C-Myste

I can’t help it: I like sheep. I like the way they feel, I like the way they smell . . . I like the pretty things that you can make out of them.

Yesterday I drove up to Eugene for the day for a really good sheep-fix. I have brought back pictures, as well as wool. Some were taken with my camera, most with my phone. It does make a difference so while I love my phone, I will continue to use the camera.

Shannon (of Kenleigh Acres) in a little stock-dog demo.

A couple of Shannon's Jacob sheep.

Wool judging: the finals of the colored wool

Best in show (left) and reserve.

I found the wool judging very interesting.  Much as in livestock judging, the judge has a microphone and discusses each fleece while making her choice.  She picks up the fleece to see its weight, checks cleanliness, and pulls out locks to check length and quality.  The winner and reserve were both colored Lincoln from the same farm.  The judge, who was from the UK, told us that while we might not know it in the PNW where they are fairly common, the Lincoln is nearly extinct in its original home and is classified as a rare breed.  My first ram was a Lincoln.  Big sheep.  Wonderful, glossy wool.

Blue Faced Leicester, as I was visiting with Garrett.

Just look at these fleeces

The hay is always greener on the other side of the fence.

In the alpaca barn, you could walk them through an agility course.

Some how I didn’t manage to bring home any pictures of Shetland sheep. I’m not sure how that happened.  There was a little moorit ewe lamb that I loved.  I don’t think she was for sale.  I spent some time talking about the breed with a young man from Thunderhead Shetlands in Monroe, who was ready to put some diapers on them and load them in the Prius.  Yes, I could easily have brought back 3 or 4: they’re that small.

Here’s what I did bring back:

Died rovings

Yes there was yarn too . . .

These will become a couple of pairs of colorful socks

But it was the rovings that caught my eye and made my fingers itch.  I’ll be bringing out my wheel to spin some lovely yarn. The rovings came from Dayspring Farm.

So, no new pasture ornaments yet.  But as I was washing dishes last night I raised my head to the window and saw a young doe looking back at me.

I managed to get outside and take a shot as she made her exit.

Then I got a shot of our beautiful evening sky

One of the (few) things that has annoyed me about our trailer is that there is no nightstand on my side of the bed. So, some five years later I have remedied that shortcoming. I knitted this last fall, but only put it to use last weekend when we pulled the trailer out of its winter respite.

Pockets for cellphone, glasses, current reading material, and even holds earrings and other personal decor. And I had yarn in my stash that coordinated well with the blue-and-beige trailer decor.

Proof that sometimes you don’t need a pattern to accomplish something. Just hold it in your mind’s eye and do it.

I’m hoping to start taking the trailer on our winter vacation as well.

White Southern Oregon style.  No snow this year.

Cozy Christmas socks

Useful item: a pocket for the bed remote-control to hang between us.  (That’s a remote to control the sleep-number, not a tv remote.)

Next up:  a sweater from Peg Gaffney’s corgi knitting book.  Note brindle yarn.

Not “real” snow, just frozen fog. Though the fog was so heavy yesterday that the weather button reported it as “snowing lightly”. I know that the everlasting fog combined with the dark affects my mood, but it was a hard week nevertheless.

It would be pretty, if only I didn’t have to drive to work in it most days.

I sometimes wonder if vacation days are worth it. They don’t mean that I work less: it’s just deferred until I return.  I took two days off before Thanksgiving and it left me behind all week.  I know that I shouldn’t grouse about it with so many unemployed and underemployed people out there, but being “overemployed” is taxing (pun intended). I’ve now held “the day job” for 16 years and 3 months which means that I have spent basically all of my 40’s there and am working hard on the 50’s. My goal has been to leave when I hit 60 and some days that feels attainable while other days I despair that it won’t be.

Sometimes I look back and can’t figure out where the 16 years went; it feels as if the time was squandered.  And in another 16 years we’ll be 73.  If it passes as quickly as the last 16 . . . and I fear that it will.

We would like to take another winter vacation in February or March and go to where the sun is shining.  It would be so much easier to leave if there was one more person in the department as my understudy and to do the invoicing.  Kathy handles the a/p and payroll now, except for the more involved bills and the taxes.  Mari processes payments and does a good job with collection calls.  Both answer calls with billing questions and are kept busy 40 hours per week.  I really can’t assign any more tasks to either, especially when they see personnel in another department get paid for knitting and reading books while they wait for the phone to ring.  Kathy knows how it is because she worked in monitoring before moving to my department in 2003.  She learned to crochet there.  But on the other hand working for me does not require nights, weekends, and holidays.

I would so much like to spend my time knitting and reading books . . .

Of course I would have no place to put an additional person in our office, were I allowed to hire one.  When the office was redesigned a few years ago, our department was short-changed on square feet per person.  We have a beautiful spacious central station, and have been told it is a showplace for the industry.  We have a sales department with a lovely conference room and private offices for people who are seldom in the office.  But such is the way in the business world.

Other depressing news for the week:

The Bandon shows are not on the 4th of July weekend in 2010.  We will need to go ahead and release the campsites we reserved to lose only the reservation fee.  If anyone wants to go to Bandon and camp on the non-dogshow weekend let us know right away.  There appear to be lots of campsites still available for the following weekend: the 9th-11th or 12th.   The Lost Coast (Ferndale) shows will be 3 days on 4th of July weekend (the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th) and I presume that Redmond will also be that weekend.  And if you want to go to Bandon the dogshow weekend, let us know that as well (and which nights) so that we can reserve the appropriate number of spaces.

Yesterday would have been Jawoo’s 16th birthday.  I miss her: though it’s the young-to-middle-aged Julie I miss, not the ancient dog she had become.

Yesterday an ultrasound revealed that in spite of 4 witnessed ties Nola is not pregnant.  So there will truly be No-Pies.

Tuesday night when we returned from the SOKC meeting there was a message that Wendy-Sue, littermate to Kacy and Axel, had died the day before.

On the plus side, I finished the socks I was working on over Thanksgiving.  I’m keeping this pair.  Other recent projects included a pouch for holding cell phone, glasses, book, etc. for my side of the bed in the trailer.  Only Tom’s side has a nightstand which has been inconvenient for me.  I’ll take a picture of that someday when it’s hung up and in use.

I’ve knitted on-and-off for years, though I started on large projects like afghans which I did not always carry with me.  Socks are much easier in that regard and are useful as well so I have enjoyed working on them.  I presume that there have been family members who did not realize I could knit (or for that matter do anything considered at all domestic).  When I was working on my socks last week in California the remark was “Oh, you’re knitting socks.  How nice.  That’s the first thing we did as children when we first started knitting, before we moved on to bigger projects.”

The only thing I could figure was that maybe they were tube socks with big yarn.   The fitted socks are actually somewhat more complicated than the afghans, sweaters, hats, etc that I have also knitted. Humph.

Time to quit playing on the blog and to get some programming work done for the other job.  And I have the laundry detergent set out in the kitchen to thaw as it solidifies in the garage where the washer and dryer are.  The garage is refrigerator temperature when it’s this cold outside.

Maybe the sun will peek through tomorrow or the next day.  Do not believe the NOAA forecast linked on the blog.  It is obviously written for people flying by in airplanes.

I think these came out kind of pretty.

I’m finally feeling competent to bestow them as gifts to others.  The recipient of these was niece Mari.

I’m already working on the next pair, but I’m not very fast having limited hours to work on them.  I seem to be averaging about one pair per month.  How long until retirement?