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Jan. 26th, 2008 10:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickSo today I watched Northanger Abby at Cousin Heather's house. Jane Austen movies are so damn rewarding. You have The Guy She Is Going To Marry and you have at least one Rake and either another or possibly a Rake In Disguise to make it a little tougher. (There's a helpful website to let you compare the guys, if you like. It's here. If you can't pick out the rakes on your own, then you're more chaste than an Austen heroine and likely to fall for the hand-plop argument. Too bad for you.) The whole thing (six novels, one plot, we decided today) is delightfully satisfactory on a variety of levels. Next up is Mansfield Park. I can't wait, yo.
I realize that it may cause some cognitive dissonance for members of the studio audience to find that I'm up for it vis a vis the movie I can't stop watching (in amongst the deathbed conversion stuff, it quotes significantly the bible parts that are in Handel, the "a man of sorrows well acquainted with grief" thing) and also that I'm game for the round of three-card-monte for virgins of marriageable age called "Pick The Right Guy" that ends in a relatively chaste kiss and an engagement. Deal. Northanger Abby also happily had Mozart's Queen of the Night aria from Magic Flute in it, which I was all kinds of happy about being able to hum along with. Opera tickets are not a waste. They enrich my life at least once per year as well as providing an excellent excuse for dining out.
I packed my spinning (wool and spindle is a very portable thing) and did that through the movie. Heather worked on her quilt, which is now at the "piece the top squares into strips" stage.
In sheep-related news, I got my hand cards in the mail on Friday and spent some quality time totally sucking at carding wool last night. However, after a couple of helpful Youtube videos (they're not all pretty German girls lipsynching to Aqua Songs. Sometimes youtube has educational and informative videos.) on the subject, I did rather better today. The hand cards were purchased primarily to make it possible for me to process the shetland fleeces from Tasha, which are delightfully fine and soft and ... incredibly filthy and chock-full of VM. They are also dual-coated which makes carding them with a dog brush nearly impossible because the shorter fibers pull right the hell out. (Single-staple-length wools work a lot better for the dog brush carding method.) So, I opted for "real" cards. That's working somewhat better and I have a spindle full of nice thin yarn now that looks like it might be worth keeping on the grounds that it's more wool than hay/dirt.
I rose pretty early this morning (couldn't sleep, was up by 4 AM) and plied the already-spun border leicester (it's brown) so that I now have something like three hundred yards of it when the missing skein comes back from mom (it went walkabout for show-n-tell purposes). It's pretty much all the same size and weight and stuff. What shall I make with brown border leicester wool? It's so soft and squishy. I <3 it. Maybe I need a sweater? A sweater would make me look fat, though. I'd have to lose twenty pounds to wear a sweater. (This is decidedly unlikely, the losing twenty pounds thing.)
What with all the spinning going on, I haven't been keeping up with knitting, which sort of sucks, but there are only have so many hours in the day. Anyway, it's not like I'm failing to participate in handicrafts, here. Culturally, I'm up to chapter 30 on Pickwick Papers, which I'm still enjoying from Librivox. It's my spinning/knitting audio. Possibly after Pickwick (which is vignettes and stuff, very easy to pick up and put down) I will need to find something else. Vanity Fair, maybe. I have this plan, here, to listen to the things I've failed to read over the years. Maybe they'll go down easier as audio.
Oh, and dinner tonight was cabbage browned in bacon grease with jalapenos, turmeric, and cilantro. It was a lot better than you probably think from reading the description.
I realize that it may cause some cognitive dissonance for members of the studio audience to find that I'm up for it vis a vis the movie I can't stop watching (in amongst the deathbed conversion stuff, it quotes significantly the bible parts that are in Handel, the "a man of sorrows well acquainted with grief" thing) and also that I'm game for the round of three-card-monte for virgins of marriageable age called "Pick The Right Guy" that ends in a relatively chaste kiss and an engagement. Deal. Northanger Abby also happily had Mozart's Queen of the Night aria from Magic Flute in it, which I was all kinds of happy about being able to hum along with. Opera tickets are not a waste. They enrich my life at least once per year as well as providing an excellent excuse for dining out.
I packed my spinning (wool and spindle is a very portable thing) and did that through the movie. Heather worked on her quilt, which is now at the "piece the top squares into strips" stage.
In sheep-related news, I got my hand cards in the mail on Friday and spent some quality time totally sucking at carding wool last night. However, after a couple of helpful Youtube videos (they're not all pretty German girls lipsynching to Aqua Songs. Sometimes youtube has educational and informative videos.) on the subject, I did rather better today. The hand cards were purchased primarily to make it possible for me to process the shetland fleeces from Tasha, which are delightfully fine and soft and ... incredibly filthy and chock-full of VM. They are also dual-coated which makes carding them with a dog brush nearly impossible because the shorter fibers pull right the hell out. (Single-staple-length wools work a lot better for the dog brush carding method.) So, I opted for "real" cards. That's working somewhat better and I have a spindle full of nice thin yarn now that looks like it might be worth keeping on the grounds that it's more wool than hay/dirt.
I rose pretty early this morning (couldn't sleep, was up by 4 AM) and plied the already-spun border leicester (it's brown) so that I now have something like three hundred yards of it when the missing skein comes back from mom (it went walkabout for show-n-tell purposes). It's pretty much all the same size and weight and stuff. What shall I make with brown border leicester wool? It's so soft and squishy. I <3 it. Maybe I need a sweater? A sweater would make me look fat, though. I'd have to lose twenty pounds to wear a sweater. (This is decidedly unlikely, the losing twenty pounds thing.)
What with all the spinning going on, I haven't been keeping up with knitting, which sort of sucks, but there are only have so many hours in the day. Anyway, it's not like I'm failing to participate in handicrafts, here. Culturally, I'm up to chapter 30 on Pickwick Papers, which I'm still enjoying from Librivox. It's my spinning/knitting audio. Possibly after Pickwick (which is vignettes and stuff, very easy to pick up and put down) I will need to find something else. Vanity Fair, maybe. I have this plan, here, to listen to the things I've failed to read over the years. Maybe they'll go down easier as audio.
Oh, and dinner tonight was cabbage browned in bacon grease with jalapenos, turmeric, and cilantro. It was a lot better than you probably think from reading the description.
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Date: 2008-01-27 01:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-27 02:01 pm (UTC)