spaazlicious

I feel better.

And I feel a little bit silly because my mood recovery is due to some very clichéd female behaviours.

I shopped, and I hacked off some hair.

Well, if I waited for the three people to stop being horrid I could wait and be sad about it a long time, so I'll just distract myself in the meantime and try to let the other little things slide on by.

Buying smelly stuff always makes me feel better:



The coconut stuff reminds me of when I used to surf every day, and how I'm "working" to get back to that state of bliss and care freeëdness. The lanolin is just a nice sumpin-sumpin for my hands since I wash them something like three hundred times a day--I don't have OCD, I just work with animals and people.

Hell, I'm feeling so much better, I'm only mildly peeved that the Biore pore strips I splurged on at the grocery store were nothing but an empty box. Damned filthy-pored shoplifters.

I have a theory that women put their pain, their frustration, their fears and tears into their hair. Then we cut it off, leaving it on a floor, and walk away.

It's just maybe not a good idea to do it all by yourself.

I've just been frustrated lately by how long my hair is (a whole two inches!) and how the last two times it's been cut, they haven't taken enough off and have given me weird shaping to boot. So yesterday, when I ran out of time to get it cut, I decided to do it by myself.

One of those late night decisions with surprisingly no alcohol involved.

Anyway, I think I did pretty good. I like the front:



But then Nick drew my attention to the back. Oops. BTW, this pic screams two things to me: 1) Don't try this at home again. 2) "Get your neck waxed, 'cuz damn you are hairy!":



And because this was at one time or another a knit blog, this is what I'm working on while I am paralysed with yarn-shortage doubts on the cardi:



A scarf in the "little pyramids" stitch pattern from about.com and of Manos de Uruguay on Brittanys which feel as thick and unwieldy as tree-trunks.

I started this scarf when Libélula was five months old. How do I remember that? Well, I remember knitting it while waiting for her to come out of the anaesthesia of her spay surgery.

Ah, memories of hysterectomies past...I cannot believe I ever bought a pair of needles like these. They are "ginormous"! A word which whenever people use it I see "GYNormous" in my head and think of the gargantuan vagina in "Hable con Ella."

What was the name of that seventies character that nostalgia has bestowed just one line to? The one that said "DYN-O-MITE!!!!"

Yes, well, with the help of some very girly cliché behaviours, I am on my way to feeling absoloodley "GYN-O-MITE!!!!!"

P.S. If no one else has thought of impregnating tampons with euphoric drugs to be absorbed through the vaginal walls during menstruation I hereby claim the idea. Sorry, image association in my brain matched the caricature silhouette of dynamite to that of a tampon, and since I've been thinking about "woman stuff" it kind of just came out. And since a sexist part of me thinks it's a good idea, I'm leaving that bit in.

I have a serious case of the "blahs." Nothing seems to be going right and lots of little things seem to be going wrong, and some big things too.

And if we leave out the big things, something I am trying very hard to do, to keep these things from wasting any more of my time or heartspace, we're left with this embarrassing predicament: running out of yarn.



I'm up to the yoke of my cardigan and have (optimistic guess) perhaps 100yds of the crayonbox bouclé left and I really don't think I can finish the yoke and do the button bands in that amount. What you see in the pic (at top) is all I've got and all I will be able to get (as far as I know).

But it's moot anyway, as a cat bit me on the tip of my left thumb, so it hurts too much to knit. G-d, I'm such a whiner.

So I guess I'm just posting to say: "I aten't dead." I just haven't got anything interesting to blog about. And while that's never really stopped me before, I also am in a bit of a funk when given time to sit and think and it's not something I wish to share, I just want it to pass on as all things must, sooner rather than later (I hope).

Here's a picture of the lighthouse at Crescent City, which reminded me a lot of a Maine coastal town: booming with tourists in summer, pretty closed-up in the colder months. And gorgeously peaceful and clean then.



There used to be a connecting road, but it was eaten by the sea.

We had a really good time driving around seeing California. The diversity of climates and landscapes is astounding and it made me wonder why anyone pays so much to live in San Diego.

Of course, saying that, I will miss this place when we go (at the earliest: July) so I guess I already know. San Diego has an unexpectedly large fiber community, and I've really been enjoying the knit meet-ups, and bummed I missed the last two. And people keep saying something about the weather...

But check out Tulare county in only a teeny part of its vista-full glory:



And the open road beckoning northward...



Thanks for all the comments and suggestions. We were thinking about Cloverdale, as there is a resident post/office/something around Santa Rosa. Cloverdale was gorgeous--although out of our price range (wine country, don'tcha know) it didn't cost anything to drive through, we got a chewy pastry at Schat's and snagged a lot of county literature at the visitor's information bureau.

We didn't even torture ourselves with the beautiful Bay area...If we won the lottery, we'd move to back to Oakland in a heartbeat, we miss Le Cheval and the Redwoods rec area a terrible ton, especially this time of year, but so far the lottery winnings haven't appeared. And it's probably not good financially planning to think they will. Doesn't mean they won't though. ;P

We did torture ourselves with visiting our other favourite ex-hometown though: Sacramento. Such a beautiful town, good food and comfortable, but with bad air quality (especially when they're burning the rice fields) and still out of our price range. We stayed on the Delta King, a riverboat that's been converted to a hotel moored in the river off Old Sac.



Small room, (duh, it's a boat) but so cozy. Here's a pic looking upriver.



And we saw the drawbridge operate, a relatively rare treat. The whole center section is lifted to let boats and ships pass.



We walked to Streets of London (a British-style pub) for dinner with Nick's friend from UC Santa Cruz who occasionally doodles a great comic.


The next day we drove north to Eureka. And on the way, we stopped at a "Drive-Thru Tree" and had a very Californian experience:



In the lavatory at the Drive-Thru Tree Official Gift Shop, I noticed this on the back of my stall door. I'm hoping these two are married and just still very much in love...but that apostrophe makes me think they're siblings:



Then when I was washing my hands I saw this:



Which means someone registered a misspelling as a trademark? Perhaps proper spelling is a slave's behaviour, or, since a google search returned a fair amount of results for "towls" which were subsequently spelled "towels" in the pages, is it an alternative spelling not recognised by the dictionary but part of a hygienic supplies vending culture?

Anyway, those are the things you wonder with so many beautiful redwoods whizzing by for hours on end. And elk. One section of the 101 was just crawling grazing with them.



When we got to Eureka, we ate at the Lost Coast Brewery, read some papers we snagged at the local food co-op, and went to bed.

The next day, we went to the zoo, where we saw something shocking.

An alpaca (identified as "Pano") having relations with a llama!!




I mean, I'd heard that Humboldt is very liberal, but nothing had prepared me for such terrible wantonness! I am writing a letter to Congress to demand a Ban on Alpaca on Llama Humpiness Amendment for our Constitution, and I think you should too!

I would have complained to the Zoo management about the depraved display, but then they might have asked why I was taking so many pictures.

We're all packed and ready to go...I wish. No, we'll be running around like chaos in human forms to leave early enough to miss LA traffic tomorrow, but at least we know at least two things we'll be packing.


This week and half of the next, we'll be driving around northern California looking for a new hometown, since someday we'd like to afford our own home and it just isn't going to happen here in sunny stickershocked San Diego.

So if you're reading this and live around Williams, Yreka, Eureka, Arcata, or Alturas and want to show us your town, or just meet up for a quick cup of coffee, drop me an e-mail at the address in the sidebar. Or if clicking that doesn't work for you for some reason, send it to TORTA_DE_TORTUGAathotmaildotblahblahblah.

I won't be bringing my wheel on the road, but I will bring my cardigan and a couple other knitting projects, and the iPod with The Secret Life of Bees on it. I'm not too far into the book (Chapter Two), but I really like what I've heard so far.

Take a look at this new breed of dog we're working on. A little longer than the usual whippet and an extra set of legs for better traction and get up'n'go.



And here's a pic of the 2,132 yards of spaaziness I will finally be sending off to Mandy, whom I'd link to but her server's offline while they're moving and settling. So hopefully she'll see this and be happy..."Yay! Another damned box to unpack!"



It was really fun spinning and dyeing all this stuff up. If you're reading this Mandy, I really hope you dig the colours and the thicknthin funkiness when it gets there.

...don't mean nothing, drive on...

I'm still in the "shock and awe" phase of this thing called loss, but I'll pretend to be moving on.

Doesn't mean I don't get some smug satisfaction out of this local sign on a business, though:



Commandment 11: Thou shalt be wary of false homophones, for they shall slip through your spell-checker, yea and verily shalt make you look like a self-righteous ignoramus.

I just saw on the news that Bush has announced plans for privatization of Social Security. Oh yay.

At least our friends to the North have our backs. Ahem. And perhaps other parts as well...Marry an American

Look at the monkey laugh. Americans love monkeys. Laugh, naughty little monkey, laugh.

Don't forget to vote, whether for a "former" cokehead alcoholic drunk driving primate [linkie1, linkie2] who has a tendency to lose time (unnacountability in Guard Service, incompetence in foreign policy [see Atlantic Monthly article]) or a human being who served honorably and is now being attacked for apparently not being wounded enough and exercising his first amendment rights.

Thst pesky first amendment sure has proved an annoyance to the GOP:

"When Vice President Dick Cheney visited Eugene, Oregon on Sept. 17, a 54-Year old woman named Perry Patterson was charged with criminal trespass for blurting the word "No" when Cheney said that George W. Bush has made the world safer. "

[From a press release regarding the three teachers threatened with arrest for wearing t-shirts printed with the words "Protect Our Civil Liberties" to a Bush speech.]

November 2nd is also Día de los Muertos, a day to honor the dead. Light a candle, tie a yellow ribbon, just get out and vote.

And now for something completely different (and more on-topic, and less topical)

Things which make me happy, part II

Libélula being a naughty monkey herself, head in a Tostitos bag

My favourite dyeing turn-out yet in yarn for Mandy in BFL from Louet which was much more fun to spin than the neppy BFL from Copper Moose.

The pugnacious jawline, even in snooziness, of my adorable niece.

# posted by Wendy @ 11/01/2004 08:11:00 PM