Category Archives: Blab

ATTENBOROUGH!!!!

By

White crab spiders in the UK

White crab spiders by my house!!
Crab spider on a daisy

Crab spider on a daisy

It was like my greatest David Attenborough squealy fan girl moment. It’s true. Also, there were yellowy-green crab spiders on the black-eyed susans (they matched the stem more than the blossom), weird grasshopper death (I’ll get more pictures, it was like cordyceps but in Vermont and without the crazy spore antennae), Chester got stink-bugged right in the mouth, tiny baby orb weavers on top of the tallest grasses (about my height) shooting out a thread of silk hoping to catch some wind and fly away, the cicadas only buzz once or twice in a day and no more, it’s a bit unsettling.

The mosquitoes and biting flies are completely out of control. Everywhere, they are monstrous. Fun fact: even though I get bit by the mosquitoes and flies, my skin does not react to it. When they bite, it hurts like normal, but I never get a spot or bump or itchy place. Same is true with flea bites (oh my god! Vermont has FLEAS ALL OVER) and a bee sting I got a couple years ago.

Speaking of bug bites, Chester tested positive for lyme disease. The new (awesome) vet said most dogs are asymptomatic their entire lives. He’s a super healthy little toughie, he’ll be fine.

David!
We’re all going to be alright.

It’s my post-apocalyptic skill set

By

Spinning yarn is always more fun than washing, skeining, counting, blocking the yarn. I’d managed to create quite a backlog of spun-but-not-processed yarns coming off the spinning wheel. 4 different yarns, 9 skeins, 1500 yards.

This is how it goes…

This is the wool after I dyed and washed it. It’s superwash merino wool, which means it won’t felt up on you if you absentmindedly toss your lovely handmade sweater into the wash machine. I use basic acid dyes in a pot with the wool and toss it in the oven for a couple hours on low.
IMG_5476.JPG

This is the wool after pre-drafting. You draft the wool, pulling the fibers out and apart a bit so it can be spun evenly and quickly. The header you see at the top of this page comes from this first picture.
Polychaete

Polychaete

Then you sit at your spinning wheel and spin it up
Polychaete

Action shot with Chester
Action shot with Chester

A comparison, wool, pre-drafted roving and singles on the bobbin
Polychaete

Spin up all your wool and then ply it together and do the boring stuff, skeining, counting washing and soaking, squeezing, snapping, and turning it into real yarn
Polychaete

Polychaete

I spun up 750 yards and I named it Polychaete.

And in a slightly different process…

I had 16 ounces of natural black shetland wool that my mom gave me as a gift (thanks mom!!). Since it was black there was no real need to dye it (though I do want to mess around with dyeing over black wool sometime). Instead I ran it through a carder which allows you to blend different fibers together. To the black wool I blended in some sparkly, multi-colored bamboo.

The batt begging to be spun
The Mayor's Wife

Pre-drafted
The Mayor's Wife

On the bobbin
The Mayor's Wife

Singles ready to be plyed
The Mayor's Wife, singles to be plyed.

Plyed
The Mayor's Wife, plyed

Washed and skeined
The Mayor's Wife

The Mayor's Wife

This yielded me 500 yards and I called it ‘The Mayor’s Wife’

Should the final revelation occur and we find ourselves wanting, you’ll be able to find me, I’ll the the chica in the swanky sweater.

He broke up with me…

By

…that bastard!
No, not David! Oddly enough, it was my new vet! I got the letter in the mail today basically saying that since I obviously didn’t trust him I could no longer bring my dogs there. I wasn’t surprised as the last time I talked to him we argued and I hung up on him and promptly found a new vet.
The vet’s office was a circus. It was obvious they had way more customers than they could handle. You had to wait forever just to get checked in and when you tried to check in they couldn’t find your file. It was utter confusion. They were so busy they didn’t even have time to really listen to you. And, no, I didn’t trust them. With one of the vets it was so apparent that she wasn’t even listening to the things I was trying to explain to her. I’m not sure what it was she cared about, but it wasn’t the animals. The other vet changed Maddie’s prescription without telling me and then acted like I was the problem for wanting him to change it back
And then there’s my hat… and Maddie having to stay 2 nights. Maddie has discovered a delicious new world of animal poop here in Vermont. She managed to get ‘food poisoning’ from it a couple months ago. That was our first real encounter with them. It definitely made me suspicious of their trustworthiness then. Maddie was sick, she was blowing yellow bile out her ass with some impressive force. We brought her in and they were too busy to be concerned, they gave me some pills. It bugged me, but Maddie got better and I figured it was probably okay.
Then, a couple weeks ago I walk through the living room and I see blood on the couch. I find Maddie and see that she has fresh blood coming out of her ass. Blood is coming OUT OF HER ASS!! Granted, it was fresh blood and NOT the kind of thing that would indicate a big intestinal problem, but still, her butt… blood… I’m trying to get her in to see the vet and they are crazy busy. They keep insisting that I leave her over night. I explain (again and again) about Maddie’s separation anxiety, the way she will badly injure herself if she is scared and can’t find me. The vet, she was totally not listening, but she insists Maddie is sick enough to be help overnight. So I go and get Maddie settled a bit and I leave my hat there with Maddie so she will have something with my smell on it. I explained this to the vet, I let her know about my hat.
They kept Maddie there 2 fucking days and I find out they just wanted a stool sample and Maddie wasn’t pooping. I went to pick her up from the vet, walked her outside and boom! She made a boom. We collected it and brought it back inside. That’s all they wanted. Maddie’s face was scraped and raw, it looked horrible. The vet mentioned that Maddie was sluggish and slow to move that morning. Maybe… JUST FUCKING MAYBE is has something to do with the fact that her elbows are scraped all to hell and they are so swollen that she has sacks of fluid hanging off them. She’s limping and sore and they didn’t know why.
Then I tried to get my hat back. No one knew what I was talking about. What hat? The hat I told you that I was leaving with my dog. You know, the dog you kept for 2 nights (at $30 a night) just so you could get a shit out of her… that dog, I left a hat with that dog. It made sense, I knew she wasn’t listening to me when I told her I left it with Maddie, but I figured SOMEBODY might have had it in their hands and put it SOMEWHERE. No one could find it and after a few days they casually told me they probably threw it away. Because that’s what you do when you find a hat you don’t know about, you stick it in the trash.
This says to me that they are either so busy that it is easier to throw a hat in the trash than walk 20 feet to the front desk and put it aside in case someone calls looking for it or that they are so indifferent to what is going on that it just makes sense to throw a hat away.
Maybe I was spoiled having Pierce Flemming, International Vet of Mystery as my vet. He was awesome with Maddie, he was awesome with me. The place was really busy but also it was well managed. I could have left my hat there and I would have gotten it back, they’d probably even put a tag on it so that it could be easily identified.
Maddie is almost 13 years old and she is really really healthy and I intend to keep it that way.
Rockingham Vet Clinic in Chester Vt… screw you

A moment

By

Maddie and I have a moment
A quiet moment with Maddie on Sunset ledge. At the far right you can see Lake Champlain and in the far distance, the Adirondacks. The trail getting up there was difficult as hell for me, but totally became worth it when I rounded the corner and saw the view. Unfortunately, there is no real way to capture how beautiful this is.
After sunset we start a new story that involves not enough water, a forgotten flashlight, fear of hypothermia, me falling down a lot, getting out of the woods after 2 am and hitting a deer on the way home (she survived, the passenger mirror did not).