Excerpt

I've been so busy with NaNoWriMo that I haven't really had time for fiber arts. In between writing sessions, which are getting more and more frequent as I get into the story, I managed to play off 90% of the frog hair, which now clocks in at more than 1500 yards of 2-ply laceweight silk, and measures at close to 7000ypp. I think I'm a touch insane?

Anyway, please enjoy the following excerpt from my novel-in-progress. I'm having a great deal of fun with this, and can't wait to get back to it each day, as the story gets more and more involved and the characters keep evolving into such full, rich personalities. I never know what's going to happen next!

enjoy!

edited: to fix formatting of excerpt - still not fantastic, but, hey, it's a first draft!
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“Matt,” I said flatly. “What do you want?”
“So it's true.”
“What is?” I asked suspiciously.
“You have a kid.”
“Yes,” I said warily. “So?”
He stepped out onto the porch. He looked good. He had been working out, and living in California had done wonders for his pale complexion. He had a nice even tan, like he spent a lot of time on the beaches and in the sun. He was dressed in dark jeans with sharp creases down the fronts and a tight, short sleeved black tee shirt that showed off his sleek muscles. He had his hair cut into a low crew cut, totally unlike the lanky long hair he'd worn in college and had it gelled in spikes across his head. I guessed that if I were to touch it, it would make me bleed it would be so hard.
He stared into my eyes with an intensity I'd never seen before. “Is she mine?”
“She's mine!” I declared hotly.
“Who's her father?” he asked pointedly.
“She doesn't have one.”
He cocked one eyebrow at me in that way he had that meant he was questioning my integrity. “Really?” it was more a statement than a question.
“What makes you think you fathered a child, you arrogant prick?” He visibly flinched. Good. “We had sex, what? Once? On our wedding night? Before you decided you'd rather go at it with the best man?”
He turned and walked over to the porch swing. The house was an old Victorian with an enormous porch on the side facing the water, and a smaller porch on the side facing the street. There had been a swing hanging from the ceiling of the porch on the street side as long as I could remember. He shoved the swing with his foot then turned to me again.
“You haven't answered my question.” he said simply.
“And I'm not going to,” I said. “You can leave now.”
“Your mom invited me to dinner.”
“Well, I'm un-inviting you,” I said hotly. “Good bye!” And I turned and walked into the house, slamming the door behind me.
“Where did Matt go?” my mother asked sweetly when I sat down on the floor to remove my boots.
“To hell, I hope.” I answered bitterly.
Before I could even make it to the kitchen, there was a knock at the front door. I stormed back and whipped the door open. “What?” I demanded.
“I need to talk to you,” Matt said. “You have to listen to me.”
“I don't have to do any such thing,” I declared.
“This doesn't have to be so difficult,” he said calmly. “I need you. Both of you.”
“Go to hell,” I said and slammed the door.
A moment later there was another knock on the door. I ripped it open with the wrath of the Furies. “I thought I told you to get the hell out of here!” I yelled as I opened the door.
Mike blinked back at me. “Slow down there, Firecracker!”
All of a sudden I felt completely deflated and exhausted. “Oh...shit.” I stammered.
“I could come back later, if you're busy,” Mike offered.
“No, it's fine,” I mumbled. “Come on in.”
“Thanks,” he said, carefully stepping onto the rug at the front door. “did you know there's guy sitting in your porch swing?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks.”
“No problem. Are you busy? Should I come back later?” He offered again. “Maybe next year?”
“No,” I said. “It's fine. Really. What's up?”
“Lauren?” my mother's voice called from the kitchen. “Is Matt staying for supper?”
“No,” I called back,
“Who's Matt?” Mike asked.
“The guy on the porch,” I answered.
“Why not?” my mother called back.
“Why's he out there?” Mike peeked around the doorframe.
“Mommy! Look at me!” Katie demanded from the stairway “I'm a fairy princess!”
“Is it always like this?” Mike asked.
“Because!” I yelled to my mother. I turned to Mike, “Yes.”
“I think I should go,” Mike hedged toward the door.
“I can fly!” Katie chirped.
“No!” I screamed as Katie leaped off the stair landing with an angelic look of total belief on her face.
“Ok, then,” Mike turned back. “I won't.”
I leaped toward Katie and she hit me dead center. I gasped as all the air burst out of my lungs, and I hit the floor with her on top of me. We fell to the floor in heap of crinoline and sparkly beads.
“Mommy,” Katie scolded. “You interrogated my flying!”
My mother came trotting out of the kitchen. “What on earth was that?” she demanded.
I lay on my back, closed my eyes, and the tears started to fall. I couldn't stop them. I had had such a crappy day, and now I was lying on the floor in a pile of pink tuutuu and glitter, and I couldn't stop.
“Are you OK?” Mike was kneeling next to me. “Don't move. Does anything hurt?”
I shook my head. I felt hands extracting Katie from the tangle we were in and my mother's voice in a low tone soothing Katie, who was also now crying.
“Ren?” Matt was now inside the house. “What happened? What's going on?”
At that moment the absurdity of it all hit me. I was lying on the floor in my mother's house, crying, after getting hit by a flying seven year old wanna-be fairy princess with my gay ex-husband and the co-worker I had a crush on standing over me. Could it get any more insane?
“Yo, what's going on?” The screen door slammed shut after Kevin, my little brother, and I started to laugh. At first it was just a giggle, a kind of snort as the laughter started to escape, and the next moment I was laughing hysterically, the tears turning to tears of laughter, until I thought I was going to pee in my pants from the hilarity of it all.
“Is she ok?”
“I think she has a concussion.”
“Is laughing one of the signs of head injury?”
“No, but I can't see her pupils, either.”
“Should we call an ambulance?”
“For laughing?”
“Mommy? What are pupils?”
Finally I laughed myself out, and lay there, exhausted. My face was wet with tears, and I could feel dampness in my hair by my ears. I opened my eyes to see five concerned faces looking back at me.
“Feel better?” my mother asked, with an odd tone in her voice.
I reached up a hand and a firm dry one grasped it. I pulled myself to sitting, and turned my back to the wall before realizing I was holding Matt's hand. I dropped it and scowled. I rubbed my face, trying to dry my cheeks. I must look a fright after all that.
“Well, then,” my mother said. “I guess I'd better put another leaf in the table.”

Announcement!

It has come to my attention that I am being charged with neglect of my blog.

I must plead "guilty."

This summer and autumn have been intense, and I have done a lot in the way of personal and physical decluttering. I hope you don't take offense, but I kind of withdrew in multiple venues, not only in blogging.

See, it started quite some time ago, a little over five years ago, when I moved back to Michigan. I moved into a tiny little house, and we (Little Boy and I) re-collected and re-grouped and I started to figure out where I was and what was going to come next. I threw everything we didn't need in everyday life into a storage garage and paid to keep it there.

Three years ago we moved into this larger house, with on-site storage, also known as "garage" and "basement" and I continued to ignore and procrastinate on the Stuff. I couldn't park in the garage, and I couldn't use the basement for anything but doing the laundry, but I managed to ignore it anyway.

This spring I decided I'd had enough. All summer and fall I've been decluttering my life - in terms of time, stuff, space, hobbies, stuff, wardrobe, and fiber. And did I mention the stuff? I had more stuff than I could possibly need in this lifetime, and I got tired of it.

I'm still tired of it, but I've been incredibly successful at selling it, giving it away, and tossing the junk. Only last week did I turn the corner, and start finding empty shelves and drawers around the house where I've gotten rid of so much stuff that there's spaces where I don't have anything to put there...and I LOVE it. An empty drawer in my desk! A shelf in the kitchen! Empty floor in the basement!

And I've been so focused on this process, so involved with living instead of planning that I kind of lost track of some things. Like my blog. And some friends...

And for all of this, I apologize.

I have to admit that the lack of blogging at some point went from being a case of neglect to a case of conscious choice, and it was mostly that I wanted to focus on me and my little family, and not on what I wanted to tell all of you or what would make a good blog-story.

And the truth is: I missed you. I missed all of you! And I don't want to quit you. I want to keep blogging, in some capacity. I can't get on a tight blogging schedule right now, as I am again doing NaNoWriMo (I love it!) and I am not going to let blogging compromise my novel-writing.

So maybe, in between chapters, when I'm going cross-eyed from writing fiction, I'll sneak in and update you on some of the wonderful projects and things we've done since last I filled you in.

Can you forgive me??

Accounting

Kiddo's been gone since Friday afternoon...and I've done nothing on the list of things I wanted done while he was gone. Instead, I have played, spun, visited, watched movies, slept, eaten out, and drank too much (once, last night at dinner. My gin and tonic was made as a double when I asked for a single. And I drank most of it before the food arrived. Glad I wasn't driving!)

Then today I woke up with a massive headache, and have spent most of the day fighting off the migraine. now that it's nearly bedtime, I might be finally winning. Of course, the 2.5 hour midday nap doesn't make bedtime come any quicker.

So I guess the accounting for my time indicates that I am unwinding. And I assume I will eventually get around to being productive at home...but doesn't finishing half an ounce of frog-hair and finally setting up for bobbin #2 count for something? (The first bobbin has two ounces on it, and it's not even 2/3 full.) And for kicks, Jofran tried to use a McMorran balance on the frog-hair, to see if there would be enough for the Peacock shawl, and a plyback nearly 8 feet long didn't even move the balance. She's guessing there'll be enough.

I've had it. I'm heading to bed. Maybe I'll crawl into the bath first... and hope that tomorrow I can be a bit more useful and maybe find the vacuum. I might even use it!

Loading up the Etsy Shop

I'm getting busy again, and have been getting a backlog of fiber and stuff for the Etsy Shop. So tonight I finally started taking pictures and getting them online. Thus, no delving into history tonight. (But since the Kiddo will be gone for a week, biking across the state with my mother next week, I should be able to throw up some more philosophical stuff and get deep again! Be sure to stop by her blog and encourage my Kiddo in his first big, multi-day ride!)

But if you'd like a sneak preview...

One new Batt Boy Batt: "Darkened Rainbow"And handmade crayons. Three sets of three crayons each, all made from Crayola wax, each unique and special! (only one set is shown here, the rest are in the shop.)

I have a huge box of vintage hats and purses I will be posting in the shop in the next week, and some of that fiber I've been taunting you with will be showing up, too. I'll be sure to let you know.

Thanks, as always, for coming by.

Oh, and Sara? The cheese tastes good - like farmer's cheese, sweet with a little tang. Very yummy. And I make yogurt all the time, and bread, too. It's all experiments in microbiology as far as I'm concerned! The trick is making sure you've got the right microbiotics in the mix - as anyone with sourdough starter gone bad will tell you!

Ghost Stories!

Antonia started it, but Alwen put my attention on it - ghost stories.

Unlike them, I am somewhat sensitive, but don't really see anything. I feel things, and get "that feeling" on occasion, but certainly don't walk around seeing auras and ghosts all day! But oh, that house in Indiana!

We bought an enormous brick house on Ohio St., in Terre Haute, Indiana in 2002 from the son of the owner. The owner, Virginia, had fallen down the stairs and died later in a nursing home. Virginia moved into that house when she was 9 years old, and lived there with her grandparents, and later her husband and children, until she died in 2001 in her 90s. Her son wanted nothing to do with the house, or the contents, and lived on the east coast. He and his daughters cleaned out some personal effects, clothing, and papers, but left everything else in there, and we bought the place, as-is.

This was an enormous house - 3600 sq.ft, not including the full 7' tall basement and the ballroom-like attic. And every inch of it was stuffed with the remnants of 90 years of one family living there. I found the grandmother's junk drawer and utensil drawer in the kitchen right next to Virginia's junk drawer and utensil drawer. Nothing ever got removed or replaced unless it was complete trash, and even then it might stay.

We knew from stories from the son, and from neighbors, that it was not always a happy house. Virginia's husband had died when he fell down the stairs some years before. Her grandmother had died in her bedroom on the second floor. (And if you're into architecture, this house was where I learned about the Coffin Door on Victorian houses, as it had one, as one of the FIVE exterior doors I was paranoid about locking every night.) I didn't get evil vibes from the house, though, and so we moved in. On top of Virginia's Crap, as it became known.

The first night I was in the house (my now-ex-husband moved down there 5 months before me to rewire and properly plumb the house) I was in Virgina's old bedroom, which we had decided was to be our room, and I was setting up the baby crib for our then-2 son. While I was working with the hardware and such I saw a bright light out of the corner of my eye, and then there was an explosion next to me. I screamed as bits of glass flew all over me, and he came running up the stairs to find that the ceiling fixture had "fallen" off the ceiling and landed next to me on the footboard of our bed where it shattered. We figured it was Virginia saying "hi."

Turns out it was her grandmother. Over the next two years we had many encounters with the grandmother, particularly in her bedroom, which became my sewing room. She didn't like my then-husband one bit, and would flutter in his ear and appear in the corner of his eye while he was removing the wallpaper from the walls (that was what passed for household division of labor in those days - he had to strip the wallpaper and wash the ancient paste off the walls, and I would repair the plaster, skim coat them, then finish.) She unnerved him a little, but never bothered me except for the one time when she fluttered in my ear. I said hello, and she left me alone after that, in what became my favorite room in the house.

The house had lots of walking noises, several roving cold spots, and eventually was the final straw in my already-failing marriage. The grandmother finally stopped pestering us at all after I asked my parich priest to come bless the house and he performed a release of spitits ritual and blessed the room.

When my step-father, Pop, died suddenly, I cried myself to sleep. The next morning I felt he was bugging, pestering me, and he wasn't stopping. Finally I ended up sitting at the piano, and he made me play Fur Elise for him, and I felt him leave about halfway through, after I'd played his favorite part. He used to sit and listen to me practice for hours on end, and would encourage and critique and be my number one fan, and I learned Fur Elise for him, and worked on getting the style the way he wanted it. I haven't played it since that morning. he has been known to play pranks and leave notes, too, like the time we came home to find the thermostat turned up to 90F right after we booked a trip the the Caribbean. And when Mom was having some woodwork done in the living room, she was worried about matching the stain since he had custom-blended it himself back in the day. And a ragged slip of paper showed up in his handwriting with the recipe on it, and nothing else.

I know there's more, but that's it for now. But if you think about it, pretty much every religion in the world acknowledges some kind of a spirit world with which we can communicate in one way or another. Just the fact that the priest was prepared and unsurprised, and had multiple levels of alternatives surprised me! I suppose it shouldn't have, but it did.

We don't know everything yet, but we sure like to pretend we do!

If you have a story of your own, feel free to add it to the comments! And Dan, if I missed any good ones about Virgina's house, please chime in!

Inadvertant Cheese

Little Boy came outside to tell me that the milk tasted like cream and was thick. OK, I figured, he's 9, right? It's only milk, right? I'll make it into yogurt tonight, since I just bought fresh milk today.

Not happening. Milk in its way to being yogurt does not look like this. This should be a pot of bubbling frothy white stuff, not chunky white stuff with yellow in it!
The scientist in me was interested...I couldn't ruin it any further, so why not play? I tried to stir it.
Ick. Curdled milk.

Wait a minute...! ould Great Grandmother's mother have thrown this out? It smells sweet, not sour, and it curdled up all by itself, so...

Following in the steps of our Foremothers, right?

I boiled it, then ladled out the chunks.
Left behind was yellow, pus-colored liquid. I believe this would be the whey?
So what to do with it? Ricotta!!

I added 1 Tbs of citric acid, and got more curds!!
Poured that through a makeshift cheese-cloth of linen napkins...
Hung it up to drain...
And I'm still waiting for it.

I tried to follow some online instructions to make the curds into mozzerella cheese, but I cooked them too long and got hard curds (and burnt my fingers something fierce!), so I packed it into a bowl, and we'll have farmer's cheese instead.
In the end, there's about 1/2 cup of ricotta and 400mL of farmer's cheese. Not too bad for the last of the "sour" milk!

So the interesting thing I found, after getting the mess in the kitchen mostly cleared up, is that if you do a search for cheese recipes, they all seem to call for fresh, new milk without the slightest hint of being "off". Makes sense, right? But did our foremothers really throw away or feed the pigs with imperfect milk? Or did they have some good use for it? Is this a case of lost knowledge or of my refusal to accept anything as "spoiled"?

Turns out, if you go check the old cookbooks, all the cheese recipes I found call for starting with sour milk!

Learned something new/old today.

Remember when you were a kid, and it was so hard to keep track of time? You hadn't internalized "time" yet, and summer days sometimes felt like a week, and a week felt like a month?

I've had a few days like that lately.

Friday night, after working all day, I visited a few local garage sales, and discovered that there were lots of garage sales that weekend. So on a whim I decided to drag all the stuff out of the garage that was waiting for donation and slap a sign up.

It worked. I got rid of half the junk stacked in the garage and made a decent sum, as well as knit lots of rows on Gansey, Jr. and got sunburned. All the big stuff disappeared, and I'm not disappointed. Not to shabby for not planning!

Saturday afternoon we went to Mass, since Sunday morning we had to be on the road by 5:30am, which came awfully early. We were scheduled to be water safeties during the triathlon my mom was running Sunday morning (which means we paddle around in kayaks and spot people who bit off more than they could swim). Sunday morning didn't dawn...it thundered. And lightning-ed. And rained.

The race started late, after several "all hands to cars" calls. When it finally started there were 2-3 foot tall rolling waves on Lake Erie, 60F water, and 60F air. I got rolled by the waves twice, another safety got rolled by his own wife (who was swimming and grabbed the side of his kayak) and the double with Kiddo and his Grampa was the only one that stayed upright. Kayak skirts might have helped a little - the waves were rolling over the bow and into our laps! Both times I rolled were from waves washing over the side of the boat and into my lap, swamping the kayak. Fun.

By Sunday afternoon I was whupped. We came home and read on the couch all afternoon before going to bed early. Kiddo slept like a rock.

Yesterday was back to work, then down to my cousin's house to pick up this year's llama shearing!!!!!! I got almost all the crias this time, so keep your eyes open for some wonderful spinning fiber coming soon!

I'm loving the sunshine and cool weather, and happy at the progress on my projects. I managed to get the Kiddo to start clearing out his toys to make room for some new Legos I bought at a garage sale last Friday, since really all he needs is Legos, books, and K'Nex to be happy, and not piles of random stuff he's outgrown. He believes it, and wants the new Legos and I want the space cleared, so we're on the same page, sort of. (And the new Legos were an incredble bargain! A couple of $100+ sets for $14 each!! I bought a bunch...we both like Legos.)

Thank you SO much for all the wonderful stories you've been sharing! If you haven't seen them, please go read the comments from the last Home Arts post - you won't be disappointed! I'm working on the next post in the Home Arts series, and am having so much fun with this! I'm glad you're enjoying it, too!