Meerkat in Memphis!

What a Handsome Fellow!

Our friends from Chicago were visiting last week and it was a great chance to see some of the things Memphis has to offer that of course we've been too busy to just stop and visit ourselves!
We went (of course) to the Zoo and it was a BEAUTIFUL facility! Almost all the exhibits contained running water and overall it was clean and friendly and didn't cost an arm and a leg and some quivit for entry. This guy stole my heart along with the other meerkats there..between they and the lemurs I am smitten!

Yesterday I mowed for the first time this season..saw something wriggling, wriggling like mad and swooped on it. Baby bullfrog I nearly chopped into soup! Yikes! I gathered him up and of course in his distress he 'peeped' at me repeatedly while I carried him through the house insisting to Jack that we put him into an aquarium. Jack convinced me to release him next to the pool however. We were also in the pool for the first time yesterday - water temp was 77 and It Is Not Even May. Woo Hoo, take THAT Chicago!

Our Spinning guild met last Sunday and did the 2nd half of our program on silk that Mary was teaching. We soaked cocoons, pulled out baby silkworms and their 'ahem' leavings, stretched them over frames we'd built, reeled silk onto cardboard and dyed a layer of silk hankies all in one afternoon! Some of my new friends were there and it was fun to sit and chat with them also! I don't feel as if I learned much other than how to remove the worms from the cocoon honestly..there were alot of participants and it was difficult at times to hear but I had great fun and brought home a little sample pack of all the offerings for my spinning notebook!

I've been deadline knitting for 2 weeks and most of it is swap/secret pal stuff that I can't post pics of until after our Knitting guild on Tuesday. I have 2 projects going for that plus the sweater from French Girl Knits that I don't have any decent pictures of yet.

May 9th is All About Women and I'm excited about being there in a spinning/knitting capacity in the 'life' section of the convention, where women learn about ways to enjoy life and just have some down time. On May 1st I'm scheduled to help my friend Mary with Pioneer Days at a school in Collierville with a spinning demo as well. Fun!

Ok, enough for now. May 1st is NOT that far off and I also have 35 of Jack's Department Heads and Managers coming to our house that day for a quarterly meeting which means 'get busy'!

One more pic - Buddah helps us keep it in perspective (to his belly, that is!)

Trying to keep up!

I've decided to 'try' and keep up a little with blogging here - there's SO much I'm doing, spinning, knitting and I've gotten really lazy about uploading pictures and messing with Blogger. Sorry about that.

This is Jack and our new dog renamed Sarah..they are howling at the moon together while Kasey looks on in amazement. (and me, I never heard a person howl quite like that)

This is some yarn I spun recently. An Etsy seller named Michelle is on Etsy as Knitkass. She is like the nicest person EVER in my book. She sent me a part for my brand new wheel I'd broken without ever talking to or meeting me! Wouldn't even take postage! I got her first handspindle from her store along with this fiber. It's hard to tell but it has a little 'glitz' in it also, and my technique is getting SO much better! Yeah!

This is my first spindle and fiber from the Butterflygirl Designs spindle/fiber club and I'm loving it so far. It's merino/bamboo/firestar blend and I'm going to do it in a SAL challenge on Ravelry. Again, the pic doesn't do justice, the fiber has this gorgeous blue/green sparkle to the bamboo that looks amazing with the black merino. The spindle is Italian Resin and I adore it.
Here is a picture of Sarah - she is ALL Jack Russell and has adopted me as her forever person. The former owner had her de-barked (ugh, I don't want to know details) but it's made her sound really funny, like she's sucking helium right before she barks, heheheh.

Other than this stuff, you can always find me hanging out around Ravelry, most often on the spinning boards. I'll try to get better about keeping up here!

Insomnia Sucks

Here I am at 3:52 am blogging. ?? Hello?? Normal people SLEEP at this hour. They aren't drinking coffee and wishing they could crank up the spinning wheel without making my partner crazy with it's adorable little 'click' as it goes round n round.

I think the fiasco with the alarm people has caused this. Yesterday he arrived 2 hours late to do our install. Ok, fine..you needed a ladder and you're clearly a kid. I began to have reservations but continued to do the laid back, nice client routine and listened to him explain that this was his first ever install by-his-lonesome. Uh-oh.

6 hours later he calls for reinforcement. God only knows what he was doing all that time since I was a little consumed with the new dog we just adopted. Her former 'mom' had come by to do a house visit and brought her because our first interview went well and she felt good about us overall. The reinforcement arrived, saved the day and left again. Now I've had this green kid in my house for 9 hours. NINE HOURS of a stranger, even worse a sweet, nice stranger that you can't be rude to. UGH. To top it off, they discovered in hour 8 that some contacts already in place on our windows were wireless. A call to our sales guy resulted in "Tell them the wiring for that is an extra $45 a window. ($45 x 5 above and beyond our quote means Jack is not a happy camper) We in the kitchen heard "I'm not mad YET but either you're going to fix this or you're going to experience MAD" They fixed it but jeez..it really pisses me off that the guy thought we'd just bend over and say thank you to over $200 in cost not quoted. By the way, the keychain remotes were never programmed. He was prepared to stay another hour (!!!, keerist Noooo) to try and do it (hadn't done that before alone either!). We politely kicked him out until today.

At any rate, the dog is a sweetheart. Her name is Hero and she is 4. She's a Jack Russell that immediately began to run like the wind with our other dog, Kasey.


I've been spinning ALOT. This is my homemade tensioned lazy kate, taken from a web pictorial (thanks, unknown web spinner!) and my plied, kool aid dyed yarn that I'm in love with.



Here's my new, gorgeous, huge diamond that my wonderful Jack bought for me. Speaks for itself.


Here is the DIY weaving loom I built because I don't have enough fibery stuff to keep me busy. I need to find more