Saturday Sky: All About Joan

On Thursday we went to the annual Rangeley Blueberry Festival. It's primarily a smallish craft fair, with twenty or so vendors selling Maine-themed products like blueberry honey and blueberry jam, as well as assorted pottery, kitchen and table linens, woodwork, and so on embellished with blueberries and moose and so on. We didn't buy much, but we did meet Joan.


She was sitting next to her booth (or maybe a friend's booth? truthfully I didn't think much about that part) spinning Icelandic wool on an old Ashford Trad with a new jumbo flyer on it. She and I talked about wheels and drop spindles and wool and her sheep, and after a while Grant and Miss B ambled by, and Grant said, "Trust you to gravitate to the only spinning wheel here."
"Well, yuh," I said, and asked Joan for a business card, remarking that she lived in Oquossoc, which is right next to Rangeley, and she asked where we were staying, which actually is also in Oquossoc, and invited us to visit her and her sheep.


These are some of Joan's Icelandic sheep.


This is Joan's flower garden, which has nothing to do with sheep but is quite lovely.


This is the fleece Joan gave me.

I have to sing Grant's praises here. You know that conversation you have with your spouse from time to time, where he (it's nearly always a he) points out to you that you have an awful lot of wool, and you tell him what SABLE means if he doesn't already know, and he says, so you'll never need any more wool, right? and you say what does SABLE have to do with acquiring more wool? Grant and I have had this conversation a number of times, most recently at Joan's house. Despite his belief that I am clinically insane, not only did he not prevent Joan from giving me the fleece, but he is proposing to drive for four hours today with it in the van. (We didn't bring the clamshell this year because everything fit without it. Ah, the clarity of hindsight.) At least cool weather is forecast.

Thank you, Joan!

And, honey, I owe you (another) one. As if you didn't know.

Still the Same Old Story

I brought five UFOs with me on vacation, not counting spinning, and two unbegun projects with deadlines. So far, with under three days left, I've finished two of the UFOs, one of which was my sock pal Aine's Sockapalooza socks. She likes them! She really, really likes them! The other one was, well, not socks, and that's all I can say right now. The list of what I have not done is impressive: finished the bobbin that's been on the wheel for, um, how long has that been anyway?, started the time-sensitive items, made much headway on knit or crochet designs for new red scarves, or figured out what to do with a blue-green skein I handpainted.

Clearly my productivity needs a goose or two.

After the Loon Is Gone

Snake On a Log!

Endgame

Socks on rock...


Socks on dock...

Late Monday night I got very close to finishing my Sockapalooza 4 socks (you didn't know I was even in Sockapalooza 4, did you? um, sorry about that). Perfect, I thought, I'll just finish the last couple of rows tomorrow morning and get them in the mail.

A cursory inspection of that first picture will give you a clue as to the flaw in this plan: I didn't account for the time needed to weave in all those ends. Also, I had promised Miss B that we could spend the day at Small's Falls, which meant I wouldn't be near a post office. (You may wonder how I managed to miss these flaws. I wonder too.)

The good news is that the socks got to join us on our jaunt, and finished the day with their ends decently concealed. I put them in the mail today. (Really.) Furthermore, Miss B and her friend E had a great time riding the falls.



I kept assuring everyone that going down this slide really didn't hurt. It's only poetic justice that while everyone else agreed that this was true, I went down it slightly wrong, and hit a sharpish rock near the bottom. I'm told I have a lovely purple bruise in a location I can't see. (No, I am not showing you a picture of it. Is nothing sacred?)


We also rode the other slide a bit further down. The darkish spot in the middle of the spray is Miss B's head. Despite appearances, this slide is actually a bit less scary than the other one, after the first time, anyway. The surface is, ahem, a good deal smoother.

If you will excuse me, I'm going to go find an ice pack to sit on.

Drive-By

Technoleeches that we are, we've brought Grant's laptop to the library. It's closed, but we can use its wireless connection from certain spots outside. But since my family is waiting semipatiently for me, having already taken their turns, I just have time for a few random pictures.


The morning mist burns off the lake and mountains. It's about 50 degrees out, and the water is the heaviest, softest silk I've ever worn.


The clouds come up over Bald Mountain; we can see the light and shade coming toward us across the water.


A flotilla of geese passes by.


And the sun goes down.

Gotta go. More later.

Saturday Sky: Not Too Shabby

My apologies for the long radio silence: I've been getting ready for our annual Rangeley vacation, including lots of logistical juggling that I'll talk about later, along with atheism and knitting. (I have been knitting, really.) For now, since it's been a long day, I give you this year's baptism of Miss B.

I should have taken the camera to the grocery store, from which we emerged to see a spectacular sunset. By the time we got back here only a remnant was left.

As remnants go, though, it's not too shabby.