Category Archives: Diary

In Which Life Is Not Fun

UPS just showed up with my secondhand lazy kate and bobbins.

Guess what? There’s a huge brokerage fee, plus GST, plus PST. All calculated on the value, which UPS determined was $106, which is the value of the item plus all their service fees. (How they can get away with saying their services qualify as part of the total value of the shipment, I cannot fathom. I originally misunderstood the $106 to be the value declared by the seller, but a close inspection of the fine print on the copy of the bill I was given indicates that no, UPS is just a bully and a bastard.)

Total brokerage fees? $57.84 CDN.

How much did I pay for this secondhand set? $60 CDN.

How much is this lazy kate + bobbin set new? $120 CDN.

I could cry. This was supposed to save me money. I’m ending up with a used product for the same amount of money I would have paid for new. I could have ordered it via my friends at Ariadne Knits and supported them for the same cost.

The UPS guy was so, so nice. He talked about all sorts of options, including never using UPS cross-border because of the inflated fees (he says he works for UPS and never uses them!) and asking people to declare the actual value paid or as used goods between 1-10$ so the associated fees are much lower.

I don’t even have the parcel now, because not only am I morally opposed to being charged an insane amount of money to obtain my already-paid-for-shipping-and-all goods, my credit card is useless and I didn’t have the cash. He’s coming back tomorrow. What really makes me angry is that I tracked this parcel from the day it was sent, and not once did they include any info about charges, which would have made me ready for them so I could have had the money on hand, or at least been emotionally prepared for having to refuse it or whatever the shipper and I decided to do about it. He says they do it on purpose, and I fully expect that they do. He gets this kind of reaction all the time, and he thinks it is completely unfair to those receiving the parcels. And 90% of the time, people pay the fees, because what else can they do? They’ve ordered an item they want and/or need, after all.

I feel like I’ve been kicked. I’m trying to find some sort of solace in the fact that I helped a fellow spinner out, but it’s kind of hard. Money’s tight, and I was trying to do what was best; I found the item used and at a good price, saved up for it, and now I feel like I’m being punished somehow for trying to do the right thing. Anyway, I’ve sent the shipper an e-mail to try to work something out. If I refuse it and it gets sent back to her to be shipped again via the post office, we lose the original UPS shipping fee, but the PO would have to charge $40 in order for our total shipping costs to match the extortionist import fee UPS is trying to charge me. And from a quick glance at the fee tables on the USPS site, it looks like it will cost between $10 and $15 to mail, which at least saves me about $25.

I hate being penalized for trying to do the right thing. I hate it.

ETA: A couple of people have asked, so let me clarify: This is not duty, it is brokerage alone. UPS evaluated the parcel and said, “We have decided that you need not pay duty on this. Now pay us $58 for telling you so.”

ETA LATER: The seller is an absolute star. She was as indignant about the brokerage fees as I was, and has told me to absolutely refuse the package. She’s never shipped anything cross-border via UPS before, and you can be darn sure she won’t do it again. When it gets back to her she’ll ship it out via the post office, and she’s offered to absorb part of the cost. I’m so thankful that she was as aghast as I was and agreed to work with me to get around this, even though it means a bit of extra effort on both our parts. So I won’t have my lazy kate and extra bobbins for another couple of weeks, but the time is worth the $40 I’ll ultimately save.

In Which She Enjoys Living In The Future

I love living in the future.

Item one: I can place a reserve for new acquisitions at the library online, check my profile, find out that they’re in before the library calls me, and show up to check them out before they’ve even made it to the reserve drawers. I scored An Echo in the Bone by Diana Gabaldon, Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld (an additional yay for the library taking your advice about new books to buy via online request forms), and Alexander McCall Smith’s The Lost Art of Gratitude. Seriously; check out that trio of bestselling authors! And they’re all on my bedside table. (The books, not the authors. It would be very crowded otherwise.)

Item two: This morning I jumped up and down on Twitter about the hat-trick of library books, because I have friends who understand that sort of thing.

Item three: Two seconds later Peter Gregson, a pro Scottish cellist I follow on Twitter and natter with on occasion, sent me a direct message saying that Sandy McCall Smith is a friend of his, and he’d be happy to pass along anything I might want to share with him.

Yes, the future is a wonderful place, where I can connect with people around the globe, and one of the people on my Twitter list and in our extended cello family knows one of my favourite authors and will say hi for me. (I asked him to say that Smith’s work had brought my ex-pat Scot mum and I much joy. Figured that covered pretty much all the bases.)

Weekend Roundup, Halloween Edition

Saturday morning we headed out to Karine and Adam’s place for a birthday party. We were the first ones there, so we blew up balloons and put up streamers while Adam got the birthday boy into his costume and Karine whipped up a fabulous brunch (first round for the kids, second round for the adults!). I was fighting a headache and realised halfway there that I’d forgotten to put on my glasses, which didn’t help at all. (I swear, I have to think of something to get around the dark-glasses-on-a-dark-dresser problem.) Almost half the invitees had to cancel due to illness, which was sad, but those in attendance had a wonderful time. There were a moments where my heart nearly broke, though; the boy came to get me at one point and said, “Mama, they’ve locked the door and won’t let me in.” The birthday boy and his school friends had closed the bedroom door against him, and he couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t let him play. So I sat with him in the playroom with an arm around his shoulders and tried to think of a way to explain it but couldn’t put it into words for him, so I just hugged him and offered to help him build with the toys at our feet. But then there was a stack of birthday cupcakes and presents, so everything was all right.

We headed home and it took the boy a while to settle for nap, of course. When he woke up HRH had hollowed out the pumpkins in preparation for carving them, and we got the boy to draw the faces for them. The results were great!

We packed up the pumpkins and headed out to the local grandparents’ house, where the boy does his trick or treating. Except it wasn’t that easy. The transport ministry had closed down half the Mercier bridge, so there was a single lane going each way. We figured it would just take a bit longer to get across, but when we encountered a staggering lineup at our alternate entrance (our regular one was closed) we tried a second, then a third, and discovered that most of the entrances to the bridge were closed, and all the traffic was being funneled through LaSalle onto one on-ramp and taking this way would eat up an insane amount of time. So after forty-five minutes of being five minutes away from our house in various directions, HRH decided to take the Champlain bridge and drive all the way around the south shore of the river to get to Chateauguay. We got to my inlaws’ house an hour and a half after we left. Normally, it’s a fifteen minute trip.

Anyway, tempers were tight and gas was getting dangerously low when we go to the Champlain, but right then the sun came out. It had been an extremely windy, rainy day up till then, but the sun suddenly broke through at just the right angle for magic to happen. As we crossed the Champlain we saw the fattest rainbow I’ve ever seen grow from the opposite shore and reach up to the clouds. I rolled down the window and took a photo:

Then we looked in the rearview mirror, and the sky behind us was on fire. Copper and gold and blazing apricot-bronze; absolutely incredible. When we got across the river I rolled down the window again (rather dangerous in the high winds, whoa) and took photos looking back at Montreal:

We had to stop for gas in La Prairie, but after that it was relatively smooth sailing, and we got to the boy’s grandparents’ door just before six-thirty. After a quick gulp of alcohol to soothe the stress we’d incurred on the way and much admiring of the decor there we got the boy out the door. He loves dressing up, he loves the decorations, he loves the candy… he is not such a big fan of older kids in scary costumes. In fact, after the first house he started digging his heels in because there were two teenagers right behind us wearing horrific rubber masks whom he saw every time he left a door, and on the corner he stopped and started crying, asking to go back home to Grandma and Papa because he was scared of costumes. The woman in the next house heard him and came out to talk to him, and she jollied him up nicely, getting him to come to her front door to see her decorations, and talking to him about the scary costumes. It turned out she worked at the local elementary school and knew exactly how to handle it. (Another example of how what one’s parents tell you doesn’t count, but hearing the same stuff from a different adult is OK.) The boy left in a much more cheerful mood, and I suspect the woman talked to the teenagers behind us because at the next house they stopped to talk to the boy and lifted their masks so he could see they were just people underneath. He was better then, and got to a whole two more houses before saying he was tired and wanted to go home. So this year he hit a total of five houses, three or four fewer than last year.

At home was more fun for everyone, actually, because my mother-in-law had finger food for us as well as more alcohol, and the boy had a delightful time answering the door in his costume and handing out candy. My father-in-law kept slipping more candy into our bags as well! It was a perfect Halloween night: windy, not too cold, piles of wet leaves all over the ground, with wisps of clouds racing across an almost perfectly full moon.

I slept horribly that night, despite being in a wonderful mood going to bed. I got two hours of sleep before midnight, then woke up so very completely at midnight that I had to get up. I knitted Gran’s scarf till two, spun some of the dye sample I’d done a while ago, spun some Aran-weight singles and plied them, then took some herbal sleeping pills and went back to bed around four. I got one hour of sleep before the boy woke us up at five, because of of course the clocks had gone back the night before and his body knew it was six. He tried to snuggle with us but wouldn’t stop squirming or talking so HRH put him back to his own bed, and I slept on and off till nine.

We went out to vote in the municipal election at ten, and wow, worst voting experience ever. The gym in which they were supposed to set up this polling station had been damaged by the wind and rain the previous day so it was squeezed into a cafeteria area instead, and the insensitivity of those waiting was just boggling. It took about forty-five minutes before our station was clear, and a good half of us waiting were polite, but the other half were just asses and made things miserable for everyone else… and this was within the first half-hour of the polls being open. The abuse the volunteers were receiving was dreadful. Now, okay, smaller area, perhaps not as many booth open per polling station number, but at the same time every single person had to unfold five ballots, mark them, and fill them in again. With only one person per booth allowed in the room at a time, yeah, that’s going to slow things down. Anyway, no one I voted for was elected, a result that I fully expected.

As the voting process took twice as long as we’d expected it to take, HRH pretty much had to leave as soon as we walked home because it was open house day at school. He took the bus in while the boy and I stayed home for lunch and a rest. We drove in after the boy’s nap to pick HRH up, and discovered that the open house had been insanely busy and successful.

Dinner was remarkably delicious homemade spaghetti sauce made from the garden tomatoes I’d canned two months ago, and then I headed off for a cello lesson. These are getting better, although I’m still having moments where I freeze up or can’t work through a small problem. My teacher had to remind me about things we’d worked on months ago — caterpillars, the little bounce in the shift that provides shock absorption so the shift doesn’t sound harsh — but for once my right hand was behaving. So now my focus is on smooth shifts, elegant ones, done at the same speed my bow hand is moving at instead of rushing the shift.

In Which She Boasts A Tiny Bit

That thread I spun on Wednesday? I plied it then ran it through the wheel again to tighten up the ply, then set the twist. Took it to Ceri’s last night after my cello lesson when I dropped off her 255 yards of Aran-weight Corriedale (or Arin-weight Ceridale, as we have taken to calling it) and she very firmly demonstrated that it was, in fact, laceweight by comparing it to the lightest fingering weight she’s ever worked with.

LACEWEIGHT, BABY!

I have 82 yards of it. It weights 16 grams, just over half an ounce. At some point I need to measure the WPI, just to further hammer the reality into my head. As Ceri said, spinning laceweight yields lots of bang for the buck.

Laceweight. After six weeks. Nice, even laceweight.

Now of course I am worried that I will never be able to spin anything thick again, so during a bout of insomnia on Saturday night I spun up some thicker singles and plied them to prove to myself that I can still spin Aran-weight yarn. And once my new-to-me bobbins and lazy kate extender arrive, I will be able to ply three or four thicker singles and perhaps get bulky weight. (Or spin four thin singles and ply them all together, muah-hah!) Next on the list of things to do is try the woollen-style long draw to get a fluffier thick yarn with better loft, so I can stretch the fibre further. (Spinning worsted-style as I’ve been doing yields a very dense yarn, whereas the woollen style incorporates more air into a yarn of the same grist/diameter, making it both warmer and possibly more economical, though not suited for every knitting project.)

Okay, I just had to get that out before I do my morning rounds of correspondence and news and such. The weekend roundup will post soon.

What I Read in October 2009

Tithe by Holly Black (reread)
Pilgrim by Timothy Findley (reread)
Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing by Mignon Fogarty
A Pale Horse by Charles Todd
Liar by Justine Larbalestier
The Other Queen by Philippa Gregory
An Indulgence a Day by Andrea Norville & Patrick Menton
Spin Control by Amy King
Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling (reread)
Things I Learned From Knitting by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee (reread)
The Drowning City by Amanda Downum
The Thirteenth Child by Patricia Wrede
Howards End by E.M. Forster (reread)

Lots of rereads this month. Hmm. I have a bunch of newish books on hold at the library, though, to be read whenever my turn come sup on the reserve list.

I loved The Thirteenth Child, despite the furor it caused when it was published (OMG, she writes an alternate history of frontier America and doesn’t include Native Americans!!! Well, yeah. So? That’s why it’s called alternate history.) The other book I really enjoyed this month was Justine Larbalestier’s Liar, although it was very problematic in that one has no idea what’s happened at the end of the book. (This isn’t due to authorial incompetence; exactly the opposite, as a matter of fact. It’s brilliantly written and very successful in what it sets out to do with an unreliable narrator.)

In Which She Rubs Her Eyes And Wonders Where The Time Went

Halloween tomorrow. I’m fine with that. It’s the fact that the next day is November that’s currently skewing my worldview.

I tend to journal about what excites or interests me, and I know I blog to primarily record things for myself rather than to entertain readers, but lately I feel that all I do is type out what we did on the weekend and post yarn stuff. I’d rather spin than write it all out. Although I should write it out; I should write it out differently than I’m doing, too, with more info about how/what I did so it’s there for me later. I’m taking notes in a notebook, but the online journal is where I go when I need to look back and see how I felt about it all. Ceri helped me figure out that if I journal about what interests and excites me that translates to my writing and entertains my readership regardless of what the subject is, which helped a lot. So now I don’t feel bad about rambling on and on about yarns and swatches and ratios.

(Also, if I journal more often instead of wibbling about boring people by nattering about fibre and posting pictures of yarn, then my posts won’t be unending screeds that sum up three or more days. There’s incentive. The longer the post, the longer it takes to write it up.)

On Tuesday Jan came by mid-afternoon, and we hit the yarn store then came home and knitted together for a little bit. Jan said something quite perceptive that I hadn’t considered before: decision-making takes up energy and effort, and if you work at home you’re self-directed, which means your entire day is composed of making decisions that you can’t hand off to a colleague or boss or underling. Add housework and meal prep and such to that, and no wonder I’m fried at the end of the day. She’s really good at laying things out in a sensible fashion so that I gain insight into my situation. She also brought us a chicken from her flock, butchered and skinned and frozen by her and t!, as a thank you for helping raise the coop this past spring. I’m looking forward to making a stew or something with it.

On Wednesday M. came over for our first rehearsal together of the Mozart duet we’re playing for the recital in December. Nothing like a practice session with your duet partner to emphasize that you’re really not as bad as you think you are. I sounded much better and steadier than I thought I did, with pretty good string crossings. This piece is all about waves and flow and steadiness, so I’m further along than I thought. There are still places that go ‘crunch’ so there is lots of room for improvement, but I felt a lot better about it than I did going in to the rehearsal. Orchestra that night wasn’t a compete disaster either: I got some of the harder bits but flaked out on the easier patches at the end of the Beethoven. I hate doing that. Just under one month till the fall concert, too.

A couple of weeks ago I saw a secondhand lazy kate extender and two bobbins for my spinning wheel listed for sale on an e-list. The price was unbeatable (everything plus shipping for the price of two new bobbins!) so I jumped on it, as I’ve been wanting more bobbins and a way to start making yarn with more than two plies. I sent the seller a money order and as of yesterday my new-to-me toys are officially on their way, and the seller wrapped them in a highly recyclable packing material… roving! Wow! I was looking forward to it before, but now I’m even more excited to see what kind of fibre is inside, and how it will spin up. The seller raises goats, so there may be some of that to be packing material, but no matter what I get I’ll be thrilled. Sometimes people are just wonderful, and I need to remember things like this to offset the overwhelming and ongoing evidence that humanity sucks. The parcel should arrive via UPS around the 11th of November.

I got the swatch pics of the two handspun knit samples up on Ravelry yesterday. It amuses me that the colours are inverted. (Also, go self-striping dye job!) This is why we swatch: The handspun n-ply for Gran looks smashing in the lace pattern on the left, and just kind of pained in the handspun scarf swatch on the right. Pics:

I tried swatching the handspun scarf pattern again on size 10s, but no, the yarn is just all wrong for the pattern. The swatch is stiff and a bit scratchy. I love the pattern, but it needs a fluffier, thicker yarn, possibly in earth tones. (What, me planning more spinning? Why would I do that?) So the lace pattern it is. I ran the yarn back through the ballwinder and it loosened up a bit as well as growing a bit softer; this is a trick I will remember for the future. (Surveying my Ravelry project list, I wonder when I became a lace knitter? Stupidly easy lace, but it’s lace all the same.)

The kerfuffle about needle size for this handspun scarf project (I don’t have size 8s; or I do, but it’s an Addi Turbo circular and I hate working with the Addis, I should sell them; I have size 8 Harmony tips but both cables are being used; what happens if I use my size 6 needles, oh, ick; what’s the next size I have close to 8s, the circular 10s? those don’t work either, argh) made me realise that while I can theoretically just go out and buy the confirmed size of needles I need for projects as they arise, it’s rather stressful for swatching to determine the correct size required when one does not yet have the needles, and now holds up the entire yarn production process until I can swatch to figure out how to finish plying the yarn. This led me to remembering that once Halloween is over there will be family members asking me what I want for Yule, which then led to exploring what equipment for knitting/spinning I don’t have and want. First up were needles, because if the project doesn’t call for 10s, 8s, or 4s I’m pretty sunk. So I checked KnitPicks and lo and behold, the sets of Harmony needles I love to work with are on sale till 4th January 2010! And as I need both a set of 10″ straights and a set of interchangeable circular tips and cables, I’m putting both on my list. If I don’t get them for Yule I’m buying them myself because that price is astonishing. (The straight set works out to less than $7 per pair, and they’re incredibly good needles.)

And this got me to thinking about what kind of yarn I want to work on. More plies theoretically mean thinner singles, and to make a thinner single one needs to use the highest speed whorl on one’s bobbin, slow take-up, and treadle faster to get as much twist into the thinly drafted fibre as possible. The highest speed ratio on my wheel is 10.5 revolutions of the bobbin to one revolution of the drive wheel. Now, that’s not bad, but it can be done faster, and Louet makes a high-speed bobbin with a highest speed of 15.1:1. So I pinged my eternally helpful local yarn store Ariadne Knits to ask about the high-speed flyer/bobbin set, and it looks like it’s almost $300. So I have quashed that plan. The high-speed flyer looks identical to the basic flyer with a 3/8″ orifice instead of the 1/2″ one my wheel has, and the set looks like it comes with the high-speed fatcore bobbins, which are twenty dollars more expensive than the regular high-speed bobbins (which sell for same price as the basic bobbins). Twenty dollars for a clear plastic tube that goes around the bobbin shaft to enlarge the core? I don’t think so. I’ll get a plain high-speed bobbin to test out, and use the trick I found online: I’ll slip some foam pipe insulation over the regular highspeed core to make it an instant fatcore. (In case you’re wondering, the fatter core reduces strain on the fine yarn being wrapped around it and reduces the chance of it snapping. We’re talking some pretty fine thread-like yarn, here.)

So yes, I am looking at making finer yarns, because I seem to have somehow become a lace knitter (or so the current lineup of works in progress on my Ravelry page would suggest), and an increasing number of my friends are getting into knitting socks. So what did I do last night instead of putting myself to bed where I could read until I fell asleep? I pulled out a half-ounce of fibre to see how thinly I could spin it. I removed the brake band entirely, set the drive band on the smallest whorl, and treadled relatively quickly while drafting out about five fibres from the narrow strip I tore off the combed top. The idea is to let the yarn sit and gather as much twist as possible before allowing it to wind onto the bobbin so the yarn doesn’t just drift apart when you pull on it, but not for so long that it overtwists and starts kinking back on itself. It took about an hour to do an sixteenth of an ounce, but I did it. (No wonder people use higher-ratio bobbins to increase production speed; at this rate it would take forever to spin enough for something like a shawl.)

I may continue it today, just for kicks, in between drafting the programme notes for the upcoming fall concert.

And remember: The clocks go back between Saturday night and Sunday morning! So when you come home from trick or treating, or your Samhain ritual, or whatever party you’ve attended (or, you know, when you just turn out your light at the end of a perfectly unusual evening) don’t forget to reset your clocks.

Halloween 2009

School party tomorrow. Here’s who will be in attendance.

He’s already planning to save the attending princesses from dragons and supervillains. Never hurts to be prepared.

The sheer glee as he put it all on and ran to a mirror was very gratifying. He kept backing away and running heroically at the mirror to watch himself rush to save someone. Then we had to place one of his stuffed rabbits in distress ( “Help! Help! I’m trapped in a building on fire!”) so Superman could run into the room, dive onto the table, scoop up the bunny, and roll off the other side in a dramatic rescue. Very impressive.