An update!

I have to admit, I'm liking Lansing. This could be because I'm working 15 hours a week and sitting on my butt waiting for classes to start... It's like a vacation. It'll be over soon enough, though. The main stress is Steve's job hunting and money situation. Unstable would best describe it. As I type, he's working on perfecting his portfolio site. This could be pointless if none of the tech jobs in the area want him and he ends up waiting tables at Applebee's or something. Some freelance work would be really nice right now just so he has more to show off... As he's a web designer (and quite talented, not that I'm biased or anything), would any of you lovely knitters like a spruced up blog?

Anyway.

Continuing the Lansing-area yarn crawl, I went to Rae's Yarn Boutique last week because Meg had mentioned it in her blog. Imagine my dismay in finding out that there was a yarn shop like, literally a block south of a shopping center I've started frequenting! And oh, what a cute shop! Steve and I made it there on an evening that they were open later; I assume it was for the knitting group talking Harry Potter on the front couches.

Well, they were sort of talking Harry Potter. When one of the ladies there would start to go into ANY detail about the plot of the last book, another would screech, "Don't ruin it!" It was really amusing. I really wanted to walk up to them and proclaim that ---- kills ---- on page ---. Really, I haven't read any of these books, but my experience with literature has overwhelmingly been that it doesn't matter if you know major plot points in advance. Does Pride and Prejudice lose any of its charm if you pick it up knowing that Elizabeth and Darcy get married? For me, it certainly does not.

Anyway, back to Rae's. Back when I worked at the shop in Ann Arbor, I was always disappointed that the ladies didn't keep a very good selection of sock yarn. (They don't like knitting socks, so their customers shouldn't either!) Not only was Rae's full of luscious sock yarn, but imagine my delight at seeing an entire box of Socks that Rock waiting for homes. There were probably at least a hundred skeins in this one box! I'm lucky I only came home with one skein:



The colorway is Lemongrass. It's springy and happy, perfect for the Sockbug Lava Flow socks it is becoming. The pattern is absolutely mindless, and highlights the little stripes that are forming.

I would have made more progress on those socks if it weren't for this little guy:



He's based on The Anti Craft's Purasuchikku no Tetsujin. I really shouldn't call him a little guy, considering he is no less than two feet tall. He's completely finished, save for some arms and maybe an antenna on top of his head. I wasn't a huge fan of how the original has wrenches for arms. While wrenches are clever, I want to do something different. I haven't come up with anything yet, and am open to suggestions. The antenna may not happen, because I'm thinking of putting a slot in the top of his head for kleenex or maybe an air freshener.



Thank god I have a robot for a tampon holder now, even if he has no arms or antenna sense of direction. While working on the tampon robot, I was thinking about the merits of plastic canvas and the other things I could make with it... Until I finished seaming up the tampon robot and had sore fingers from all the tight spots and tough seams! Ugh. Honestly, I can see why plastic canvas went out in the seventies.

Why I quit. (Or, knitting drama.)

I used to work at a really, REALLY nice yarn shop. In this state, it's probably only second to ThreadBear. (Okay, I'll admit it, I think it's BETTER than ThreadBear, because the ThreadBear woman was really awful to me when I was there.) The co-owners were really sweet (usually), and the rest of my co-workers were amazing. But over the summer, I called it quits. I had taught classes, given private lessons, and worked countless hours on the floor. I had bought countless skeins of yarn at a small discount.

But here's the catch: I was the youngest person employed there. This was fine with a lot of the clientele, but there were a few who were, for lack of a better descriptor, ANN ARBORITES. These are people who work for Pfizer, Google, or the University and act like they're gods. They throw hundreds of dollars around on things like yarn and wine. They have too much in the way of a disposable income. Some are really kind, while some are nightmares that think they're in Berkeley or Cambridge or something. If you saw the people that go to this university, you'd know that we're NOT the "Harvard of the West" as they liked to claim.

Anyhow, my age. It all seemed to culminate in this one old woman who had knitted a bright yellow baby blanket. When she found out that the kid was a girl, she crocheted hot pink fun fur and multicolored bobble yarn around the outside of it. she was going to finish it off with some plain pink edging. No further comment on the choice of colors/yarns. Note that she had ALREADY crocheted two borders around the outside of her blanket.

She came in to us. I was working with one of the owners, who was teaching a class. They don't like to be disturbed when instructing a class, and rightly so. She saw that the owner was busy, and proceeded to ask me how to crochet an edge around the edge of her blanket. (This would be the third border, mind you.) I showed her anyway, and she insisted that I wasn't doing it right - her tension looked fine on the ugly yarns that she had chosen before, but on a smooth yarn she wasn't keeping it even, so she insisted it was wrong. I explained to her a million ways that it was just that her tension was off and perhaps she could try again.

This wasn't good enough. She looked at the owner, teaching away, and I said, "She's teaching a class. She'll be done at noon." (It was about 10:30.) "THAT IS UNACCEPTABLE!" She barged over and interrupted the class, insisting that I didn't know what I was talking about. The owner looked at her work, told her that the tension was off on her third layer of crochet, and then this woman ACCEPTED THE ANSWER coming from her.

Thing is, I have more years of knitting under my belt than the owner. I started early.

There are not enough expletives to explain how pissed off I was.

The thing is, this happened all the time. Time and time again, I got my intelligence insulted about something which has been my pastime for over fifteen years. So what if I started when I was six? So, middled-aged knitters of southern Michigan with sticks up your asses? You drove me to quit. Thanks a lot.

I get more credibility when working with ceramic tile at my full-time gig.

I can't wait until law school.