What I Know About Plumbing

...would scarcely fill a drain trap.  So it was with no small panic that I called a plumber last week after returning home to discover my kitchen floor half an inch deep in water.

And I may have twitched a bit when she arrived, and gently let me know that my kitchen faucet had passed on to that great U-Bend in the Sky.  Then it occurred to me that I never liked that faucet.  It came with the house, and reminded me of the previous owners:  Cheap and Cheerful.

My Plumber (I have a Plumber now.  It makes me feel powerful.) is the lovely and talented Andrea, who loves Scottish Terriers (has one of her very own), and so was immediately approved of by Paisley, who supervised the job.

Andrea not only replaced my kitchen faucet with a sassy new pretty one, she installed a new kitchen sink and garbage disposal.  And with Andrea at my side to support the decision, I elected to disarm the Plumbing Gods by replacing the other three, equally crappy, sink/faucet combos in our house.

And now all things washy at Huff House are not only good as new, they ARE new.  Check out my sparkly new sink!  So much easier to appreciate than my new Catalytic Converter.  I especially like that I got to pick out the sprayer.  You should have seen the plumbing supply guy's face when I asked:  "Will this nozzle spray with enough pressure to rinse the detergent out of sheep fleece?"  I do love Muggles. 

So now, I won't panic when the toilets go (obviously that will be next), because I know I can call Andrea.  And hopefully she will turn directly to me for her next Knitting Emergency, should she ever have one.  One good rescue deserves another, after all.

Three Days, Three Things

Thing One:  Last Thursday, I had the great good fortune to meet the members of the Tigard Knitting Guild.  Of the 100 or so who turned out, here are the half that would fit in my camera.  We talked about knitting, and colorwork, and math, and the fact that I sometimes don't know what day it is.  They liked me in spite of my calendar-challenged nature, which tells me that they are not only a delightful gang of knitters; they may have experienced the occasional Time Pleat, themselves.

Thing Two:  On Friday, my mom (who's visiting us) and I set out to visit a yarn store I had never been to.  At the beginning of our journey, my car's tire looked like this:

See how it's nice and round, even at the bottom?  This is the desired state of things,  But that's not what it looked like when we arrived at the yarn store.  Instead, thanks to an ill-placed nail, my poor tire looked exactly like this, but much, much flatter on one side.  So think about it:  I was actually stranded at the yarn store:

I had plenty of time, while I waited for the tire rescue gentleman, to ponder the ramifications of being trapped at the yarn store.  And while the scenario was certainly a dangerous one, financially speaking, it was also, I'm guessing, every knitter's fantasy.  That's right: indefinite time, in a place filled with nice people, and more yarn than I could knit in several days.  Too bad my cell phone worked when I called the tire guy.  He did, eventually show up, and fixed my tire.  Which was the only bleak moment in the whole situation.  Once my tire was round again, Mom and I were able to move on to

Thing Three:  My mom really loves the handspun hat I made her last year.  And by loves, I mean she all but sleeps in it.  Which is fine, in my opinion.  I hope that when I reach the sassy age of 77, I can wear my favorite hat all the time without anybody bugging me about it.  Even if it has feathers on it, which I'm guessing it will.  However, Mom's hat has a decidedly wintry feel about it, which might be less well-suited to spring wearing than she would like.  Frankly, she doesn't care about this at all, but my sisters and I worry that people might think we aren't taking good care of her if her wardrobe crossed over from "Adorable Grammy" to "Hobo Chic".  So I took it upon myself to make her a spring hat that she will like as well as the winter one:

It's made of Sublime Soya Cotton DK, which is super soft, drapey, and decidedly non-wintry.  But a stand-in for the favorite is a tall order, even for me.  Stay tuned...

Acts of Mercy

The trip to Lindsay's skating competition went just great.  Right up to the point where I realized that the athlete I was rooting for was in the throes of the Stomach Flu.  How, you may ask, did I know?  Well, I didn't really, until I came down with it myself.  But more about that later.  What I want to tell you is that my kid is Tough.  She tossed her cookies, straightened her hairdo, and then skated a first place program.  Then she changed outfits as fast as possible (not all that fast when you are trying not to toss more cookies) and skated a second place program.  Then she collected some medals, smiled for some photos, and tossed her cookies again.  Is there any more helpless feeling in the world than holding some barfy kid in your arms and trying to make them feel better?  On the floor of the skating rink bathroom? 

So I put her in the car, after an agonizing afternoon, during which Lindsay had to decide which was worse:  A.  Forefitting her third event, thereby removing herself from the running for a special artistry award she might have won, or  B.  Sticking it out and tempting the Skating Gods, who are known to punish skaters with stomach flu by inflicting public displays of, well, symptoms.  She ultimately chose A, which turned out to be for the best.  Turns out that a plastic shopping bag from the pro shop will hold way more symptoms than you would think (at least until the nearest rest stop), and my wee heroine survived the two-hour car ride home.  We consoled ourselves with the knowledge that we both learned something:  Lindsay learned what her absolute physical limits are, and I learned that when your kid has a virulent bug and you tell yourself that the dread of catching it is worse than actually catching it, that's a load of crap. 

And In case things weren't gnarly enough, we got home to find that Phillip had the stomach flu, too.  So I told myself that it was only the power of suggestion, and the abnormally high gross-out factor that were making me feel icky as I lay motionless on the bathroom floor that night.  Have I mentioned that my powers of denial are epic?  This is after every CC of liquid in my body has left it with a velocity that is nearly ballistic, and in every direction.  That's right, Gentle Readers:  I'm here to tell you that it's actually possible to vomit out of your eyes.

So Lindsay, Phillip and I are all on our lips in the floor, leaving no one but poor Campbell to tend to the dead and dying.  Campbell, in case you are wondering (and still reading this), had the bug a week ago, and so has been declared immune.  Maybe the worst thing about the stomach flu is that when you have it, you are a complete pariah.  No one in their right mind will come near you, and if there are three sufferers, you might as well just lock all the doors and wait for the undertaker.  Even if your only caregiver is an eight-year-old.  Don't bother calling in the cavalry, because they ain't-a-comin.  Just suffer there on the floor and pray for morning.

But morning, of course, does eventually come.  And when it did, I began to realize that my family and I were not going to be the first casualties of Cholera in the USA in decades.  I'm definitely better than I was, and so are the other two.  Nobody is ready to eat anything more complicated than paste, you understand, but I think we'll pull through.  And Cam seems not to have been marked for life.  By this episode.

Naturally, the first thing I wanted to do when I could sit up was knit.  Here is the knee sock I told you about.  And while I'm on the subject of barf (really? can't just move on?) this poor thing is really suffering.  Check out the bizarre calf "shaping".  Probably okay if your calf has a tumor.  And my groovy hand painted yarn is totally pooling, there at the ankle.  Why, you may ask, do I continue to beat such an obviously dead horse?  Because I clearly don't know any better.  This is my first knee sock, and I keep thinking that something will change if I just press on.  I used what seemed to be a very cool pattern.  But it is only a program of numbers generators, which does exactly as it is supposed to do, not a knitting shaman, for heaven's sake.  I probably entered the wrong guage into the formula or something.  It seems to need negative ease.  And by that I mean it's just way too freakin huge around, though the length seems oddly accurate.  I would have held out to the very end, in order to measure and re-calculate all the areas where things have gone so obviously wrong.  But I'm going to run out of yarn (not surprising, having knitted a grain silo-cozy), which can only mean one thing.  Frog City.  

I am going to measure the bulging calf thing, though, before I hook it up to the ball winder and let 'er rip.  Seems like the least I could do for the poor thing.

If you know the magic formula for the amount of negative ease required for a knee sock at 9 stitches to the inch, kindly weigh in?  I guarantee contact with this blog post to be non-infectious.