Ha ha - hey! What's the what? I guess with all the "moving to Vancouver" and "Fringe touring" stuff, I've gotten a little behind on the ol' blog. I have a lengthy list of topics to write about and hope to get to them all one day. But today, I'm thinking I'll list them in point form and then get to the knitty gritty. HA ha - see what I did there? Jealous?
Things That Roro Would Like to Address in Detail on Her Blog Sometime in the Near Future
- How our friends, whether they sent nice notes or came to our farewell open house to help us get rid of stuff or found homes for our beloved fish or gave us the gift of iTunes or offered their contact info to Katr if she needed any help in my absence, are incredibly kind and unbelievably generous people;
- How, at different points in the moving/packing process Padu, Deuce, Drew, Chgi, Ers, Jusm and Mipa all (mostly willingly) became our bitches and we couldn't have done it without them;
- How our real estate agent ROCKS and if you are buying or selling in the GTA, you should hire this man;
- How I was reminded, over the course of our 5-day journey from Toronto to Saskatoon, that my ass responds to a nice bathroom like it's Pavlov's dogs; and
- How Katr's in Vancouver and I'm in Saskatoon and we are sappy, sappy lesbians who miss each other terribly. Sniff.
Things That Roro Will Be Addressing in This Post
- Knitting
As we were leaving Toronto, Chgi and I stopped at a yarn store, as you do. I promised Chgi that I would be quick - I just needed to load up on yarn for a cross-country mystery knitting project. Also, Chgi was going to pick out some yarn for me to make him a scarf, as it was his birthday that day. And no one's birthday should go by without a visit to the yarn store, am I right?
I was worried that I might hold us up in the yarn store, what with my need to touch everything, but I soon relaxed when I saw that the delights of yarn store had Chgi completely in thrall. HA ha! I browsed in peace for many minutes while he exclaimed passionately over the range of colours and textures before settling on what I thought were three skeins of Takhi Donegal Tweed - one teal, one gold and one brown, all with little flecks of colour throughout. I checked the label on one of them, noted that I had the right needle size already, bought Chgi's yarn AND my mystery project yarn and a new $13-highway-robbery-no-handjob circular needle and we were on our way. Woooo!
Our first night in Sudbury, I wound all the skeins of tweed into balls and I started Chgi's scarf on the way to Wawa. He wanted a simple pattern - a big chunk of brown, a smaller chunk of gold, a small chunk of blue, then gold, then brown again. I was happy to oblige and cast on with the brown as we sped down the Trans Canada. A few rows in, I noticed two things:
a) the brown was very nice, but . . . thicker than I expected; and
b) the first few rows were real, real tight. Like I was knitting a dense, cushy tweed bathmat.
Because I have the tightest cast-on in the Western Hemisphere, I didn't let it bother me initially - in fact, we even took a photo of the brown section in front of a lake while bikers mocked our truck, then nodded respectfully at Chris's mustache:
A few more inches in, that brown was getting tighter and tighter. I was perplexed. I had checked the label. I was using the right size needle size. I continued to rationalize - maybe it's SUPPOSED to knit up like this. It's from Ireland, after all - perhaps the cops there wore bullet-proof vests made of this tweed during The Troubles. Finally, doubt overcame me in Sault Ste. Marie and I checked the label again. And that's when I realized that I had bought TWO DIFFERENT KINDS OF TWEED and that, unlike the teal and gold tweed, the brown tweed I was currently knitting on 5mm needles required a minimum needle size of 6.5 mm. FOILED!
Shitbag. So then I had to make a choice. Would I:
a) frog the whole six inches of scarf and start again on bigger needles - REALLY big needles, 'cause the only thing I have bigger that the 6mm are my 8mm; or
b) tell myself and Chgi that it would all work out, uh, once I "blocked" it (non-knitters are impressed with fancy knitting terms).
It was hot and I was tired and our truck is not air-conditioned. Don't judge me. Anyway, here's the scarf so far, alongside some very fetching mystery knitting.
That's not the $13-highway-robbery-no-handjob circular needle, by the way - I managed to somehow kick that unopened piece of knitting equipment out onto the road somewhere near Brandon, Manitoba and had to buy a new needle in Saskatoon. Cost? $3.00! No more fancy needles for me. And I can handle my own handjobs.