Osborn Fiber Studio

Random random random!

1. It is now that 20% of the year in which all I want to do is go to the pool, and all I want to eat are raw fruits and vegetables. (Not to be self-righteous; the rest of the year all I want to eat are fried carbohydrates.) I am sitting here eating peas right out of their pods between paragraphs, and it makes me happy as a clam. Or a rabbit.

2. I have lots of funny words for blogging. Blagarag, bloguearogue, bliggity-blaggage, blogitations. It probably started here. I totally refer to the world wide web as “the interblag.”

3. I got my nails done yesterday. It’s the first time I’ve been to a mani/pedi since the day before my wedding, and it was lovely. For a person like me in a perpetual need of a chill pill, these should be a more regular ritual. Sitting there in the “Serenity room,” reading a travel magazine while my toes dried, I got to thinking about the religion that is health and wellness. Am I more suspicious of it because it’s so obviously consumeristic in every facet? Or more because my 20th-century Protestantism is that of the incurably miserable? I will have to ponder this in more depth. Also, it is sort of difficult to take a picture of both your fingers and toes.

4. There has been a bunch of planting going on around here. The community garden is filled with seedlings, and I’ve transplanted most of the remaining survivors into pots. I cannot tell you how excited I am about brussels sprouts.

5. I will have to take pictures for you of the impossibly huge sumac bush wedged between our new garage and our neighbor’s fence. I think it is poison, but the interblag is very inconsistent – half of it says it is the poisonous spawn of of hell and that I should pour concentrated-satan-blood-acid-weedkiller on it; the other half says that actual poison sumac is really rare and this is probably innocuous and makes a nice tea. Poison or not, our neighbor says she has an allergy to it, so Seretha & I are going to attack it tomorrow. Fully covered from head to toe, with shears, spade, and pitchfork; safely disposing in garbage bags. Pray for us.

6. Inexplicably, a congregation of flies has appeared in my dining room. They all seem to have forgotten how they got in, and are throwing themselves desperately at the window, trying to get out. I want them out as much as they do, but I am not opening the window for them, (a) because I don’t want to screw around with the screen, and (b) because keeping the AC on and the windows closed is the only thing keeping me from being poached in my own sweat.

7. You would think that sort of heat would prevent me from knitting a gigantic object out of thick wool. This would be logical, but you would be wrong. Michelle’s mamaponcho, started about a week ago, is over halfway finished. I solve the obvious heating problem by working on it in air conditioned spaces and by letting the bulk of it sit beside, rather than atop, my lap.

8. This blitz of speed is in large part because I have lost the ability to read without knitting. Or, at least, to read for “work” (read: school). I could probably read for pleasure without any handiwork. But the 900 pages of theology and history that I had to get through last week meant that I was completely dependent on large swaths of stockinette stitch to maintain my will to live. Things will progress rather more slowly now that I no longer have an enormous hands-free deadline bearing down on me.