The right side of 30

Well, it happened.

I'm 30. I will never be in my 20s again.

Though, I have to say, while I was feeling slightly panicked in the days leading up to my birthday, when the day actually hit I not only felt relieved, but actually a little empowered. This is probably due to the fact that I've always been at least 13 years younger than ANYONE in my family, and therefore, even in my late 20's, have never truly been taken seriously (Mom, I'm not talking about you- you have taken me seriously since I could walk and for that I am incredibly grateful), but once I hit 30 I guess I felt a bit more valid. I told that to my friend Betsey when we were at the Paradise for a Sara Bareilles concert the night before and she yelled back "What?!? You feel PHALLIC??!?" So, of course realizing that feeling phallic is probably more awesome than feeling valid, I went with that. But inside I really meant "valid."

So, it turns out I am actually incredibly happy to be 30.

Something besides validity and empowerment that comes with being 30 is apparently a massive and very appreciated increase in knit speed! My mother, god bless her newly fiber-loving soul, bought me the absolute HAPPIEST skein of sock yarn on earth and I started knitting with it on Monday. I finished my first sock FRIDAY MORNING. WHAT?!?



Mom also got me a Spindolyn. It is SO COOL! It's a spindle, but not a DROP spindle. It sits in that base there on the bottom and spins freely, and you draft upwards, then wind it on. It's like learning how to spin all over again, but it's just SO COOL!



Speaking of my mom, she's prolly gonna kill me for this, but these are the absolute most adorable pictures of her I've ever seen. Unfortunately, they were taken by me, so they are incredibly blurry because I have NO talent for photography, but she is just SO EXCITED about the hat and scarf she knit with her own handspun.






I told her she should post that second picture on her blog and she said "Well, but, do you think people will think I actually look like that? Or will it be clear that I'm making a face?" So I just want to make it very clear that she was making a face.


Meanwhile, I've been working for a while on the Socks That Rock kit that I got at Rhinebeck. For some reason, I'm spinning this INCREDIBLY slowly, but the other night I was working on it and realized that what was on the bobbin really kind of looked like a sunrise. I tried to capture it, not sure it worked, but you can kind of see what I'm talking about:



I finished that bobbin last night and instead of starting on the 3rd and final bobbin, I decided to do something totally different, so I whipped out some Spunky Eclectic Superwash Corrie in her "Autumn" colorway, and thought I'd try to spin a thick and thin single, then ply it with thread, something I've always wanted to do. What I discovered, to my absolute SHOCK, was that for the first time ever, I was able to spin a consistent, thick single! So I'm not quite sure how I'll ply this up, but I'm just incredibly AMAZED at this newfound ability, and I'm attributing it entirely to my turning 30.




Something else I've been wanting to try is the Andean plying method. I got this amazing Bosworth spindle for Christmas and immediately started spinning up some Merino/Silk blend that I got from A Touch of Twist at the Gathering. I reached a pretty full cop so I decided to try Rosemaryknits' method of winding the single on a book with a popsicle stick to create a loose enough bracelet to ply from. I was scared, envisioning all sorts of evil tangling happening, but was comforted by her statement that this has worked 100% of the time for her, and I was thrilled with how easy it was!

So first you take the single and you wind it, you wind it. Onto a book with a popsicle stick stuck in it. You have to wind it on in the Andean Plying way, which I could never describe but know how to do (there are a million and one tutorials on the web for this, if you're actually interested.)



Then I took it off the book (a somewhat harrowing process, admittedly)...



...threw it on my wrist, plied it up against itself (not with enough twist, I'm afraid), and voila, my first mini skein:



Easy as peanut butter and jelly. :)


That's all the fibery news that's fit to post, however I will briefly recount the adventures of the vacation Ken and I were so looking forward to.

So the plan was to wake up Monday morning, get to the airport, fly to San Francisco, go on a wine tour, rent a car, explore the California coast on the way down to Los Angeles, stay with my sister for a few days, meet up with some old friends, visit some family, then fly back.

We got as far as waking up Monday morning.

Ken contracted some VIOLENT stomach bug that morning, and instead of going to the airport we canceled our trip and went to the hospital, where the poor guy was forced into a flowery hospital gown and made to lie in a bed at least a foot and a half too short for him, with a pink bucket by his side and an IV in his arm which pumped a ridiculous amount of fluids back into his body. He was given some very powerful drugs and felt a LOT better by the next day, but we were unable to go on our vacation.

We WERE, however, able to reschedule the vacation, exactly the same, but staying at one cheaper hotel and one better hotel, we're getting an extra day in San Francisco and the new dates cut down on our car rental price by about $150. We leave tomorrow morning. So help me god, if anything stands in the way of us and this vacation, I will commit murder. I will. Or at least kick something really hard.

I have not been happy with the precedent set regarding vacations and hospitals, what with our accident last August on the way up to our lake house rental, and now Ken's evil 24 hour belly bug. Though, I will say that I am one to try very hard to look on the bright side and I am grateful for several things. 1. He started feeling sick at 3am, and not 10 am, when we'd been on the plane for an hour. 2. This OBVIOUSLY happened because of some horrible accident that would have occurred had we actually made the trip. I don't know, maybe our car would have gone off a cliff to rest forever by that car Kerouac mentions in Big Sur which is apparently still there, resulting in I don't know how much money lost in paying back the rental company, not to mention insurance rate hikes for bad driving, not to mention a horrible, fiery death.

So now, we're out a few more hundred dollars in cancellation fees, but we're alive and healthy. Hopefully we'll be that way tomorrow on the plane, too. :)