now and then.

The kitten (who does not yet have a name, but I’m pretty sure he’s french or italian) is all black with a dozen little white hairs on his chest. He has yellow eyes, and he is the most friendliest, purr-ingest little thing you have ever met. We were worried that he might wear his purrer right out last night. He is 4 months old, and spent most of that time at the shelter, so we are impressed that he is adjusting so quickly. Tonight, we will close the door on his kitty carrier (which he really likes and has adopted as his very own cave) and put him in the living room for Magoo to be forced to deal with. Hopefully, that will go smoothly and he will be able to wander freely in the rest of the house tonight.

Just a quick note to let y’all know that my mom and sister and I have started a new blog. We each take a photo once a week and post it simultaneously over at The Daileys, Weekly. We hope you enjoy it.

DeAnna: We totally rock!
Preston: Well…kind of slowly. But ya, we rock.
DeAnna: I guess we sort of ballad.
Preston: Just call me Leta Ford.

I took last month off from the Self-Portrait Challenge, but I’m back in this month with this challenge:

photograph your good bits, bad bits, wobbly bits and sexy bits. photograph it all and show us your body. - I don’t expect to see any traditional portraits, no pretty faces or full body shots, rather bits and extracts of your self.

While I certainly have plenty of jiggly bits, I wanted to start this month off with something that feels really good.
I like my hands a lot. I think they look remarkably like my mom’s hands, and I have always thought that she had the most beautiful hands. There are a lot of things about spinning that I really like, and many of them have to do with the way that it connects me to a community of women, big scale and small scale.

People have known how to make twine for pretty much as long as people have been around, but drop spindles, very similiar to the one I’m using in the picture, were probably invented around 10,000 years ago. Since spindles came before the invention of the wheel, it’s theorized that the one led to the other. They spun the Egyptian mummies wraps, and wool for amazing tapestries and works of art, and the thread used to weave the fabric that the pioneers covered their wagons with when they moved West. The Three Fates spin the threads of our mortal lives. Today, in some parts of the country, women still spin the stories of their lives on spindles very much like the one in the picture, a direct line from 10,000 years ago to today. That’s a powerful legacy to be a part of.

On the smaller scale, spinning and fiber arts connects me with a community of women that I respect very much. This spindle was a birthday gift from Preston’s mom. The wool I’m using was also a gift from her, for no reason, I think. The printed fabric on my right knee is the stash bag that Preston’s aunt Tiana made me for xmas this year. Inside that bag is a smaller bag that I use for carrying the spindle and the specific hank of fibers I’m spinning at the time. That smaller bag was given to me as a gift from a dear friend, now not a part of my life, years ago. Everywhere I pull out my spinning, people want to to talk to me about it. Many of them remember their grandmother doing it, especially the older men. “It’s like magic,” they all say. And all of this magic, this channeling of 10,000 years of women’s history into one more-or-less thin, sometimes-lumpy, sometimes-frazzled, always beautiful strand of fibers, and also this more-or-less fabulous (though also sometimes-lumpy, or frazzled, or jiggly) life, I do with my mother’s hands.

Preston: Oh cool, I just got an e-mail from that girl who moved to some foreign country.

Me: (singing) “I’m livin’ in a foreign country, but I’m bound to cross the line. Beauty walks a razor’s edge, some day I’ll make it mine.”

Preston: That’s nice, babe. Is that White Snake or Bob Dylan?

Me: I overheard this shop owner talking to a friend about how a particular woman had been called to come into the shop so that the shop owner could pray for the woman’s son, who had leukemia.
Preston: Wow, what delusions of grandeur, to think that you have the direct line to God’s ear. That your prayers will be the ones that cure a boy’s cancer.
Me: She probably didn’t see herself as all that special; anyone can have the same power. All you have to do is “accept-Jesus-Christ-as-your-Lord-and-Personal-Savior”.
Preston: I see. So it’s sort of like a Costco membership then.

…here’s how Preston’s day at the beach looked.

But back to being self-centered, I’m really becoming unhappy with my camera. It’s been really great for the sort of photographer I’ve been for the last couple years, but I feel like I really need to upgrade in order to be able to do what I want to do these days. For instance, the telephoto lens that is available for it is just not good quality. These surf pictures of Preston just don’t have the clarity that they should have at this level of zoom. The macro shots also don’t come out as clear as they should. And what I really need these days is control over the focus. This camera that I have gives me manual control over everything except focus if I want it. But I’m at a stage where I really want to be able to do the focus also. Especially where I’m taking pictures at the ocean, it’s hard to convince the auto focus to focus exactly where I want it. Unfortunately, the next step up is a really expensive one. I have the high-end of the point-n-shoot cameras. To step up, I have to move into the realm of digital SLRs, and we’re talking around $1000 for the minimum kit that I would want. I’m working on convincing Preston that we should go in halves on one, but you know I can only work on him on so many issues at once, and I’ve already started my campaign to convince him that we need a dog when we move into our new house.

Me: Hey! Look at what I made!

Preston: Wow, it’s a….um…It’s perfect!!