Mortaine’s Blog

Cross-posted to my journal and

I posted about this in already today (twice, ahem), but I wanted to post here about it as well.

I learned how to spin yarn today. It’s not especially great yarn, because I’m new. But it’s yarn and it’s more or less consistent in length and strength, so I’m happy. It was very easy to learn once all the pieces fit together in my mind; I made my first yarn this morning before I even had coffee.

This is an incredibly awesome good thing, because it brings me one step closer to spinning my mom’s wool into yarn. I think I figured out that I’ve carded her wool incorrectly (fortunately, I haven’t carded much of it), because the fibers just puff up instead of go in the same direction. so I will need to re-card or just start over with uncarded wool.

I’ll post pics at the end of the weekend. For those who want to know (and a plug): I’m using a top whorl drop spindle bought off eBay and purple roving. I also got a low whorl spindle from the same seller and some rust-colored roving (same seller). The seller is Annie May Stone: the spindle+roving kits were about $10 each, which is about half of what a spindle alone costs in stores (and about $8 more than you can make your own spindle for). The spindles had leaders attached, and they have hooks, which makes spinning as a beginner SO MUCH EASIER. They came with directions, but I also used the videos at ICanSpin.com to help me figure it all out.

Had more dreams about HP. In this one, he got “adopted” by an older student at Hogwart’s, and ended up with two older brothers, both of whom were not magic users, but who were at least nice, unlike the rest of Harry’s family. Harry was also played by some blond kid– I was a little disappointed by the casting, there. The older Hogwart’s student originally thought he had been orphaned, like Harry, but later, he remembered that his parents were alive, but such abusive people, Dumbledore had removed him from their custody.

And at some point (separate dream, same theme), Harry ended up at a private Valentine’s day dinner with his girlfriend, Hermione and some boy, and a third couple, at his g.f.’s house. I looked outside and saw a lone figure sitting inside a car, and realized that our couples dinner was leaving someone out in the cold, so I invited them in, admonishing our host that one did not exclude friends in the name of romance.

Anyway, must get dressed and breakfasted. Have a good day, folks!

I just started reading The Reptile Room (the second book in the series of Unfortunate Events). And just this minute I woke up from a nap and realized that the children have gone to live with their uncle, a herpetologist who focuses on snakes. Like… pythons.

Yes, indeed, children. That would be Uncle Monty’s Python.

*groan*

Last night, I made myself home-made pasta sauce and put a take-and-bake loaf of bread in the oven and some spaghetti in the cooker.

And then I checked LiveJournal. So my bread was a little extra-crunchy and my pasta was waaay over-done. I could have wept– the sauce was really special, and I ruined it with everything else. Sigh.

When I got the bellyache, I just figured the overdone pasta was the culprit. My body “purged” itself of its contents (er… not in the stick-a-finger-down-your-throat way) and I went to bed at about 9:30, feeling kind of cruddy, hot, and thirsty (but I’d had 4 glasses of water with dinner, so I knew I wasn’t thirsty).

I woke up at about 5 this morning to go to the bathroom, thankful that the intestinal distress hadn’t continued past 10:00. When I got up, I realized my body was covered in a light layer of sweat. As I got back to bed, it occurs to me that this is exactly what my body feels like after it’s just broken a fever. So my indigestion last night wasn’t just bad pasta– I must have been running a low-grade fever to boot.

So I turned off the alarm and went back to sleep. I will run today, just not with the team, so I have a chance of letting my body heal before I subject it to more running (I’m having a lot of pain when I run lately, and really need those new shoes to come in soon).