Saturday, February 06, 2010

 

Madness Takes Its Toll


Please have exact change ready.

It's all madness, all the time Chez Lapin these days.

The car situation has been resolved.

My parents, FSM bless their little addled noggins, decided to buy themselves a newer, smaller car, and give their old one to me. I am now the proud owner of a 2001 Chevy Cavalier -- the only North American car I've ever owned (apart from the Mercury Sable which blew up 8 days after I bought it, which has gone to the scrappers and about which we shall never again speak). It's too small, really, for business stuff, seeing yarn takes up a hell of a lot of room, however I'm going to see about having a trailer hitch installed and getting the wiring done so that I can just rent one of those little U-Haul trailers (and possibly eventually buy one).

It's got less than 100,000 km on it (60,000 miles for my friends south of the 49th), it has brakes, it's been maintained properly, and it has two scrapes (bumpers, nothing major) and a slightly-dented side panel (victim of last year's insane snows).

As for hauling, it's only a four-cylinder, but then again I'm hauling yarn, not lead ingots. It'll do us just fine.

You can't believe how grateful and relieved I am to have a reliable car.

As for the rest of the madness ... the main bathroom is fine, the second bathroom is completely festooned with brightly-dyed skeins of big fat singles which I will be selling as "weaving supplies", although they're also completely knittable. 100% New Zealand wool and I love it to death. I think I have another bunch of it that I'll dye today after I've had a little sleep, and then ship off to Seattle to my partner in crime, so I can haul it to California in just another couple of weeks.

I've discovered a hell of a lot of yarn that I skeined and then for some reason left on the loveseat (in the dining room ... we're about to get rid of it). I had thought I might be getting a little low on stock yarn, having spent a lot of my yarn $ on the blown-up car (oops, we weren't going to talk about that again). I moved some coats off the loveseat tonight and found skein after skein of undyed yarn. I just got another 12 cones in from my suppliers, so I suspect that I'll be fine. Right now the living room is piled high with many, many undyed skeins.

The box of dyed skeins that have to just be reskeined so they look tidy and then get ballbands put on them is huge. There has to be far more than 100 skeins in there now. My first 50 skeins that are ready to go have already hit Seattle. There's going to be a lot of yarn. I haven't even started on the fibre.

We can occasionally find a place to sit, but I think the entire family is resigned to the fact that for the next two weeks it's gonna be all yarn, all the time.

I'll try to get some pictures up later today. It's just utterly bonkers.

All I can say is that my family is just lucky I'm not trying to make them actually eat yarn. Or help me skein.

Yet.

And now ... to sleep, perchance to skein ...

Comments:
Oh Happy Day! Transportation - reliable transportation. I'm so glad to hear it, and the malingering yarn hiding in the dining room is just the icing on the cake. I'm glad to hear good news!
 
We used to have a trailer...we didn't maintain it well, so it died, but it was very cheap...we went to a RV place, and bought a used pop up camper! The canvas was No Good (and moldy) and we just uninstalled all the cabinets and beds, and canvas and all, totally cleaned it out, down to the bare wood. You would have had to then paint it, too, I suspect, for your yarn (we were just putting wooden 18th C camping equipment in it). But it was pretty light, once we got that all out, and towable by an ordinary car! And it would hold a LOT of yarn ;-) Easy to pack and unpack, as well....but ours had a leaky roof, (like I said, badly maintained), but something like this might work for you...

Our 18th C unit has a small trailer that you can stand up in...even empty, a car can't tow it, it's too tall and heavy, and unwieldy.

It was fun...we would crank up the roof, load it up, crank it down, and go! It was light enough to easily push around, and everything!
 
Fibre? /perk

What lovely and helpful parents. I'm so glad you've got the car business sorted out.

xo
 
YAYAYAY New car!!!

I cannot wait until we all get to play in CA!
 
Thank goodness for some good news. It blows about the other car but I hope the new(er) one works well for you. If you need some place to crash at (or another mailing address), let me know. And hooray for finding your secret skein stash.

Damn that's a lot of yarn.
 
You do realize,of course, that it isn't quite nice to tell all us landlocked folks in the middle of the continent that ALL your yarn is going to be on the left coast?

I can just picture your house - you are someone who keeps house exactly the way I do.
 
You're not making them help you skein yet? You are a wonder woman :)
 
I was wondering how the car blow up - sorry - was going to play out. I'm glad it worked out. You know, you could always get one of those thingies for the top of the car as well. Yarn is squooshy. It would be cheaper to start off with anyway.
 
9 years old with less that 60,000 miles on it-- that's great! And yarn is smooshable - you can jam a lot into a small space (again, unlike lead ingots!).
 
Hooray for good cars and found yarn!
Those car-top clamshells have worked well for friends of mine. I had doubts about the fabric version but it seems to work, and I think it's easier to bring in at night if you need to prevent theft (someone once stole a huge tent that had been on top of a friend's car - he was happy, he had been going to throw it away - but it did happen at a motel). They also flatten for storage.
 
Allow me to instruct you in the art of the FIBRE PIE. (fibre, you perve, I said fibre)
1. Pack it in a heavy garbage bag.
2. Roll it, squish it, kneel on it.
3. Take your handy dandy duct tape, and tape all around in both directins.
Voila! The duct tape keeps it flat and you can shove an amazing amount in a small space.

It takes a bit of practise for how much duct tape and where... at first you have these slowly expanding bags that press against the back of your head and your right cheek as you drive, and others on the highway stare at you in astonishment, but it gets better the more you do.
(I swear you must be responsible for the words in your word verification thingy... favoli. I know you could use that in a sentence.)
 
Yay for parents. I got some of my best cars that way. Unfortunately, I am in the parent position now and I can't afford to do the same. At least it is a happy ending.
Joan In Reno
 
So glad your car problem is resolved! I just sold my show van for $240, as it has electrical issues that no one has been able to resolve. The guy that bought it is supposed to be "ept" rather than "in," so I hope he'll be able to fix it.
We had to get a new furnace today, as we had a power outage that fried the circuitry that controls ignition, so the entire unit flooded with oil. Our furnace man said if it had gotten spark, the house would have blown up. So glad I didn't hit the reset button.
 
please consider putting the sprog(s) to work in the family business for a small stipend, doing things like putting on ball bands at first, and graduating to more complex tasks.

i began working for my family's flower shop at age 9, earning 25 cents an hour (it was 1953, after all!). by 14, i was making adult minimum wage, and worth every penny. i grew to understand why my parents often were too tired to do what i would have liked them to do, but i also had quality time with them on the job.

the experience served me well. i developed a strong work ethic, learned to save and helped pay for college. i had a long, stable career and retired with tidy retirement savings despite the great recession. (i often regretted that i had no such business to share with my kids.)

i don't know about canada, but under u.s. law, kids can put earnings into retirement savings, giving their money 5 or 6 decades to grow. even if that doesn't apply, learning to do a task well, to earn, to spend wisely and to save is a valuable experience.
 
"to sleep...perchance to skein"
You need to do the post-hypnotic suggestion to your family that they will skein while asleep and you will wake up with it all done! and they will sleep in and leave you in peace in the morning....
 
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