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

Last night I went to my local knitter’s get-together. I’ve wanted to go for a long time, but then I almost chickened out last night. I’m so glad I went! The knitters were all super cool. (One thing I realized I like about knitting and crafting groups is that there is usually a range of ages present…the oldest woman was maybe in her 50’s, the youngest 20-something.) There were about a dozen people there, and I ended up spending most of the time talking to someone whose name I forgot (along with everyone else’s). She’s from Texas, but moved here to go to Evergreen. She was in her late 20’s or so. She lives off the grid in a trailer somewhere near the college. She’s planning to spend a couple months in Brazil this summer, where she’s going to study capoeira. Anyway, she was very groovy.

And, as I was driving to the bookstore (where the knitter’s meet) I was thinking about how I need to find out if the Deaf Coffee has started up again. And I was thinking that if I’m going to a knitting group, and climbing once a week, and working a couple of evenings, I’m running out of time to add in more groups. Well, how fortunate is it that there turns out to be a deaf woman at the knitting group! I heard her talking and recognized the deaf accent and asked her if she could sign (I signed the question to her). I was the only other person there who could sign, and it was so fun! She could read lips a bit, so she could catch bits of what was going on in the conversation, but with me there she could ask all about what other people were making and stuff. Of course, I don’t know the signs for things like “lace cardigan” so I ended up finger-spelling a lot, but she was very tolerant. She goes every week, and she said there are a couple other deaf women who often come. Whoo-hoo!

And just in case anyone is searching for Deaf Coffee meet-ups in Olympia, they’ve started up again at Cafe Artisan (which used to be Cafe Veritas, it’s the same place where it used to be, just a new name) every first Friday of the month.

Have I mentioned that my life is pretty much about the painting lately? That’s what I spent the weekend doing also. A friend from work came to help for a couple hours on Saturday; Amy and Shannon came for most of the afternoon on Sunday.

A couple years ago, my friend Amy accused me of always taking pictures of trees as
if they were phallic symbols. So this one’s for you, Amy.

If you can’t come up with a picture of yourself on Xmas, the most photographed day of the year, well, I don’t know what, because I did.

While we mostly did no presents this year, Preston’s mom and aunt and uncle had sent gifts, and it was really nice to wake up this morning and open them. In the picture, I’m wearing two gifts from Kathy, the red vest and the handwoven(! by Kathy !) scarf. Then we went over to some friends of Preston’s family (friends since 1941!) and had Xmas dinner. Good conversation, good people, good food. Slightly long-winded (it’s like that hanging out with smart people), but it was okay because I had my new bag (from Aunt T) filled with my new knitting hobby, so I knitted away. I’m okay with the fact that that makes me a nerd. Like some sort of home ec nerd, not even a cool nerd like a math whiz or something.

If you want to see more pics with a “red” theme, check out the Self-Portrait Challenge.

Spent the weekend in Olympia looking at houses to rent (nothing too exciting to report), and crashed at Eric’s house on Saturday. I love hanging out with people who haven’t forgotten how to PLAY! And I don’t mean like grown-ups play by smoking cigars and talking about golf, or by getting drunk at the club, or even playing chess and discussing Nietzsche, but get down in the dirt and pretend like you’re a cat or a bug or an Indian or a rocketship, and wholeheartedly, unself-consciously play like kids know how to do.

Saturday night, we were feeling restless, so we went for a walk around 11:30 that evening. It was a rare clear night and the stars were out, so we ended up laying on our backs in the front yard, in the shadows of some big fir trees. The front yard has a big street light right next to it, and is on a main street, so we felt sort of secretive laying there in the shadows. We saw a couple shooting stars. It was nice. As we were laying there, I could hear something moving every once in a while in the bushes next to us. I figured there was some sort of nocturnal animal in there waiting for us to move along so it could continue its foraging. After we’d been there for 10 minutes or so, it got tired of waiting and started walking through the dried leaves. Apparently Eric hadn’t heard it before that, because he was immediately crouched and balanced on the balls of his feet facing the fence with his staff in his hands. The motion was beautiful, and I almost felt bad telling him that it was just a raccoon.

We wandered the same direction that the raccoon had headed, towards the abandoned garden, tried to pick grapes in the dark (even harder than you might think), and wandered back towards Eric’s building. Standing in the shadow of one of the apartment garages, we looked out across the well-lit street that we would have to cross to get back to the apartment. We were talking about how we used to play ninja when we were kids, and how we both always wanted to be ninjas. Of course, he’s come a lot closer than I ever did, him being a couple months away from his black belt in kung fu, while the closest I’ve come is a couple months of kickboxing, but y’all let’s not get too nitpicky about the details, shall we?

So standing there in the shadows, I asked him if he wanted his ninja challenge for the night. At first, he turned it down, saying that he couldn’t do anything ninja. But I assured him it was a ninja challenge he would be able to do. Not yet willing to commit, he asked what it was.

“Get from here to the sidewalk in front of your apartment, without stepping into the light.” And he was off. And seriously, I’m not sure I’ve had so much fun slinking around in the dark since the days of my criminal teens, and this time if the cops happened by to ask us what we were up to, I wouldn’t have had to lie. Although we were within sight of his apartment, it took us 40 minutes of crawling around in the bushes to get as close as we could. We were still across the well-lit street from his sidewalk when we found ourselves without another plan to stick to the shadows. His apartment building is pretty well lit, it turns out.

As we sat at the base of a tree pondering our options, a cat walked by and seemed surprised to find us there. “Sshh, don’t say a word,” Eric told the cat. “Or we’ll have to kill you.” “Don’t worry,” I told him. “It’s just a brother ninja; all cats are ninjas.” The cat hung out with us for a while, and listened in while figured out how to get across the road.

“If you were a ninja, and you needed to get from here to there in the least conspicuous way possible, what would you do?” I asked.

“If I was a ninja, and I was out with my female ninja partner, and I needed to cross a well-lit street inconspicuously, I would probably just walk across it while holding hands with my partner and acting like something other than a ninja,” he said.

I thought this was fairly brilliant, and also an indicator that our ninja game had probably lasted long enough. So we headed across the street, and stood in the front yard again for a while. The cat followed us, also not acting like a ninja. We chatted with the cat for a while (which involved alternating periods of looking away from the cat with periods of looking at the cat while pretending not to). The cat seemed fascinated, in that way that cats do when they are so fascinated that they pretend not to be and sit on the sidewalks cleaning themselves instead. Finally, we turned to head up the stairs to the apartment. The cat stopped cleaning himself long enough to make eye contact as we rounded the corner, and we returned the “goodnight” as we left.

Tags: ninja, cats, play