so much has happened

Hi again. Remember me?

In the time since I last wrote, Dan and I walked into a furniture store and I noticed the "Office Help Wanted" sign. I inquired, thinking not much of it, but the lady was very interested and had me fill out a three-line application form and didn't need to see a resume. I came in a few days later for an interview and all of a sudden I am working four days a week processing payments for furniture. It happened so fast! It's not exactly what I was after but it will do for now. Everyone is nice and we did get some furniture.

The store is selling off all their used furniture and only going to sell new from now on, so there was a steep discount on these pieces. Out of the three yellow sofas on display, we took two of them. I was so delighted! The big octagonal coffee table will have its bamboo middle removed and Dan has ideas for something artistic in the future.

So I'm working mostly 10-6 shifts, and on my off days, it seems, I have to stay at home and wait around for tradespeople to come. We don't have internet at home yet (how much will it cost?) so I haven't had a chance to bring my laptop to the brewery to use the WiFi until today, and it means that I have also been out of touch. I've started receiving messages from people "Hey I haven't heard from you what's happening?" so I'm very sorry.

With two new-to-us sofas (for a total of three) and our two camping chairs, we had barely enough seating for the 12 guests we had over for St. Patrick's Day last weekend. Dan made two kinds of corned beef, boiled cabbage, and a vegan chili. I made the Kale and Brussels sprouts salad that my friend introduced me to last year, and a focaccia that, in the last few minutes, got burned.

 Dan bought dried ancho chiles, soaked them, peeled the skins, macerated them, and they became the base for the vegan chili.

Toasted almonds for the salad. 

 Two bunches of kale and a bag of Brussels sprouts all chopped up!

 Mixed together. I didn't have a salad bowl big enough so I used the top of my Tupperware cake taker!

 Rutabega, turnip, beets and carrots roasted for the chili

Roasting vegetables and the corned beef, which eventually became pastrami!

I made the focaccia recipe from the rebar cookbook for the first time. (Seriously - every foodie in Victoria who is or knows vegetarians or vegans has this in their kitchen - it is a fantastic book and I highly recommend it!) and it was going well (I'm still getting used to baking in a gas range) until the last few minutes when, it looked almost done and Dan suggested we put it on broil for 30 seconds, I went upstairs and he forgot about it and...

We reseasoned the top and by the end of the night it was mostly gone, so I know I'll have to make it again!

I had made some decorations for our party but I didn't get them finished - I knitted up a bunch of shamrocks and was going to string them up but just ran out of time. We at least had green napkins and dishes. The invitees were basically brewery staff and a few significant others. It was lovely to have everyone over! I do love to entertain. Sam hid upstairs all night, of course, not being fond of more than say two people at a time. We are still eating the leftovers and I am looking forward to hosting our next event. Maybe next time we will have a dining table and chairs!

This is the built in bookshelf in the sun room in the southeast corner of the house. It is quite a lovely room and it will eventually be full of plants. Each day I have a day off, I do a bit of painting, it looks like each of the four colors will take three coats. Since it looks like I'll be working quite a lot in the next while, this will probably not be complete for another two weeks or so. I sure am happy with it!

I have also been planting seeds left and right. Every container I can find gets filled with potting soil and seeds. I bought a bunch of seeds from a local distributor when I first got here. Then two new friends gave me a bunch of their seeds. Today I found some more (cheap!) seeds at the hardware store.

These seeds are from The Skipper, who gave them to me just before I left Vancouver Island. I have hundreds more to plant and the space to do it! It's been really cold here, like below freezing at least every third night, so I'm glad that I haven't been able to plant anything outside yet. I need rather a lot of infrastructure before I can do anything with this massive yard, but it seems full of flowers that look like snowdrops just now so both Dan and I are reluctant do mess with it. We will definitely need at least a dozen yards of topsoil, spent grain, manure, and any other inputs I can manage. I'll be building a three-bin compost system much like the one I had in East Sooke - made of pallets and chicken wire - but more structurally sound. I even bought myself a hammer today! I lugged a 40-pound bag of potting soil home from the hardware store, six blocks from the house. I figured I had been lifting 55-pound bags of concrete all fall and winter, surely I could manage this.

The truck is still without a clutch. The place that will fix it was busy with an engine rebuild, and poor Dan just hasn't had time to go talk to the guys to book the truck in. Once it is again drivable, I can do things like go grocery shopping or drive to further locales for interviews. I also still need a NC driver's license, but that seems to be a complicated issue (a driver has to have insurance before they can get a DL) and all these things take time that we are having a hard time finding right now.

Oh this is important. We have been so far rather disappointed with the Asian food out here. Last week Dan had to drive to Hickory (four hours away) to drop off some beer for a festival next month, and because it was my day off, I went with him. On the way back we stopped in Raleigh to go to Whole Foods for ingredients for our party. Lo and behold! There was a yarn store next door! Of course we went in to Great Yarns, Dan bought some yarn so each of us could have a new pair of socks - the socks for me will match the burnt orange shirt Dan's mum gave me for Christmas! We admittedly went a little crazy in Whole Foods, it sure was fun. I sure do miss having a good bulk foods section!

While in Raleigh, we went to the Guitar Center so Dan could look at stringed instruments. While we were there we were approached by this creepy guy who was trying really hard to make conversation with us (OH YOU'RE FROM CANADA DON'T THEY HAVE CARIBOU IN CANADA) and eventually Dan said "I'm going to go look at banjos", to which the guy invited us to his church even though we told him we don't live in Raleigh. Dan played his "I'm Jewish" card even before I had a chance to think of a reply and away we went. Nobody around here knows how to respond to Jewish people it seems. I wanted so say "Dude, that's creepy!"

So that put us in a bit of a sour mood, and we needed dinner. Dan said "I don't know, how about Vietnamese?" I looked in my Google Maps on my phone and sure enough, there was Pho Cali across the street! We pulled into the parking lot and it was a Vietnamese food lover's paradise - right next to the restaurant there was a Vietnamese grocery. We were SO happy, we walked in and felt like we were at home! We went a little crazy there too. It was good. We have three kinds of sweet chili sauce now. :-) We put the groceries away and went to Pho Cali. It reeked of old cigarettes and urine, but the service was so quirky and friendly, it looked like it was going to be good. It was. In fact, we declared it better than Pho Vy in Victoria, and it was, for me, the best pho I had ever had. So that made us really happy.

That's my newsy longish post just for you on the eve of my birthday, and I have to work tomorrow. I had a shoutout from Louise on the Caithness Craft Collective podcast recently, thank you for your kind words Louise! I must admit that despite feeling like there are not enough hours in the day and feeling stressed out about all kinds of things, at the end of the day I am happy that I get to be in the same room as My Sweety. That was all I wanted for twenty months, what more could I ask for?

Chicken in a kilt

Ok so in November I participated in a swap put on by LouiseJHunt of the Caithness Craft Collective podcast. This particular swap was for a handwritten letter and a handmade Christmas decoration.

I was paired up with my new friend Arlen, a Scot transplanted into Boise, Idaho. I didn't have much information to go on for what to make him, but I knew he was originally from Scotland and that he had a number of chickens. So obviously...

Because chickens wear kilts, right? Well, even with a quick Google search, I didn't find chickens wearing kilts, but really they should because, especially for hens, it would be good for them if they have a randy rooster that has his favourite girls who lose their back feathers with all the attention. Chicken sweaters are a thing, why not chicken kilts?

ineptitude, despair, and restlessness

What a cheery title for a blog post.

Before Dan came to visit me from October 27th - November 15th (which is largely the cause for my internet quiet), we (thought we) were on the verge of having my interview date. We had resubmitted the things the National Visa Center (NVC) had asked us to resubmit (namely, the Japan Police certificate and the photo), and we were sure we were just a few days away from getting my date. Then they said "we need you to resubmit the photo again". So we did. And then we waited.

Finally, two weeks later, they said "we need you to resubmit the marriage certificate".

WHAT THE FUCK.

We submitted that in June or July, and seriously guys, if we have to adhere to a checklist of things to submit, why can't you check all the things that need to be submitted on the same checklist? And why not tell us all at once if there are things that need to be done instead of waiting five months?

So Dan dutifully resubmitted the marriage certificate and got the usual banal response "please allow up to 20 days for us to process".

So once again, or still, I have no idea what the next month or three or five holds.

I'm so tired of being tossed around. There is supposedly an "expedite" flag on my file, and given that my priority date is January 5, 2012, we really expected I would have been there by now. Are they really just messing with us? Because it sure seems like that with every single thing we have to do or step to take, there is a problem. It is so exasperating.

Prior to my medical exam, the appointment for which I am not allowed to make until I have the date of my interview in Montreal, I am required to get some vaccinations. The flu shot is easy, it's available anywhere. In September I called the public health clinic and was told I could get the other vaccination, Tdap, free, any time. I went to get these done yesterday. I got the flu shot at a pharmacy, and while the pharmacist did not have the Tdap (Tetanus, diptheria and pertussis) vaccine, she said I could just go to the public health clinic four blocks away and get it for free.

So off I went to the clinic. A snarky receptionist told me that NO they don't do the Tdap and that I would have to go to a travel clinic, that I would have to "purchase" the vaccine (why not just say pay for?), that I would need to make an appointment and phone around because it's not easy to find.

WTF.

Deep breath. Back to my truck. Look up number for travel clinic on my iPhone. Phone clinic. Get voice mail. Leave a message.

Two hours later they return my call. Nice receptionist. Appointment on Friday afternoon, $40 for the doctor's fee, $45 for the vaccination. So much for free health care in Canada.

Now I am mindful that Mercury is in retrograde so maybe after it goes direct on Monday then everything will work out. Even so, there is a limit to how much I can take.

I had a thing happen this morning which is not worth retelling because it is a minor thing, but it triggered an emotional response that basically broke the dam of emotions I didn't know I had been holding in. I cried for hours, felt gutted by despair, and wondered how the heck I am going to get through the next weeks or months until I can be with my husband again. I want to start living my own life again. I want to build soil and plant flowers. I want to be working and feel useful.

I'm not sure what I experienced this morning was actually a depressive episode. My last episode was some time in May, I think, and because I have had a number of them in the past year and a half that Dan and I have been apart, I am keenly aware of what it feels like. Today I was just sad and then mad. Why is my immigration taking so long? Do the letters of the senators and governors and other government officials mean nothing? Will I be with Dan for Christmas?


Yesterday I was installing foam insulation in the basement while listening to the Caithness Craft Collective podcast. LouiseJHunt has a segment called "Random Hellos" and she included me, saying "yarnsalad, how are you, O quiet one?" and that was very sweet. I have been unusually quiet-on-the-internet these past months, it's true. I have so much unstructured time you would think I would be able to put a blog post together a bit more often but alas, it has not been so.

So to wrap up, then, while I don't wish to speak disparagingly of the people who are handling my documents at the NVC, because we have had to submit and resubmit each document at least twice, it makes me wonder what their job qualifications are and what is happening to all the misplaced documents we have submitted. That's the "ineptitude" of the title of this post. Despair was me this morning, Restlessness is me now. I'm ready to move on to the next thing. There is a nice big house and yard waiting for me in Kinston and I can't wait to get unpacked. I haven't seen most of my stuff (in boxes in the basement) for a year and a half. How much longer will it be?

knitterly abundance

In the past few months, I have experienced some of the abundance the Universe has to offer. Some lovely things came my way.

Natalie from the Cloudy With a Chance of Fiber podcast (@cloudynatknit) asked us during a #knitchat on Twitter one day if anyone was knitting a sweater. I mentioned I would be but I can't afford a sweater's worth of yarn. She PMd me and said "what colors do you like?" and the next thing I know I get this box in the post.

Enough yarn for a sweater and then whatever else Natalie could fit into the box. Yarn for a hat. Some of her handspun. Plenty to keep me busy!

Not long after that, Ursa, my long time friend of 17 years and host of The Pagan Knitter podcast (@ThePaganKnitter), and formerly the dyer behind Gaia's Colours Fibre Arts, took me out for a birthday lunch. She said she was getting rid of yarn that didn't sell when she was shutting down her dye studio, would I be interested in going through it? UM YES.

So here we have an abundance of sock and lace weight yarn, a few bags of undyed roving that I will find a spinning wheel to work with, and then a few bags of tangled skeins. There will be lots of socks and shawls in my future...

Then one day I was on Twitter musing about knitted underwear or bras or something. My longtime reader and follower/friend @FelicityGS mentioned she had a book on knitted underwear, that she would send it to me.

When Brooke found out it was also my birthday, she delayed in sending the book a bit because she decided to knit me a present! She blogged about it here.

I think I can say with certainty that this is the finest thing anyone has ever made for me. It is lace, thousands of yards of yarn, I can't imagine how many hours it took (100+ I expect), and in three skeins of Malabrigo no less. So to Brooke I offer my infinite gratitude for such a beautiful piece! I wear it a lot (since it still gets cool at night) and will cherish this for as long as I live! I should point out that Brooke is in the category of "friend I haven't met yet", but one day we'll hang out, possibly at some fiber festival in the eastern United States...

In early in March Louse (@CaithnessCraft) of the Caithness Craft Collective podcast declared that we were having a fiber postcard swap, and that if we wanted to be included to send her a message and she would pair us up with buddy to swap with. The idea was that we would make a postcard and it didn't matter how fancy or simple, or even what kind of fiber, just that we make something. Well sure enough Louse paired me up with Judith (@elvetje), another "friend I haven't met yet" (so is Natalie, above, by the way), who is also waiting for immigration to the United States (but she has been waiting for years and she is in the Netherlands). The postcard I made for Judith was a poem I wrote and the state of Texas made from ribbon, stitched to a paper card. It's quite pedestrian compared to what Judith sent me and therefore I don't picture it here.

A stranded colour knitted matryoshka of me and Dan, ribbons and a card! 

On the back this is "To:    " and then Judith's depiction of me, yarnsalad. I love it!

Wait! There's more!

Now my memory is a bit fuzzy on this one, but at some point I asked LouiseJHunt, who lives in northern Scotland, about woad - dyeing with woad or woad-coloured yarn. This happened when I was still living in Ucluelet, I think, which was almost a year ago now. After a bit of information-finding, it turned out that you can't send woad (a plant used for dyeing things blue) to Canada or the United States. Something about botanical content, I bet. At any rate, Louise offered to dye up some yarn for me and send it. I delayed in having her sending it to me because I thought I would be moving soon. That was in September. When she was offering to make leather bookmarks for her lovely listeners, I took her up on it and she sent me this yarn as well.

437 yards of 80%baby suri alpaca and 20% fine merino in lace weight. It's beautiful!

So there you have it. I've been meaning to put this post up for a long time, and it's been more than a month now since I have received all this knitterly abundance. Here I offer up my thanks to all those mentioned here who have contributed to my habit, helped me to feel loved, and have shown me that the Universe is a place of abundance. Thank you, my dear friends!

well now I _have_ to blog today

O gosh my dear readers, I'm so sorry I haven't posted in nearly two weeks. Really? Twelve days?

I actually started a post telling you all about my visit with my sister & her daughter. It was tremendous fun and I have lots of pictures. That will have to wait.

Something happened today that made my day. I was driving home from Tofino, listening to the KnitWits podcast, when I heard Rick mention some of the listeners "there are even people with names like yarnsalad..." I was delighted! That's the third podcast now that I have been mentioned on (the other two being Caithness Craft Collective and Cloudy with a Chance of Fiber). Imagine how silly I felt when I discovered that this podcast that I had been mentioned on was released on March 11th. As in over a month ago. Sorry Rick & Carin. I love your show! I'm just working my way through it is all.

What else can I tell you to tide you over until I can make a proper post.. We have had a few days of sun here in Ucluelet. We know this doesn't mean winter is over. Winter is not over until April 30th, according to the signs on either side of The Pass, which tell you you must have tire chains or winter tires between October 1st and April 30th. Seven months of winter. And sunny days, while good for one's mood, do not necessarily mean warm. I think our high today was 10 - and it's been hovering around 7 for the last few weeks, so 10 isn't much of an improvement. O well. Soon we will have spring.

Knitting-wise, I have not actually been knitting very much since the Sock Retreat. Really. I have finished a piece for a secret project, and am working on another piece for that same secret project, which I obviously can't tell you about yet. But that is really fun and I can't wait to see it all come together. Don't worry, I'll tell you all about it. All of my Cookie A socks are on hold. I have gone back to a pair of socks I started almost a year ago and I really must get them finished. I only recenlty figured out how to manage the intarsia bit (thanks to a friend's help) so once I get that section done, I think these socks will fly off the needles and will be given to their intended recipient. Then I'll be on a sock-finishing streak, I'm sure. I hope. Just in time for flip-flop season.

turns out, I just need to eat more or, the embarrassment post

Well I am embarrassed.

I saw the doctor on my birthday. Went on about how I got sick and never felt like I recovered, still coughing, sore throat, etc., and oh yeah I've lost 24 pounds in the last three months. She looked at me. BINGO. (She didn't say that. Doctors don't know what bingo is.) She figures the reason my body wasn't letting me get better was because my body wasn't getting enough calories to recover. That certainly explains my high level of fatigue. She also pointed out that I'm probably cold all the time too (why yes!) So there it was, my doctor told me I should eat more cake on my birthday, and that I should slow down my weight loss program (from two pounds a week to a pound and a half or just a pound).

On that note, a couple of pounds ago I came down into the "normal" range of the BMI. That sure feels good. I have a growing stack of pants I can't wear anymore. I told a friend on Skype today that I'm shrinking out of my bras. We commiserated that the breasts are always the first to go when we lose weight. I also have more and more clothes I can fit into.

Here is something else that is a bit embarrassing. When I was doing laundry yesterday (I have energy to do laundry again!), I realized that I have five lime green tops. Five. I knew I liked this colour, and to be fair, two of them were gifts, but gosh it sure still seems like a lot.

LouiseJHunt LouiseJHunt LouiseJHunt LouiseJHunt LouiseJHunt LouiseJHunt LouiseJHunt LouiseJHunt

Yes, that was a total non sequitur, but LouiseJHunt seems to be mentioning me on every podcast (more embarrassment) so perhaps I should respond in kind by mentioning her in every blog post? Louise's podcast, by the way, is the Caithness Craft Collective Podcast out of northeast Scotland. It doesn't seem to matter what Louise talks about, I just like hearing her talk in the Caithness dialect. Thanks for the birthday wishes Louise! (btw, the word you were looking for was not 'humbleness' but humility, I think) (Okay I am listening to the Sneeze episode as I'm writing this post. Total multi-media junkie am I).

Tomorrow Dan & I will hit the road at 5am to reach French Creek for an 8am offload. Oh yeah, I still work at my fish counting job! There is a fairly large offload they need a hook-and-line validator for, and they need a second person to tag the halibut, so Dan and I will go. It's a long way but we'll be paid for our time and per kilometer (.43/km) as well as the time we are working. Working with My Sweety! A road trip! A trip into Town! Depending on how tired we are, I might be able to convince Dan to stop in at the Port Alberni Hops Festival on the way back (sorry, can't seem to find a website to link to).

Last bit of news: I am on sock #5 - I was shooting for seven before Cookie A comes next weekend but it was just too ambitious a goal. That's okay though, that means I'll have only five partners to knit after the retreat and that means I can move onto other projects. As ever, I have a long queue of things I want to knit!

drive-by friending

If you are a knitter and listen to knitting podcasts, you may have encountered the term "drive-by friending". This refers to people who hear or read someone's Ravelry name, and then add them to their friends list. The friendee recieves a message "yarnsalad has added you as a friend" and sometimes you have no idea why.

 I first heard this term while listening to Susan Dolph's podcast, Knitajourney. Louise J Hunt mentioned it in a recent episode and said that I was the first person to drive-by friend her. Really?

Last June, I went through the entire Ravelry group for the Electric Sheep podcast and friended every single person. At the time, it was something like 600 people. Total drive-by friending, and simply because (and this is what I told people when they asked) they listened to the Electric Sheep podcast and therefore must be a nice person. A few dozen people asked, a few hundred friended me back, no questions asked.

Ravelry is unlike Facebook in that there is no steady stream of status updates. If someone is in your friends, it simply means you have ready access to their notebook. This includes projects, queue, library, groups, and hooks/needles. You can see what they are knitting/crocheting, see what books or magazines they have, see what groups they are in. It's a great way to learn about the kinds of things that are out there that we may never have heard of before.

So drive-by friending on Ravelry isn't as invasive as Facebook is. When I joined Facebook the first time around, people I hadn't heard from since high school friended me, ostensibly, to stalk me. I found that creepy. I don't really spend much time on Facebook now, since I find I have all my social media needs met here, on Twitter, and through Ravelry.

This is all to say if you are reading this, are on Ravelry and haven't yet friended me, you are welcome to! My handle is yarnsalad pretty much everywhere I go.