we interrupt this blog post

I know I promised to post the rest of our travel photos "tomorrow" a week ago. And I will, possibly later today. Where does the time go? I'm going to tell you a little bit of news, then I'm going to go outside and shovel snow, then I'm going to decide what we are having for dinner and make a shopping list. I'll walk to the grocery store two blocks away through this blizzard, and then come home and start cooking. Or maybe I'll get another blog post in first.

The news: We have been here for eleven days now. Surely the weather is colder than we are used to and there has been snow on the ground the whole time. I don't mind, it's just one more new experience. Well, not new, I did after all grow up in a place that has real winter. But it's been twenty years since I really lived in a place that has weather like this and that it is a normal thing that will stick around longer than a few days.

We are enjoying our new surroundings and are making new friends. The "street" we live on, the one on our address, is not actually a street, it's a sidewalk off a street. I'm guessing it used to be an alley for horse-drawn carriages? At any rate, it means that all our neighbors are close but we have an amazing amount of privacy. With no cars going by, it is also very quiet, which I love. The place we were in before was noisy and not at all private, and I felt like a caged animal in that house. This house is much nicer than the one we moved out of. It's smaller, and far easier to keep clean. I can't tell you how happy I am about this. Sam is happy too, she has been more affectionate with Dan here than she ever has in her whole life.

So my first bit of news is that I have been requested to write a blog for a private company. It hasn't started yet, as the company isn't quite ready to get going, but when they are that task will fall to me. I'm pretty excited about that, it's a great company.

The second is that I had an interview with the Wasatch Community Gardens on Monday. I had contacted them in December, in applying for one of their intern programs. I am passionate about local food and I wanted to get involved with the local foodshed right away, this seemed the best place to start. After my conversation with the coordinator, we agreed I am a good fit and so will be their 2014 Urban Farming Apprentice, starting in a few weeks. Much of the things they want done are things I have done before, in terms of compost rehabilitation and soil building, and there will be some organizing too (yay! I love organizing).

The biggest news: I have been in touch with a few people from the University of Utah, having met a number of them at the AMIA Symposium back last November. After a meeting yesterday morning that I was hoping would result in a job, ended up resulting in an application to do a second Master's degree. I was kind of deflated at the suggestion ("but I already have and MSc in this field!") but it became clear that there are many more doors open to students. This is not to say there won't be work for me beforehand, and I am making my rounds and meeting all the people. There is a dearth of qualitative researchers here and I am SO EXCITED because I was warned all those years ago that there wouldn't be much work for people like me. There hasn't been. Until now. I am in the right place. So HURRAY! I have sent off my resume to a number of people and some of them have heard of me already. I'll go to the research seminars presented every week (the U is an 11-minute train ride from my station, which is only a block and a half away) and will get deeply reacquainted with what is happening in the field. Turns out there is a lot happening at the University of Utah.

It all happened so fast yesterday that I was still spinning by the end of they day, but it feels right. If I can turn that Master's into a PhD, I may do just that. This is a place I want to stay for a while, I can certainly commit to being in Utah for at least five years. More if things are good for both me and Dan.

Oh there is one other thing - we got fitbits! I heard about fitbits in November when I was at the Symposium and have been thinking about them ever since. Certainly with the stress last year and the difficulty exercising (due to crazy schedules and not feeling safe in our neighborhood), I have regained much of the weight I had lost back in 2011. But I did it once and I will do it again. This time it will be much easier (well, if weight loss can be easy) because it seems like a video game and watching the stats on my iPhone app is a data manager's wet dream. People are obsessed with these things. I hope I don't become like that. I'll let you know.

Still one other thing: Thanks to my Twitter buddy Donna Druchunas, there is a small group of us doing a group course of The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. I have owned the book since 1998 and have done the program a couple of times on my own, but it is nice to go back to it with a bunch of buddies and see how we do. I may do some blog posts specifically about that - I hope I have time because this kind of work digs up a lot of stuff formerly buried in one's psyche.

Okay that's it, I really have to go shovel snow. I will try to post photos later!

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!

WordCamp Victoria 2012: a brief recap

I love conferences. I love going to these kinds of events where a whole bunch of interesting brains are in one space and having one big gigantic brainstorming love-in, with lots of different options of which session to go to. During and after each session I always feel like I want to press the "pause" button so I can run off and write in my journal about all the thinks [sic] I'm thinking. But there is no pause button alas, and I just simply have to take copious notes and hope that I remember to revisit every detail later in writing. Is that even possible?

Here is what happened: On Thursday, someone retweeted that there were extra tickets available for WordCamp Victoria if someone wanted to attend but couldn't afford it, just go to the website and contact the guy. This was a right place-right time situation, and I was on it. I contacted the guy, was registered and two days later I was there.

So were 300 other people. Holy cow, this was a thing! This un-conference (as it was billed) is for WordPress enthusiasts, but I figured there would be lots of content for people who are social media fans and bloggers in general. I knew that I might perhaps be lured to move my blogging activity to WordPress. You have been warned. There is an actual Social Media Camp in Victoria in June, but by then I'm sure I will be long gone to North Carolina with green card in hand.

I will do another post about the specific sessions I went to, because there really is just way too much content to put into one post (and you might not be interested in it anyway) but there were some general observations and themes throughout the day that I would like to share with you.

Who was there? Good question. I didn't actually interact with a lot of people in person, believe it or not. I spent most of the day being an audience member, and as so many people were live-Tweeting, it meant that those same people (I was one of them) were not interacting with other attendees. That did feel admittedly odd, since the whole point of an unconference is to interact with people. But that's the thing, right? It's about being online. I did get to meet a few people from Twitter (was starstruck by a poli sci prof from UVic, @janniaragon who is interesting and prolific, she later referred to me in a tweet as "statuesque"!) and made a bunch of new Twitter friends. It was kind of surreal. In one session, someone I follow on Twitter (@scribbler9) was tweeting about the same seminar I was in, so I tweeted "where are you sitting?" she said "second row, red water bottle", and I said "I'm in the third row, blue water bottle". Then later, a new Twitter friend/follower asked if it was me knitting with the pink yarn (I think I was the only person knitting there). It was like public stalking, but in a good way. In terms of demographics though, it seems everyone was proportionally represented, given the demographic of Victoria. I would say more than half the attendees were 45+, more than half were women, there were not many visible minorities. Lots of technogeeks (as evidenced by the sheer volume of iDevices) and WordPress superfans. There were writers, photographers, graphic designers, social media junkies, academics and laypeople. And all of them were Tweeting.

There were seven sessions, one per hour between 9am and 5pm, plus lunch. There were two keynotes and I missed the first one (I think I was confused about the schedule) but everyone was live tweeting the content so I felt like I was there. I'll talk later about the specific sessions.

What surprised me: people schedule their blog posts. Then they schedule the tweets announcing their blog posts. There is software to do this for you. Does this seem weird to you? It did to me. Some people tweet about their blog post three or four times to make sure everyone reads it. Then there was talk about linking from all the social media sites, Twitter and Facebook being the main two, but Google + being a leading contender and people are actually using LinkedIn. (For the record, I hate LinkedIn, never found it useful when I was on it and would go back with a great amount of resentment if I had to). There is a feature in WordPress that gives you suggestions on what to blog about. Um, what? Toni and I were talking about this the day before, about what an odd thing that was. Why blog at all if you can't think about what you want to write about? What I found hugely surprising is that no where in any of the presentations I saw was there any attention to language skills, to grammar, punctuation and spelling, or to the conventions of writing. Is that a given? Is it even an issue for people who blog that if you don't have the language skills that you might not retain a sophisticated readership? As a word nerd, I was rather shocked by this absence.

It also gave me cause to give some thought to why people blog, tweet, and otherwise engage in being an online presence and social media. There was a very clear message early in the day about being your own PR manager and creating your own personal brand, because everyone, it seems, has something to sell. Lots of people want lots of people to come to their blog so that they will attract advertisers so they can make money from blogging. This made me uncomfortable and I have to do some thinking about why I blog. At the moment I blog to keep people up to date with what kinds of adventures YarnSalad is having, and I hope that will always be interesting. While I think I have lots to say and I am delighted that I get more than a thousand hits to my blog every month, I do need to think about the future of my blog. A future employer or publisher could be reading my work here so this must be a consideration. I'm sure if you Google my name this comes up high, and it is true that potential employers and landlords are using Google to see what kind of person their applicant is. I am one of those people with a unique name (and not a Kevin Miller or something like that) and a solid internet presence, so I do have to be very mindful of the content I put on the Internet.

At any rate, by the end of the day my mind was full and exhausted, but I am so glad I went. I will start paying attention to more things like this in the future because I think unconferences like this will proliferate and, well, you know me, I like to be on the cutting edge (that was sarcasm). Something to consider though, is how to keep the balance of being a smarmy salesman engaged in shameless self-promotion and being a sincere human being behind the keyboard? Hopefully, dear reader, I will keep it real and that will mean you will continue to hang out with me.

the whole point of having a blog

In my case, one of the reasons I keep a blog is to keep you, my readers, informed of what is going on. Sometimes that turns out to be interesting random stuff, like picking rosehips from the side of Kennedy lake and turning them into a sauce for the duck to be roasted. Sometimes it's about the things we make. But lately, as my life has taken many turns and tumbles, it is really to keep you posted on what I'm up to and how I'm doing.

A long time ago there was a tradition of once-a-year form letters that people wrote & tucked into their Christmas cards. Then came the big blanket emails that some of us sent out to everyone, not wanting to repeat themselves or to save themselves the labour of writing out the same story 50 times over. For me, at this moment in my life, I bypass all that rigamarole and keep a blog. The Adventures of YarnSalad.  Some people check it regularly and each time I make a new post, I tweet it and post a link on Facebook.

I was very surprised then to hear that someone who follows me on Twitter and is also a Facebook friend only realized yesterday that I was back in town. I've been back for a month. With all the ways I go to great lengths to keep in touch with people, communication can still fail and I have to accept there is nothing I can do about that.

Versatile Blogger Award

O look! Someone gave me an award!

 

This is a pay-it-forward award of recognition. Isn't that sweet? This one was passed on to me by my friend Ursa.  Here are the rules for receiving this award:

1. Thank and link back to the blogger that awarded you the badge. - check
2. Share 7 things about you. - see below
3. Award 5 – 15 other bloggers. - see below
4. Contact these bloggers to let them know about the award. - will do this after I publish this one

  

Seven things about me

(and here I will list things that you wouldn't already know from being a regular reader of my blog)(which will be tough, because I share a lot with you, my readers)

1. I grew up in Alberta, left just before I turned 21, lived their for five months in the winter of 2004/5, and hope I never have to live in that province again. I hate the climate, the attitudes, the government, the consumerism, and just how boring the whole thing is. BC suits me way better.

2. For most of my adult life I have been saying I have spent most of my adult life in post secondary institutions. It took me 5 1/2 years to do my BA (started at community college, transferred to university to  finish), did two years of a second undergrad degree before starting my Master's, which also took me two years. That equals nine and a half years. But I have been an adult (more or less) since I was 18, and I'm 37 now. That makes 19 years of being an adult and half of that is 9 1/2. So now, for a little while, I can say "I've spent half my adult life in post secondary education" but soon this will, in fact, be less than half. 

3. I had my right ovary removed in emergency surgery when they discovered a cyst the size of a grapefruit in the summer of 2006. The following year, I had bunion surgery on one foot. The year after that, I had the other bunion surgery. I hope I never have to have surgery again. 

4. I have an extremely difficult time saying "I love you" to people I love. My husband is the exception, we say it all the time. But I rarely say it to my family. It feels awkward in that context, like unlubricated metal grinding on metal. Those words were not said much when I was growing up so I was really unaccustomed to using them for most of my life. My sister works very hard to make sure they say it in their family, but for me it just feels strange. 

5. I have had a lot of therapy/counselling, especially when I was in my 20s and in university. I did a tremendous amount of self-work in order to be less socially awkward, more honest with myself and others, more accountable for my actions and to be a person of integrity. I really didn't like who I was when I was in my early 20s so I heeded the lesson of Richard Laskin, Ph.D., who was my professor for my first year Sociology class: "Pay Attention". 

6. Paying attention was a segue into mindfulness for me. I studied Buddhism for a few years in my early days of religious exploration (and eventually went down the path of Pagansim, which I have since left), and internalized a few Buddhist lessons. I like to think I have developed mindfulness, and for me that means paying attention to what the other person may be feeling/thinking in a situation, considering the context (why are they reacting that way?), and being circumspect. I also learned non-attachment which sometimes manifests as aloofness. And that may have to do with #5. But I can let go of things, places, people, without a huge emotional disturbance.

7. I think I have developed a coping mechanism by which I forget unpleasant things. I say "I think" because I'm not sure. I know there are big patches of my life that I have no recollection of. There have been countless occasions when someone would say "Remember when... " and even if the event wasn't unpleasant, I have no recollection. Even with further detail I don't remember. This goes for times in my childhood as well as in my adult life. Maybe there is a section of my brain where synapses don't form. But lately I have been referring to this as my "delete" mechanism. My sister said "remember when..." and I say "no, I must have deleted that."

Well now that seemed to have turned into an Exploration of Stacey's Psyche. Hm. Don't mean to get so heavy, sorry! And now for the next bit:

Other Versatile Bloggers

1. Oh Sweetie

This is Diandra, who is a young mom, academic, foodie, knitter, designer, all-around crafty gal. She's really into the farming grow-your-own-food movement and has a bazillion ideas about... well... everything. 

2. That's the Life

These are friends of ours in Ucluelet who moved here from Toronto to follow their dream. I often refer to them as The Good People at Stellar Coffee, because they are about to launch their roastery! Dan & I refer to them as 'K2', since both their names begin with K. They spend a lot of time outdoors here and chronicle the movements of the wildlife that surrounds us. 

3. Stacey Homemaker

This is also a friend of mine, Stacey (spelled correctly), who only recently started blogging but she really seems to have gotten the hang of it. We met in 2005 while first year students in the B.Sc. program for Health Information Science. It's hard to believe it's been almost six years since then! Stacey blogs about food, crafty stuff, style, and (at the moment while she is on vacation), Hawaii.

4. Silverrose

I can't remember how I found this gal - was it on Twitter? And she has a few handles so I don't know her first name, either. What I *do* know is that she knits beautifully, loves to spin, blogs about things like My Little Pony biscuits she made, and is about to graduate from... I'm not sure what. But she's a busy gal and always has interesting stuff to say!

5. Backyard Feast 

Another friend, Toni. We met while working at the library in Victoria in 1999. They (she and The Skipper) bought a house with a yard in 2009 and have been working hard to maximize their food-production space in the back yard. Toni not only posts about their seedlings and raised veggies, but also explores workshops and events in her area, discusses books she's read, features photos taken by The Skipper (an excellent photographer), and often waxes philosophical on how gardening/farming/food production changes the way you think about things. Every post is carefully crafted and thoughtfully written (she is a PhD in English, after all).

6. Nerdy Together

Now here is something amazing. Amanda has made it her goal/obsession to create a scarf or some other wearable neck piece every day of 2011 and blog about it. Yesterday was Day 110 and she hasn't skipped a beat, despite having been sick a few times and taking a trip to - where was it? Disneyland? She knits, crochets, sews, and otherwise assembles all manner of textiles & fiber into things you can wear around your neck. I was so darned excited about her project I crocheted two of one of her early patterns, called the Sideways Single Crochet scarf (and my photo for one of them is the feature photo in Ravelry!). Do check her out, you will be amazed at her level of inspiration!

7. Flounder Guts

This is Dan's (as in my husband) blog. He doesn't post very often but when he does, his posts are full of content and photos. They are well-thought out and carefully researched, as Dan used to be a regular blogger when blogging was first invented.

And there you have it!

ghost readers

Are you one of those people who reads blogs but doesn't comment? If I'm getting 500 hits a month on my blog, that's an average of 16 readers a day, not including me reading my own posts. Almost nobody comments.

Someone else whose blog I read (or was it on Twitter?) mentioned this. I'm sure we all have our reasons for not commenting on a post. Maybe we like the anonymity. Maybe we have nothing to say. Maybe we don't know how to comment, or find that whole entering-the-gobbledygook-word a bit of a mystery.

See this is one of the reasons I got these gadgets on the sidebar. That way I can see I have had readers recently from Winnipeg, Western Australia, Germany, and Rhode Island. Where are you friends-I-haven't-met coming from? How did you come to my blog? I would *really* love it if you told me how you found me. No really. I would. And if you have a blog, chances are, I'll start reading you back. I'm a pretty good commenter!

The week that kicked my butt

Hi friends,

Another brief update for you. The hard drive on my beloved HP laptop was failing, then I hammered the nail on the coffin when I tripped over the cord and it came crashing to the floor last week, shattering the tablet touch screen. Dan salvaged what he could, was able to recover most of my data, but because I use my computer so much we had to find me a new computer to use fast.

Yesterday we drove out to Courtenay to get Camilla, the little white Samsung netbook I am writing on now. I don' know why I have named her Camilla, I'm not in the habit of naming my electronic toys, but there you are. Some guy listed it on Craigslist for $120 and the thing is not even six months old. We were happy to take a trip out of town to get it! The keyboard will take some getting used to. The shift key and apostrophe are in different places, so I'm backspacing a lot to get this text out.

We popped over to Comox, since I'll be picking my sister & niece up from the airport there in April. Lovely little town, so many deer!

Somewhere during the day I started feeling sick, which is not at all surprising since Dan has been sick for much of the last week. I haven't been sick since June, was rather smug that I had sucessfully avoided being sick twice while my dear husband suffered. That's what I get for kissing him before the contagious period ends.

This means I had to call in sick today, and will be staying home tomorrow too. It's always a bit nerve-wracking calling in sick when you are new to a job. But I work in a hospital, and really, you don't want the person who cleans the instruments and handles the supplies and drugs to go into work sick, do you?

 I'm writing to you from my bed and I think I'll soon be going back to sleep. Cold medicine is taking hold, you see, and I need to chase sleep. But there you are, the reason I have been, as they say, dead on the air. (Though not if you follow me on Twitter, since I have the Twitter app for my phone). Also, if you are friends with me on Facebook, I got flamed last week and am having a Time Out from Facebook. I find I get much more respect and positive communication with Twitter. You know what they say: Facebook is for friends who are more like strangers and Twitter is for strangers who are more like friends.

my other blog

For those of you not on Facebook or Twitter, I have started a second blog. I have long been searching out The Perfect Coffee, and go out of my way to find local roasters. This new blog, called Dark Roast Vancouver Island. will be reviewing each dark roast coffee I find here on the Island. My first review was of a Starbucks blend, but I do have at least five others lined up. Local roasteries seem to leaping up all over the place and with all the good coffee available on the Island, it's time they got some press!