Saturday, May 03, 2008

aaaaaaargh! (resolved)


Can you see the crisis? Can you see the problem? Can you see the whole earth-shattering, scream loudly, rip it all out issue?

Can you see the idiocy, which is to use yarn that comes all nicely measured, for a specific kit, and take some and play around with it on other things, and then mess a whole wodge of it up, and then use it to play with the cats, and then wonder why you run out of yarn at the end. I should have liable to 'User Error' tattooed on my forehead....

But, the amazing Andie over at Renaissance Dyeing, after getting my slightly hysterical, written at 2am email, ran out to her workshop on a Saturday morning (now there is service for you), ransacked her stores, and found the right yarn, in the right dye-lot, and is sending it to me. (Along with some other things that may have fallen into my shopping basket). And anyone else who needs Copper Beech dye lot no.2 will just have to whistle for it, for I have cornered the world market in this particular yarn. (Open to bribes, of course, of other yarn....)

So, do you think 250m will be enough to finish it?

(Hmmm, wonder if this was what was causing my somewhat self-indulged melt-down recently.)

Thursday, May 01, 2008

not knitting but drowning....

Well, there is some knitting, and exciting things are close to finished (as long as I don't run out of yarn...), and some exciting purchases have come into the house (ask me how to get hold of some Woolmeise!). But I need to vent, so be warned.

But, right now, I am fighting with Insurance companies, and most specifically their very clever new strategy of demanding that all clients must needs become hydrogeologists overnight. For last summer, the area I live in suffered some flooding. Some quite bad flooding. A result of extreme weather, and poor infrastructure maintenance. But my house, luckily, was dry.

But now I have to fill in a form, asking such things as are you within 1/4 mile of any streams, rivers, lakes, reservoirs, water courses or tidal waters? (Well, I reckon most places would be fairly close to at least one of these, oh, and by the way, what precisely do they mean by a water course? Precisely? Because if I get the answers wrong, it could be used to invalidate any insurance claim I make....). and please advise the approximate height of the premises above the normal high water mark of the nearest watercourse? (Do you think the council would lend me their fancy theodolites? The ones that can measure along roads, and around corners, and through buildings, oh, and would a really, really good GPS machine be useful, one which will give me the exact height differences? Because if I get the answers wrong, it could be used to invalidate any insurance claim I make....)

Now, I may have mentioned my problems with forms before (I once managed to tell the DVLA - driving licence people - that I was legally blind, and when they sent me a very nice letter asking if I had made a mistake, I rang them up and argued about it. Because I couldn't possibly have been wrong....). So I am in complete tail-spin melt down.

Not helped by going to events to which one needs to take a smart suit (fine, I'll get the iron out), display boards (well, if you will volunteer to put up a display), drawing pins (for to attach to the display board), computer (for to display something using technology - amazing, though, how people who don't like computers can actively refuse to even acknowledge the presence of one, even if you are playing music very loudly through it). So far, so good and normal. But then add in a couple of laundry racks (which have absolutely nothing to do with my display), and most importantly, a cool box (because there was a transfer of a rather nice piece of meat - apologies if you are veggie - that needed to take place in a car park, which had absolutely nothing to do with displays, events, smart suits, computers, or even laundry racks.) It was remembering the cool box which put me over the edge....

Oh, can anyone explain what a supra-existential crisis is (and why it might be different from just your plain old regular existential crisis)? Or what an ontological insecurity is?