“Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.”

– Frederick Douglass, 1852

You can read the whole text of this speech here:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h2927t.html

I found the quote here.

At first, Preston is in a library and he’s researching lots of information. Other people think it’s weird that he wants to have all this information. Some people start asking him questions and he knows all the answers. They ask him a question that he doens’t know the answer to and he gets very excited and starts looking through all these books on this table trying to find the answer. The people, in unison, say “Smarty-pants nerd!” which sounds hilarious to say right now, but in the dream preston’s feelings were hurt. Then the camera pans away from the library and we see the whole primitive village that it’s located in, and the voice-over explains that from those roots, this person went on to study to become one of the first surgeons (and I realize that it isn’t Preston we’re seeing, but one of Preston’s distant ancestors).

The scene in the library was just before the onset of the Dark Ages, and Preston (I’m just going to keep calling him that) had access to all this information until all the libraries were done away with during the Dark Ages. So then the camera pans through some scenes of Preston dissecting cadavers in the cemetery a la da Vinci. In particular, there is a close-up of a hand and forearm with the skin peeled back and Preston studying how the tendons and muscles respond to moving the fingers.

Skip ahead 30 years or so, and Preston is a skilled surgeon working under the rule of some sort of medieval lord. He is only allowed to use his skills to work on the upper classes and his time is strictly controlled by some sort of overseer. His profession is seen very sceptically and the ruling lord keep very strict control over anyone with doctor skills. It’s unclear what has happened immediately preceeding the scene, but Preston has found someone in trouble who isn’t rich but who is somehow very important to the future of the world.
It’s as if he has found Jesus Christ wounded in a ditch and he understands the importance of fixing up this person.

He goes to the overseer and says, “Give me two of the best surgeons. It is very important. I can’t explain now.” The overseer is an unfeeling automaton who says, “I see no reason why you are not reporting for duty. You are not ill.” And the overseer tries to insist that it is time for him to report to work. Preston tries to insist that there is a very important reason why he doesn’t have to work now, there is something very worthwhile to be accomplished down the road, but the overseer doesn’t listen. They argue heatedly until the overseer grabs him by the hand and motions to the guard standing behind him. The guard steps forward and uses his sword to sever Preston’s hand at the wrist. The cut is complete and clean. Preston wails, not in pain, but in disbelief that they would damage the hand of a skilled surgeon. The overseer and guard don’t understand the importance of what they have done. “Let’s see you try to do surgery now,” they taunt him.

Cut to Preston in some sort of dungeon in shackles. His wrist is bandaged clumsily with strips of cloth, soaked through with blood. He is thinking to himself that it is his left hand that was cut off, and he could still do surgery better than most people, even with only his right hand, if only he could figure out how to escape. He still is focused on the person outside of the scene who needed his help. Preston is trying to figure out how to release another surgeon who is also being held in the dungeon.

End of Dream.

But after I got inside and uploaded the pictures I noticed something interesting. There are a LOT more flowers in our lawn this year than last year. Partly that’s because it’s three weeks later this year than it was last year when I did the photo tour. But also I like to think it has a lot to do with our having lived here for a year. We’ve been selectively mowing the lawn, going around the big stands of clover and other interesting flowers. There are some volunteer bleeding hearts and columbines coming up along the edges of the house (sorry, flowers are already past, so I didn’t catch them electronically). One of the most common flowers in our yard is some sort of weed, but I like it a lot and I’ve even weeded around it in the flowerbed to make it look like I planted it there on purpose. And of course, we’ve planted a few flowers as well. I’ve also included flowers on plants in the vegetable garden, because I figure they count as far is increasing food sources for bees and other insects. And also because a flower is a flower dude.

There were too many to put them in a blog post, so I uploaded them to a flickr set, which you can enjoy by going here. If there is no note below the picture saying what the flower is, that’s because I don’t know, and you should leave me a comment (either on the picture or here on the blog) if you know what it is.

And if you want to appreciate the fabulousness of detail that my new camera allows, you can click on the button that says “All Sizes” and that will give you a bigger version. Of course, the camera takes a much bigger picture, but it would take a long time to upload the full versions, so I just left them as large as seemed reasonable. I have definitely noticed what most reviewers have already said about the Canon XTi, which is that the stock lens isn’t great. I really feel like there should be a better level of detail in the larger versions than there is. But I’m confident that a fancy new lens will fix that

That someone gave me and/or Preston a couple big plastic sacks full of frozen fish. We didn’t know what to do with it. I thought we should can it, and I fired up the computer this morning thinking for a minute that I should look up the canning times for fish, thinking that we really had sacks of thawing fish stinking up the kitchen. It was big flakes of beautiful pink salmon and huge rainbow trout with the skin still on.

(Click on this one for a bigger view)

So last Friday, I’m biking down the bike trail across town. (Just one of the many cool things about Olympia is that there is a bike trail that roughly parallels the freeway all the way across town. And the bonus cool of it is that as a young-ish female-looking person, I can ride my bike alone on this trail after dark and the most dangerous thing that has ever happened to me on it is that I almost ran into a deer once.) There’s a good mile of the trail on the way home that is precisely the right slope for my tires, so that I don’t have to either pedal or brake and I coast along at just the right speed, observing the lush fern-y undergrowth and amazing big-leaf maple trees that surround the trail. So on Friday, I’m coasting along, and catch a little movement out of the corner of my eye, just as I’m coasting past. There is a small (maybe 1 or 2 feet wide) swath of grass that’s mown short on either side of the trail. And hunkered down in that swath, right next to the trail, is a bird. I roll past, but it sticks in my mind that that’s an odd place for a bird to be hanging out. I stop my bike and pedal back slowly to where the bird is still sitting next to the trail.

I stop a respectful distance away, and on the far side of the path, and try not to intimidate the bird. I look everywhere but directly at the bird, just watching it out of my periphery. It’s a robin, and eventually it turns a bit and I see the streaking on its breast that indicates a juvenile. But it has all of its flight feathers and seems full-grown, as if it should be able to fly. We hang out there, on opposite sides of the path, for several minutes. There is a Swainson’s thrush calling in the distance. Someone just asked me recently if I had ever seen a Swainson’s or only heard them. It’s unusual to see them, as they’re very shy. So I stood and listened to this one as it seemed to call from trees closer and closer to the trail. Eventually, I saw it fly from one side of the trail to the other, landing in a big-leaf maple right next to the trail and calling out its upward spiraling song. All the while, the juvenile robin stayed hunkered down in the short grass next to the trail. A couple of bicycles went by quickly and didn’t seem to notice it, although it flinched each time. Anytime someone approached, I would look the other direction to avoid calling attention to it. Eventually, a 20-something guy with his dog came walking up the trail. As he got close enough that I didn’t have to yell, but far enough away that the dog hadn’t noticed the bird yet, I let the guy know that there was this baby bird on the side of the road that he probably didn’t want his dog getting into. He shortened up the leash and walked on the other side of the trail and thanked me for the heads up. The bird stayed motionless except for the heavy breathing that I could see even from across the trail. After a few more minutes, I could see that there were a couple of adult robins keeping a close eye on the situation and I thought that maybe I was standing too close, even at the distance I was at, for them to come in to help the fledgling. And in the time that I had been watching, I had seen the bird take a few steps, enough so that I could tell it wouldn’t be easily caught even if it did need my help, and I decided that all I would be able to accomplish was to further traumatize it. Best to leave it to its parents, i figured, who are infinitely more competent to take care of a baby robin than I am.

I turned my bike back down the path, and coasted 20 or 30 feet down the path, when an adult male robin streaked past my right shoulder, close enough to startle me, and landed in the path directly in front of my bike. He landed only for a second, but close enough that if he had stayed, I wouldn’t have been able to avoid running over him. I was on my brakes when he flew up to a branch just below eye level on the side of the path. I was already on the brakes, so I stopped and looked at him. He looked directly at me. First with one eye, then with the other, and then directly at me with both eyes (which I’ve never really seen a bird do before), as if to say “Are you REALLY paying attention?” I was far enough away from the juvenile that I didn’t get any sense this was threatening behavior, or intended to chase me away. It was a communication, but not an aggressive one. I stayed still and tried to broadcast the energy of an attentive herbivore. The robin, as if it wasn’t sure that I was really for real paying attention, hopped from the branch, and flew straight towards me. Even though I knew for certain that he knew I was standing there, I couldn’t help but flinch when it seemed like he didn’t see me and was going to run into me. At the last second, he veered off, landing at the base of a small deer trail that I hadn’t noticed, heading up the side hill into the maple forest. He folded and refolded his wings twice, the way they do, glanced at me, and started searching the ground for things to eat, seemingly unconcerned. I didn’t know what that meant. I’m out of practice at my animal communications.

I took two steps towards him, and he flew directly up the trail, staying at about my eye level from the ground, over the rise until I couldn’t see him. Well, what can you do, but follow. Even with a still partially torn MCL and wearing flip flops and clambering up a steep sandy sidehill trail. So I followed. Once I headed up the trail, he flew off, maybe back to the fledgling by the trail. I followed the trail up to the top of the rise to the first crossroads. The trail seemed more well used than just some deer would account for, and this being Olympia, I figured someone’s camp was probably back here somewhere. I stood at the crossroads for a while, watching. And, well, nothing in particular happened. There was no pot of gold. No genie appeared to grant me any wishes. I watched a towhee talking to some babies in the nest. I could hear someone’s little yappy dog in the distance. The persistent sound of the freeway through the trees. A Swainson’s thrush sang in the distance, maybe the same one as before. I walked a little way down one branch of the trail, to a spot that had been someone’s camp previously. Two mismatched socks on the ground, a half-buried pair of underwear, a crumpled cigarette pack. No wolves slipped by in the cool green distance. Not even a raccoon, that I saw. I started to worry about my bike, left unattended by the well-traveled path below, out of sight. I shrugged, and headed back to the trail, and coasted the rest of the way down the hill. But maybe I missed it, whatever it was. I’ll stop again today. And maybe tomorrow too.

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

First off, my sister brought some yarn with her all the way back from her trip to Italy, and it as the most scrumptiously soft yarn you have ever felt. It’s by Filatura di Crosi, and I’m afraid it’s discontinued. It definitely needed to be a scarf, so that is what it is.

I really like how it turned out to go around my neck really narrow, almost like a choker and then have a bunch of drapey folds in the front, but it turned out like that totally by accident. When I started it, I started it way too wide, and realized I was going to have a very small baby blanket rather than a scarf. A very wise woman at my knitting group suggested that, instead of having to frog the whole thing and start over, that I just decrease a bunch. I had only two skeins of the yarn, and it’s discontinued, so I decreased a bunch and went until my first skein was gone. I decreed that to be the halfway point, and used the second skein to  increase back up. It created a pretty funny-looking flared end on both sides of the scarf which look really funny laid flat, but I like the way it looks on.

From there, I decided to tackle a felted slipper pattern that Jane had given me almost a year ago. I had enough handspun wool from Lupine, Kathy’s sheep, to make 10 slippers (or so I thought). I finished one of them (highlighted over on The Dailey’s Weekly back in March), but was almost out of wool and had to wait for an emergency shipment of more wool from Kathy before I could spin enough to make the second slipper. (Turns out it takes a LOT of yarn to make a felted slipper. When I made the first one, I just couldn’t believe that the instructions were right. The finished slipper, before felting, was big enough for three or four feet.) But anyway, I finished them both up finally, and Preston seems to like them. They look like Bigfoot Feet to me, and if I ever make another pair, I will try to felt claws on the front

It felt (haha!) really good to have completed a whole project using all yarn I had handspun myself, so I decided to tackle a project where I had to actually spin the yarn to a particular dimension with a particular project in mind. All the spinning I’d done before was just learning how it all worked and spinning the fiber to whatever dimension it seemed easiest to do. This time I decided that I wanted to make a beautiful and elegant scarf for a friend of ours. I knew she wanted something in red, and I wanted to be able to do a lacy pattern, so I looked around online and in some books and found a classic lace pattern called “Crest of the Wave” in a book I got from the library. (Sorry I don’t remember the book.) I spun up two slightly different shades of red, about an ounce each, and spun them as thin as I could. Then I plied the two shades together, and at a two-ply, it came out to be heavier than lace-weight yarn, but definitely lighter than worsted-weight. The red shading was very subtle but added some dimension to the color. I used #9 needles to knit up a scarf for my friend. She loved it. I think I could have blocked it more severely to open up the lace a little more.

Somewhere along the path, I think while I was working on the slippers, I discovered that I can knit and read at the same time! According to Elizabeth Zimmerman (who I am totally in love with and want to marry…her motto was “Knit on with confidence and hope, through all crises.”), anyone who can read aloud can also knit and read at the same time, since both involve reading a few words, or sometimes a few sentences, ahead of the words that you’re actually understanding, sort of like the function on CD players that keeps them from skipping. I’m not yet good enough to do it on patterns, but I can work just a basic knit in the round while reading. And just in the knick of time, I came across the pattern for a Kitty Pi. (Based on a design by Elizabeth Zimmerman, called the Pi Shawl, and based on the concept that as a circle’s radius doubles, it’s circumference does as well.)

So I spun up a bunch more of Lupine’s wool (same stuff as Preston’s slippers) and made up a kitty pi for Pavarotti. Magoo already has a little Magic Carpet, the one and only weaving project I ever finished (and by “finished” I mean I got it 2/3 done, and then took it off the loom and tied off the extra warp ends and called them “fringe”). So I thought Pavi should have his very own place to nap. The kitty pi is designed without a top crust, but I thought Pavi’s should wrap over the top a little, since he is a burrowing animal. This was another felted project, so I made it huge and felted it down. I learned an important lesson about felting different wools. The Lupine wool was washed either by Kathy herself or by the small mill she sent it to be turned into roving. The creamy white merino that I used for half the top of the pi was processed by some large commercial facility. I think the Lupine wool still has a fair amount of oil in it, and it takes a lot longer to felt than the commercially processed white stuff. So I ended up with a lot less creamy white topping than I intended, since it felted a lot faster than the main body. Even though Magoo already has the Magic Carpet, she immediately knew that this was a fancy upgrade and moved right in.

Pavi also likes it, but he thinks it is better suited as a place to hide toys and then pounce on them when they are least expecting it.

Preston also loves the kitty pi and he wants to know how long it would take me to knit up a 6 foot one. I think this might take more wool than Lupine has to offer, so Preston made due with pretending that it was a kangaroo pouch and taking Little Roo (aka Pavi) on the hippity-hop tour of the whole house.

Pavi thinks bad attention is better than no attention, so he didn’t mind the tour.

And finally, we come to the most recent project, which is a Knitting Mystery. Preston couldn’t have a 6 Foot Preston Pi, but I agreed to make him a hat instead. He picked out colors from the yarns I had, and I used the same pattern I had used last year to make my favorite hat. I guess I must have finished it sometime during my blogging hiatus, because there’s no picture up, so you will have to trust me that this is a very fine hat. So I embarked upon the second one, using the blue and yellow yarn Preston had picked out. I followed the directions just as I did the first time. When the hat was done, and I cast off the circular needles, it seemed unnecessarily big. Rather then re-knit it, Preston suggested the we just felt it down a little, since it was all wool. Brilliant! So we dropped it in the washer, where the most peculiar thing happened. It turned into a kitty pi!

I often say that I don’t know what happened when I just don’t want to admit to a stupid mistake, but in this case, I really don’t know what happened. I made exactly the same pattern 6 months ago, and it turned into a hat. Very peculiar. I re-checked the pattern, but there weren’t any decreases that I missed or anything. I’ll take it with me to my knitting group on Monday and see if any of them can explain it to me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV7gwExQH40

See what I mean! It’s like a furry little ewok and you just want to pinch their furry little cheeks! I didn’t try it but, I suspect that alpacas do not like to have their cheeks pinched. In fact, I suspect that they take themselves fairly seriously.

You might notice that the fiber on the alpacas in those two pictures seems different. It turns out that there are two very different kinds of alpacas–the Suri and the Huacaya. The Suri have much longer, straighter hair. I understand that their hair is more like silk, very fine and smooth and not much crimp to it. But I haven’t had a chance to feel any of the unfinished Suri fibers. I think they look kinda dorky, you know, in an adorable sort of way.

The Huacaya are the more ewok-looking ones like the first picture. Their hair is curly, but not kinky like a sheep’s, and they don’t have lanolin so it’s super soft right off the animal. It feels like holding warm clouds. Really.

Of course, they all look funny right after they get sheared.

And it turns out that they think each other looks funny after they get sheared too. I had heard this about sheep, but witnessed it with the alpacas also. It turns out that they have a pretty incredible visual memory. According to the shearer, they will remember a person’s face for about 2 years, so alpacas that she sheared last year will know who she is right away. They also recognize other alpacas visually, and they keep track of each other by sight. So when one of them gets taken out of the pen and sheared and then brought back, no one recognizes her at first. There is lots of squeeling and sniffing while the rest of the herd compiles enough secondary clues to be able to confirm her identity without all the hair.

And also, one mustn’t forget the third kind of alpaca–the punk-rock alpaca.

p.s. Someone in my knitting group gifted me a *whole alpaca fleece*! Pictures to come after I get it processed and ready for spinning. It’s a beautiful grey color from an alpaca named Rex.