Emily

I have tracked down a wonderful and rare object... a dress with a full(ish) skirt. An XL handles a 38D bust acceptably, and has perhaps 24" of ease at the hips. Since my hips are 44", it should handle a pretty wide range of women. The fabric seems to be a nice crisp cotton lawn (haven't washed it yet, so I'm untrusting). If it washes well, it will be $23 well spent.

Other colors are black, grey and navy. Finally, gothy summer wear!

I'm done knitting the red scarf. I need to weave in ends, wash it, and block it. Yes thank you I *am* blocking a plain ribbed scarf. After I scrub down the bathtub and track down all my hand knit outerwear.

It is very hard to play Rock Band when it is hot and sticky. However, the hot and sticky has given me a strange case of finishitis, so perhaps my red scarf will someday be done.

And I spun more of the purple stuff. I forgot how nice the turkish is for spinning while reading on the laptop.

Gonna expand on some technical spinning stuff here, since (as always) it gets complicated. When I started spinning, obviously you used a spindle to get laceweight yarn. Since then, life has changed a bit, and a lot of the absolutes from then are no longer absolutes. So take all of what follows with an appropriate grain of salt.

Most of my spindles are 2.5" toy wheel spindles with 9" shafts. They range in weight from 18-22g (give or take), do not have pointed ends, and have relatively long cotter pin hooks. So far, my most sucessful "crammed" cop records at 40g (probably more like 35g, but we've all heard me screaming for a decent scale before and I don't need to start foaming at the mouth again). My most sucessful sewing thread cop was probably in the 10-15g range. Like most toy wheel high whorls, they are amazingly high speed twist insertion devices, which only plays up my natural taste for high twist yarns. (high twist and laceweight knitting yarn are often a bad combination, for a variety of technical reasons... this means I tend not to spin a lot of laceweight)

Because these spindles are so short and do not have a pointed tip, they don't work well for supported spinning. And since (IMO) lace looks best when knitted out of yarn that has as few joins as possible, this means my "default spindles" are not good for laceweight yarn.

There are high whorl designs that work well supported, like the Norge. If I allowed myself to give in to the rabid collecting urge, one of these is high on my list. Tiny apartments and rabid spindle collecting do not mix, so we keep me away from spindle shops.

(supported spinning means the spindle isn't hanging in the air, and can in theory be done with any sort of spindle. in practice, it doesn't work well if the spindle doesn't come to a point on the bottom. trying to spin supported on standard wall to wall carpet doesn't work well. nor does it work well when you kind of have to take over the kitchen floor and no one can move around you. a sensible person would buy a spindle bowl, but I never claimed to be sensible. and really, in what universe is making your own yarn and hissing at the thought of a spinning wheel "sensible"? directions wanted so I can relocate.)

Most people think of low whorls when they think supported... stuff like a tahkli is both a low whorl and a supported spindle. My Turkish spindle works supported (tho a lot of the currently available ones *don't* and this tends to lead to me foaming at the mouth and pondering learning to use a lathe). For a lot of good and sound reasons, low whorls have been pretty unfashionable for the last 10 years or so, and it's getting hard(er) to find pretty ones that spin well. Still, if you want a ferociously versatile spindle, it's hard to beat a good low whorl... which is why I bought my Turkish in the first place. (if pretty, ferociously versatile and cheap are your desired characteristics, just give up now. you can get at best, two out of the three, and mostly you only get one.)

Next component of laceweight is fiber prep. I don't do much of my own prep, because washing fleece is not an apartment suitable activity (tm). It is *not* the path to staying on the good side of your building's handyman and landlord. For the really insanely fine laceweight tho... doing your own prep is just not optional. I've done *some* prep on my own, and it's really shocking the difference that it makes for spinning very fine yarns. And I'm not good at prep. I don't do it often, have no tools really, and have never had even a 15min lesson on the subject. So if it makes a difference I can see, well... it's kind of a giant difference. If you're working with raw alpaca, angora or llama, you often *can* do full prep in an apartment. Just for some projects/people they're not suitable. And even the lowest grease raw fibers can turn problematic. Paranoia on behalf of your plumbing is wise.

If you need to work with commercial prep fiber only... you are limited. This is ok, and workable... just be aware that there are limitations. Most commercial Shetland fiber won't be suitable for the most delicate lace shawls. Many sorts of sheep that have very soft fleece (Cormo, Targhee, Corriedale etc) are not available in commercial prep that works well for lace. Most commercial Merino will work better. Often commercial cashmere will be a better choice as well (tho given me and cashmere, this is hearsay... I don't want to risk the nasty itchy stuff). Commercially prepared silk top tends to be good for lace also. Silk hankies/bells/caps etc, not so much.

Technique also counts. If you're trying to spin a fine, short, slippery angora from a commercial prep, it will not work the same as hand prepared angora or any sort of sheep's wool. Figuring out what's the right technique for your particular fiber can be a real trick. Some of it is personal taste, some of it is knowing enough techniques that you have a choice. And some of it is relentless sampling.

I suspect part of the path to laceweight in an apartment involves some of the tricks I'm learning from the Giant Skeins project. If I can get consistent joins, that means I can get respectable laceweight yardage even tho a spindleful is very little yardage.

Mixed bag.

I need to scrub down the stove, clear the table, swap tablecloths, and do some other spiffing in the kitchen/dining room.

I need to deskein the dining chairs I'm using as a niddy noddy. (also, it'd be REALLY CLEVER to stop procrastinating after over seven bloody years and get together the round tuits for a heat safe pvc niddy noddy) I want to spin more of the purple today. Or maybe the BFL. Or something. It's too hot to knit, but spinning still feels good.

And I need to stop staring at the house ad I found, and go *look* at it. Cause the pictures will not tell me any more. And my gut instincts are telling me a strange combination of "too good to be true" and "fair price", which feels very odd.

Also, there is (as always) the laundry monster. Eew.

Victory!

I defeated the UPS boxes, with the aid of abernat and wrenb's magic trailer.

Also, I have tea now.

I don't know how this happened, but I am Out. There is no more tea after this pot. I don't even have a stash of bagged tea hidden away. Blech.

How am I supposed to function without my tea?

Whee. I think I've got about half a spindleful of BFL done. Same BFL as in the no-longer-endless plying project skein. Since I have a spindleful already knocking around, this means I'll have another endless plying project sooner or later. Probably later, since I'd like to do sampling for tremendously overstuffed spindles. That means filling up a silly number of TP rolls.

The skein is in the middle of being reskeined. When I washed it, some of the plying twist didn't settle properly, because I skeined it on my foot/hand... and as always, the skein migrated partway through and has sections that are different lengths. Y'know how insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results? This sort of skeining is great for providing intermittent insanity reinforcement. My yarn, it is making me crazy! (if I'm around 100 or so yards, the skeining technique works fine and is stable. if I'm over that, I can make it work fine, but I tend to forget... and then I get a messy skein like this one.)

The yarn came out kind of novelty, which displeases me. Too many sections at worsted weight paired with manymanymany sections of fingering. And it's pretty obvious why the worsted bits are happening... my hands sweat, the fiber clumps and tries to felt, and then the singles gets FAT. Not nice at all.

There hasn't been much progress on the purple stuff. I think I needed a break and more relaxing spinning, which always seems to happen on the Turkish. Maybe someday I won't need that? I'm trying to talk myself out of spinning up *all* my stashed purple... there's a mohair/wool heathered blend tucked in my stash that I'd love to get rid of. And it coordinates with this stuff! (Bad idea on the whole, since that would give me about 6 oz of a tone on tone purple tweed, then about 3 oz of mohair/wool purple, and at that point I'm getting into sweater territory and need to find some more fiber...)

I took the neverending white stuff in the plying stage to the picnic. It is no longer neverending, and is now YARN. I discovered that CD spindles will cause all geeks in the room to stare raptly at them. And a taken apart CD spindle is a lovely thing for amusing a tired toddler. Baby Lily was enthralled by my Ubuntu CDs because they had *circles* on them. She also thought yarn was pretty cool *g*.

Am still tired, but can't sleep. Bother.

After aiming a Sean at an Abby, I started feeling brainful enough to spin. So now I've got more of the purple, and I'm back to cursing at the BFL 2 ply. My CD spindle *really* needs a 3rd CD for this big a plying job, and I can't find any bum CDs to add to it. Wah! I'm pondering ripping out the hook and spending some quality time with the shaft so it can be half hitched and used supported. That might make it even more useful.

By comparison, the Turkish spindle is being sweet and pleasant. The only bad part is the Corriedale is *just* rough enough that long spinning sessions are a bad plan. I'm a bit over halfway through, so I should be busy for a while. I should be clever and spin when Bill is doing solo Rock Band... might help with getting some of the awkward vocal lines into my head.

Got to the pool, and did 14 short laps. My perfectionist self has all kinds of stuff to say on the subject (terrible breaststroke/elementary back kick form, poor scissors kick form, bad crawl breathing form, terrible endurance) and I'm mostly plugging my ears and telling it to shut up so I can work on form. I'm also cranky because I'm not strong enough to do a "real" lap drill.

I'm pondering hauling Bill out for basketball later so I can do more swimming. Water GOOD!

We-ell... I have passed from utterly terrible on a fake plastic guitar to just sucking. I finally five starred a song on easy. I also have the endurance of a gnat, since even 5 songs is stretching my endurance to the limit.

Vocals remain my nice happy place. I'm starting to get some decent strength back.

(also, dear WotC: if you are interested in game balance, it is not a good idea to invite the nice young ladies with the ravens into your game's pantheon. Just sayin'. Nor the other nice young lady with the owl. Or her brother.)

Apartment Therapy's kitchen section is doing a series of posts on what they call "free cooking". The first I've found is on basic pantry ingredients.

Mine is... pretty different.

1. Maldon sea salt. I'll eventually try this, but it's not readily available here (or in most places). I use kosher salt or a fine grained sea salt, depending on the texture I want. Since we don't eat much ocean fish and I don't like plain iodized salt, I do need a sea salt of some sort to ward against iodine deficiency.

2. Peppercorns and a good peppermill. Trader Joe's "disposable" pepper mill is actually refillable. We have since bought a good peppermill, but the TJ's versions are still around, doing good work on Sichuan pepper and various other easily ground spices. Some other manufacturers (NOT McCormick's unfortunately) probably have similar "disposable" pepper mills.

3. Dried mushrooms. I hate mushrooms. Nasty texture, often a nasty smell. Ew. Naturally, these are *not* part of my pantry stock.

4. Olive oil. You don't actually stock a kitchen with a top quality extra virgin olive oil only. If you're doing Just One Oil, you want a moderate quality oil that has a nice flavor in dressings and will not be destroyed by being used in a saute. If you're going a little fancier, a neutral oil (I like peanut best, but ymmv) and a flavored oil is better. The flavored oil could be olive, but walnut, hazelnut and many others are good too. Flavored oil goes in dressings, neutral oil does sautes. Flavored oils go rancid quickly so avoid buying too much at once... 500mL is a *lot* of salad dressing.

5. Wine to cook with. Very useful, and most box whites are good enough to cover the white end. A box merlot can work nicely to cover the red end. I'm sort of on the fence on this tho, since I tend to cook with wine more for winter dishes.

6. chicken or vegetable stock. Definitely pantry gold, but I go through the good stuff *quickly*. Usually gets supplemented with boullion aka chicken flavored salt.

7. Here is where I cheat... to sub for dried mushrooms, the remaining pantry stock is:

- a hard grating cheese like Parmesan or Romano
- rice (in an ideal world, both a short grain and a long grain... in this iteration of the ideal world, it's a good sushi rice for risotto and jasmine rice for the long grain)
- onions
- sage, thyme, rosemary, dried chiles, cumin and cocoa powder
- vinegar (I like malt, I like red wine, I like balsamic... I just plain like vinegar, and I use it year round. I can live without wine for flavoring. I can't live without vinegar.)

I keep a *lot* more in the way of pantry stock, but that's about as narrowed down as I can make it.

I made pancakes for breakfast. Then, I devoured two pancakes with strawberries and some of Babcock's Dutch Kase cheese. I have figured out a clever method that seems to be working to keep the strawberries going without maceration... Wash the berries thoroughly in a strainer. Set it over a bowl (because they *drip* for hours). Soak a towel with water, and drape that over the berries. Store in fridge. So far, the berries stored that way are not drying out the way most veg/fruit stored in our fridge does... and they haven't gone moldy yet.

So I have a happy tummy, and the promise of more strawberries later. Yay!

@music store
practice pad
Stick Control
spare drumsticks
drum throne

@library
return books

also, run large creature ragged *eg*

@pool
swim lots

Joy! The strawberries are *ripe* and perfect!

There were *kittens*. Cranky kittens! And the staff were hoping they'd grow up into good ratters and thus good farm cats.

Michael W. Master's testimony...

There are some *giant* problems with this testimony. If you buy a futures contract for say, cocoa beans, you're not buying just one thing. You may have bought a contract saying "on July 4, 2008, I will take delivery of 800 tonnes of cocoa beans from Plantation X at $30 per ton". Chocolate makers buying their beans on the open market would want this sort of contract. Or, you may have a contract saying "on July 4, 2008, I shall deliver 10,000 tonnes of cocoa beans to Hershey Foods at $40 per ton". (note that Hershey Foods doesn't source all its cocoa beans in this manner... quite a lot are produced on plantations the company owns outright... and most other chocolate makers have similar arrangements. thus you'll note the quantity of cocoa beans Mr Masters cites as being traded on the futures markets is quite low) Now, it's easy enough for *both* of those cocoa bean contracts to be owned by the same person. So the beans from Plantation X are bought by a middleman on the first contract, and are bundled together with the beans from many other contracts and sold to Hershey Foods, at a rather nice profit for the middleman.

Now, like most unprocessed agricultural products, cocoa beans have one tiny problem. They do not keep indefinitely. So when a company builds a stockpile of cocoa beans, they need to have a way to store them safely. They can't just keep the cocoa beans forever and do nothing with them... or they have rotten cocoa beans and no money. The shareholders frown on this, and not just because chocolate abuse is bad.

So when Masters claims that "At 1.3 billion bushels, the current Wheat futures stockpile of Index Speculators is enough to supply every American with all the bread, pasta and baked goods they can eat for the next two years." there's a problem. He's presuming that every bushel contracted is a separate and distinct bushel (ie, none of the bushels pass through the futures market more than once). He's also presuming that the wheat doesn't get used. In fact, he later claims that "Index Speculators" never sell. If they were in fact not selling, all the wheat they bought would eventually end up sitting in a silo somewhere... rotting. And smelling really bad. Also, these theoretical speculators would now be out a whole lot of money, and would be in deep trouble with their shareholders. (also, they wouldn't have any pizza, because with 1.3b bushels of rotting wheat, there isn't gonna be much flour for your pizza)

His claim just doesn't make sense. If speculators really are doing what he claims, there would be evidence of a spurt in silo construction, or many grain silo operators would have very full silos. (or a whole lot of very smelly silos) When you're trying to trace a commodity bubble, there is physical stuff that rots, and smells and has to be stored. (at least when it comes to food)

Instead, there is no evidence that large chunks of the US food supply are rotting in silos owned by wealthy speculators. There *is* substantial evidence (in the form of flooded roads, bike paths, cities and fields all over the Midwest) that US crop yield will be very low this year. There will be fewer bushels of US grown wheat available for ConAgra and other large food processors to buy, and so there will be more dollars chasing those bushels of wheat. (and corn. and soybeans. and broccoli. and so on and so forth.) Unsurprisingly, the price is already going up.

If you're going to lie to Congress, it's a good idea to make it believable. Claiming with a straight face that 1.3 billion of bushels of wheat are sitting in silos somewhere rotting is *not* a hard claim for even Congress to check. For one thing, I'm not sure there's that much silo capacity in the US... and we can *check* how many bushels have been shipped outside our borders.

(it is *possible* that there really is a bubble... but not one that involves vast quantities of rotting food sitting in silos.)

Have defeated some of the to-do list. Have not defeated *all*. Bleah.

@library
return excess books
pick up holds

@TJs
veggies!

@pool
get pass

have lunch with bill/drew

make pizza dough
clean microwave
clean kitchen floor
vacuum study/LR
run last 2-3 loads of laundry