Life's a Stitch

Back in the day, if you lost your car keys, there were two options:

1. Call your carefully guarded key code into a locksmith and have them cut another key – $4.50.
or
2. Have the locksmith make what you thought was an expensive house call  $45. He would do his magic with something like wax and graphite, return to his van and emerge five minutes later with a key.

Twenty years later, what happens when you lose your car keys? Here’s my story:

Arriving back to our friends’ home in Seattle after our cruise a couple of weeks back, C accidentally discarded our keyset into the recycling bin during an act of neighbourly  kindness. By the time we realized they were missing,  the recycling had been collected.

In calling the nearest Kia dealership we were educated to the realities of today’s car key. What looks like an innocent key actually has a dual purpose. Embedded in the plastic head is a computer chip that controls the engine immobilizer. The chip must be programmed to your particular car. The car must be present at the dealership for the process. There would be charges for the key blank, cutting the key and programming the chip – about $150 at the dealer plus the fee to tow the car.

It doesn’t end there,The car is in it’s first model year, meaning key blanks are not yet available from generic places such as e-bay. Funnily enough ( another Canadianism) they are not even available at most dealers. The only key blank for our car, in the entire Pacific Northwest, was located thirty miles north in Everett. Ching ching. Then there’s the replacement of the also recycled keyless entry remote and its programming.

To hell with this, says Chuck, Actually he said much more than that, but I won’t get into it. Borrowing our friend’s truck, C drove the three and a half hours back home to Vancouver, returning the next morning with our second set of car keys and a much improved attitude.

They call this progress.

Progress of another kind:

Recently subscribing to Interweave`s Knitting Daily, I have learned the truth about UFO`s. Only 2% of polled knitters have no unfinished objects. 36% have between two and four, 36% have between five and eight, and 6% of us have over 20 UFO`s hanging around. That`s all I needed to hear to cultivate a worse habit. It`s like reading that over 42% of women own more than two dozen pairs of shoes and giving yourself permission to buy a few more. I, myself, am the owner of only nine pairs of shoes so I feel entitled to a different vice or two.

Knitting progress on the two additions to my UFO list since reading that article – the Hemlock Ring blanket and my second faux Montego Bay scarf. So far, the colour in the scarf is pooling randomly, but with my recent Lorna’s Laces experience, I’m sure it will look OK overall. C says it’s an interesting giraffe-like pattern. Just what I want for something that goes around the neck.

What’s this?

It’s not half of a bikini top. It’s not a hat. Nope, it’s not a knit artichoke or even a tea cozy.

Give up? It’s the beginning of Jared‘s Hemlock Ring Blanket. Jared morphed a 1942 doily pattern into a blanket by using chunky yarn and adding rows of feather and fan stitch, hence the doily-roid description above. He says it’s made with 660 yards of yarn – a quick knit. So quick in fact, that someone participating in the KAL has completed three in ten days! Sounds like some serious doping going on there.

I’m using this Tatamy Tweed DK, another example of vacation stash, and am knitting it doubled on size 10US needles. Tatamy Tweed, spun in Pennsylvania, comes in 250 yard skeins for $6. It’s the evergreen colourway and contains about half cotton and half acrylic. Great stitch definition and looks and feels like a high quality, higher priced yarn.

WARNING: Rant ahead. I believe it comes with age.

Why, when you call your bank, are you asked to punch in your access number only to be asked your access number again when a service rep finally picks up the line?

The other one that bugs me is when you can’t reach a person without punching in something you don’t have to begin with. Our bank that held he mortgage for our apartment in Washington required you to punch in the zip code of your billing address, but it wouldn’t take the Cdn postal code of our billing address. There was no way to get to a person without that bit of identifying tid. To top it off, the recording tells you that they are trying to protect your privacy by requesting the information you can’t provide, insinuating that you mustn’t be you, since you don’t have the required information. All these hoops and I only wanted to make a payment over the phone.

I believe in privacy legislation, but my local bank won’t let me deposit money into my minor child’s account if I have forgotten his account number because it would be admitting that he, indeed, has an account at that institution and that would be a breech of privacy. I’ve asked them to take my money, and after I leave the bank, deposit it, if an account indeed exists, otherwise they can just keep the money, but please don’t make me have to come back. The irksome fact is, that if they would access his account, they would see that it was actually established as MY account, held in trust for him.

What about being put on hold, repetitively listening to the recording telling you how much your business means, and at the 45 minute mark being told to try again later and then getting cut off.

I’m on a roll. Have you had an encounter with Amtrak’s Julie, the automated ticket agent? Although the train leaves from Vancouver, Julie won’t accept a Canadian credit card. After the third request for an "agent" Julie says something like," I think you are saying that I can’t help you and you want to be connected to an agent." Julie has a keen sense of the obvious.

One more, I can’t help it. You are unable to make comments on other’s Typepad blogs, nor can you link to those who have commented on yours. Typepad blames the web browser, the web browser people blame the internet provider, the internet provider blames the wireless modem company. Turns out Typepad was right, the problem resolved by switching browsers. So, Typepadders, I will be visiting and commenting once again.

Two of my vacation stash enhancements: LL Shepherd Sock yarn for another faux Montego Bay scarf and three half price Annie Blatt kits for gifts. I believe Blogless Marsha and I have bought all but two of these kits at Seattle’s Math Store over the past year.

Where to begin? I’ve been on vacation, starting with an unpleasant medical procedure that left me with a two day headache and a bruised neck. There was nowhere to go from there, but up. Lets start with the two, five and nine:
Two countries,
five cities,
and nine yarn shops.

That sounds like a good holiday to me, but add in six good friends and four nights on a cruise ship and its a formula for perfection. Living on the West Coast gives us many opportunities for inexpensive shoulder season mini-cruises to ports laden with exceptional yarn booty. Enough talk, here are the pictures:

That’s the Mercury, which for us, started out in Seattle, where we visited the Acorn Street Yarn Shop, Weaving Works, the Fiber Gallery, the Math Store (which unbelievably has a yarn department) and So Much Yarn. Next stop – Nanaimo, BC, home to the Woolly Ewe.

There’s Blogless Marsha saying "It’s time to get you an evening knitting bag, rather than that muslin shopping bag." At Halloween, instead of cruise ship carved ice decor, there are wonderful jack o’lanterns.

Then there’s the parliament building in our province’s capitol, Victoria, with the best in BC knitting store – the Beehive Wool Shop. That’s a family of Vancouver Island sea otters. If they got any closer I’d be figuring out how to include some shed fur into a knitting project. You know I’ve knit possum before, right? Doesn’t seem so weird after that.

Back on land we hit Great Yarns in Everett and the new Apple Yarns in Bellingham. The icing on the cake was a visit to B’Ham’s Trader Joe’s, finally open after eighteen months of rumours and construction. So now it’s back to reality.

Look at the difference between this year and last:

I’ve been out of town this week, no time to post, so I’ll leave you with my scarf at the halfway mark. You can get a good idea of the drapiness in the first and the colour in the second.

When all the world is a hopeless jumble,
and the raindrops tumble all around,
heaven opens a magic lane…

(Over the rainbow, Arlen-Harburg, 1939)

Our house this year, with the 17 year old, has been a struggle. Academics have not been his strong suit and his highlight in the school play was over shadowed by an act of poor judgment. Each day begins with a battle to get him out of bed and often times ends with a pointless discussion prompted by a letter, sent in the mail by a teacher, paradoxically called a progress note. So we grab our successes when we can.

If you have five minutes watch this. Please forgive my bragging, I do try to avoid such behaviour outside of knitting of course. Here’s the boy, in his team’s prize winning 72 hour film festival entry, Capeless. Their requirements were that they use film noir as their genre, use a paintbrush as a prop, and begin or end the film with the line "I’m going to need to borrow your car." Bryant wrote the screenplay, wrote and performed the score and was the primary actor. He won the prize for best composer of an original score and his teammate won for best cinematographer. It proves to us how successful he can be when something catches his interest. We just have to get this guy through traditional high school and on to other things.

PS: If you can’t get the video to run, go to Youtube and search for Capeless. It’s about the second one down.

In BC we call it budging, elsewhere it’s cutting in or jumping the queue. It bugs me. I can’t figure it out – is it a laid back West Coast thing or a Canadian trait, but here, people are generally good about taking turns. Lining up to cross the Lion’s Gate Bridge, where three lanes merge into one, people take turns. At MacDonald’s, people dutifully form one line behind an imaginary point and funnel in succession as clerks become available.

I say generally, because there is always an exception and it always happens to be when I’m in line. For instance, waiting for a chance to wash my car at the self serve car wash. There are three stalls and I’m sitting there waiting for the next one to become available. In comes a car that zooms around me to wait for stall #1. I get brave and approach the guy (no generalizations here, but today at the bank with a neatly formed queue, awaiting for the door to open, an employee comments on how orderly we look. Two of us observed that it must have something to do with gender).

Back to the car wash "Excuse me," says I, "I’ve been waiting."

"That’s not the way you do it," says the driver.

"That’s the way I do it at the bank and at MacDonald’s,"  I tell him.

That’s not what you do here." he says in an exasperated tone, "so which one do you want, make up your mind.

Very politely I say, "I want the one that you’re in." I take secret pleasure watching him back up and move to stall #2.

I’m sure he was thrilled, however, to see that he beat me into his stall by 30 seconds.

On the way home I witness another form of budging, the person who sneaks through a stop sign on the heels of the car in front of her, not waiting for for her turn. She proves that it has nothing to do with gender. All I could think of is "You’d better be in labour, honey."

As long as I’m witchin’ about stuff, let me turn on myself and my inability to visualize what a seemingly beautiful handpainted yarn will look like when knit up. Many times I’m disappointed. This time,however, I lucked out:

That’s Lorna’s Laces Shepherd’s sock yarn in Gold Bar and a faux version of the Montego Bay scarf pattern from Interweave Knits. I found similar stitch pattern in a book and, as they also say in Canada, Bob’s your uncle.

Extra, Extra – Did you see that the current Vogue has an Alice Starmore pattern? What a treat. An A-S pattern without the hundreds of dollar expense of a kit!

Now for the C word.Yes, I’ve crossed the line into the world of crochet. In my college years someone taught me to repeat one stitch, thousands of times, until it became an afghan. Many years later, not having touched a hook, I saw this pattern and vowed to learn how to crochet properly. It’s from a Leisure Arts booklet called Color Bright Creatures. It also has patterns for afghans made up of lions, puppies, frogs, birds, turtles and adorable pink piggies.

So I found myself in a three session class at my LYS, where hopefully, I’ve learned everything I need to know to make that afghan. In the meantime, I finished this scarf, quick and easy pattern with icky chenille (no wonder it’s been discontinued) Fiesta Chinchilla silk yarn. Pretty colours but rough wormy chenille. The pattern is Float Away from the Interweave website. I added picots to the wavy points and omitted the fruit loops-esque fringe. It photographs better than it feels.

Finally, I was tagged by Nina, of Two Sicilian Chicks, with a meme. I like this one as it is short, sweet and interesting. You go to page 161 of the book you are currently reading and share sentence #5. My sentence is "I worked next to my mother-in-law, squeezing together the balls," (are you getting nervous?) "using this rice to protect more rice, that most precious of daily foods." Sentences can be funny our of context. It’s from Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See. I had no idea that one in ten girls died from having their feet bound. I’m going to cop out on tagging anyone, but so many of you are readers and talk about books on your blogs, so if you’re interested, I invite you to take part in this itty-bitty meme.

WARNING: may be offfensive to vegetarians and knitters who don’t eat lamb.

Yes! A lamb dinner:

On a Tuesday night? To what do we owe this great pleasure?

That would be what happens when *someone* takes laundry out of the dryer, and instead of folding it into a basket, piles it onto the plug from the downstairs spare fridge. It brought back memories of the time when our freezer experienced an unexpected thaw, which gave me the opportunity to cook duck, turkey and beef all in one day. Thank goodness I was on maternity leave and had the time and need for excessive caloric intake.

One more thing – I still can’t comment on Typepad blogs. Seems I only had a brief reprieve last week.