skittermagoo!

Tuesdays are for spinning!

Actually, the weekend also was for spinning, a little bit. A while ago at the Woolie Ewe I bought some wool roving that had sparkly stuff in it . . . a total impulse buy, it languished in the fiber closet for quite a while after I bought it.

Well. I pulled it out on Sunday when I wanted just a little something to spin (the hank of sparkly stuff was only about an ounce or so).

Unspun, it looked innocent and sweet enough . . .

ooooh, sparkles

But once I started spinning it, it was horrible, hateful stuff. Very prickly and rough, and the wool part of it was kind of, ohhh, noily, I guess -- there were bits of wool that were kind of like little knots; when spun up, the knots made bumps in the yarn. Plus, the color blend (called "pumpkin patch"), when spun up, looked pukey. At first I thought maybe the lumps and bumps were because it had been so long since I sat down at the wheel, but it wasn't so -- this stuff was just icky.

fugly yarn!

No more sparkles for me, no way!

So instead, tonight I sat down with some wool blend roving (from Amy at Spunky Eclectic), and got my spinning groove back. It definitely wasn't me with that sparkly crap!

mmmm, red!

And just for Anne, who requested more Abby pictures:

This is where I found silly kitty this morning . . . this is the cat who almost never gets on any countertops!

I'm also consistent when it comes to not blogging!

Yes, yes, I know. It's been a while. No, I'm not dead, nor have I been abducted by aliens. No, I haven't decided once and for all to quit blogging. I've just been busy, you know? Work has been kicking my arse, and once I get home and make dinner and catch up on blogs and stuff, it seems like I have no time to blog myself.

I've been trying to get to bed earlier lately (all the reports say that 8 hours of sleep is sooo beneficial, so I've been shooting for, um, 7 hours or so), and it has totally backfired. Instead of waking up all nice and rested and ready to face the world, the earlier bedtime has meant that when the alarm goes off at 6am I'm right smack in the middle of a nice REM cycle, and am in the midst of a dream. Which means that I'm even groggier than normal when I wake up. Hmmmm. Somehow I think this is more detrimental than helpful to my general well-being.

ANYway. I've been doing some stuff since August (though I'm not exactly sure how that month totally slipped away from me and now we're in mid-September). That is, stuff other than sweating, swearing, adn complaining about the weather. Alas, here in North Texas it only hit 90 or so today, and there was a definite nip of Fall in the air. Those of you in northern climes where 90 is a heat wave, just please play along and keep quiet.

With a recent 1" of rain, my "garden" is flourishing (we've been in one of the worst droughts on record this year, and believe me, one measley inch of rain is HUGE around here). My tomato plant actually made a tomato! Much celebration was had by me.

Looks huge and plump and ready to be made into a nice tomato sandwich, doesn't it?

Well, here's another picture for you, for scale.

No tomato sandwich here, unless it was made on tiny miniature bread. Instead, I ate it all in one bite, and it was divine! Nothing like home grown tomatoes. Be nice if they were a bit, well, size-ier.

In other garden news, we discovered this growing up one of our gutters and through the fence in the backyard . . .

pretty!

There's also been some knitting 'round these parts! I very surreptiously made this cool entrelac dishcloth . . . I was going to make it a Blog Surprise, but someone at knitnight was talking about the pattern and of course I had to pipe up and say, "Oh, I made one of those!".

I got the pattern over at Criminy Jickets. Go, get it and make one. Now!

And finally, last Sunday Hub and I went to Grapefest, a local "wine festival" close to where we live.

Hub is a bit camera-shy!

It was a little too warm out (mid 90s) to be herded like cattle into a big tent to try out and vote for our favorite Texas wines, but it was still pretty fun. We had a couple good ones, a couple of really bad ones, and a whole bunch of mediocre wines. I think that the wine growers in Texas generally haven't been doing it long enough to have well-established grapes, but there is a lot of potential!