Part One: Women

There's a rule. Don't go to Yarn Expressions on one of their variable-percentage sale days. (Draw a ticket to determine your discount. Most people get 20% off, a few people get more, one person gets 75% off.) Sure, the flyers are lovely, and the possibility of drawing one of the lucky tickets is enticing, but the actual experience of trying to make a purchase at the store on sale day can only be described as craptastic.

Errata in the truest sense of the word:

Courtesy of Brian, "Which Nigerian Spammer Are You?"

You are Princess Agbani. You are a student at the University of Nigeria, Lagos. You got my name through the chember of comerse. You have $21,350,000 to share, which your father, the king, left you. You have trouble spelling.

An evil little yarn from artfibers.com:

Sanskrit.

I'd just like to note that I do not need this yarn. That fact does not, however, prevent me from lusting after it.

I quote:

After a bit of a hiatus, one of our semi-completed household projects has been brought to full completion. Last weekend, I asked Jeff to cut the remaining pieces of wood so that we could finish up our new CD rack, since our current plethora of CDs outgrew our old storage facility at least six months ago.Once he'd attached a back and a stabilizing base, all it needed was a coat of paint and we were good to go. I applied the paint yesterday afternoon and brought in the finished rack after dark. I set it up in the reading room and thought, "Oh dear.

In this world, there are two kinds of yarn shops. The first are more prevalent; they have skeins and cones of yarn arranged in graceful rows of manufacturer, fiber, and colorway. They believe in browsing, newsletters, and knitting classes, and the employees proudly wear their hand-knitted clothing like the store samples they are.

Those are yarn shops.

But there is another kind - the kind buried not in the small-businesses section of southeast Huntsville, but buried in a sea of directions that start off like this: "Take Rideout Road until it dead-ends into Highway 53. Turn left and head toward Harvest. I don't remember how many flashing yellow lights you'll go through, but one of them's for McKee Road. Take a right, drive a ways, and we're on the left. We lock the front door while we're in the back, working with fiber, so it may take us a minute or two before we can get the door unlocked for you."

That, my friends, is a crack dealer in the guise of a fiber shop.

My grandmother never expected me to stick with yarn work. When I asked her to teach me, I think she was surprised, and even moreso that I persevered and became good at it. Later, I added knitting to my repertoire, but was never able to master the art of tatting (using carefully-crafted knots to create delicate lace).