Life's a Stitch

A national shoe fetish

Wonder what Google searches I'll get with that title? In a break from knitting, I give you the following true story:

I am not shoe addicted as some, as I am extremely tenderfooted, hence the need for comfy shoes as pictured on the left. I don't know how I was blessed with such namby pamby sensitive footsies. I live in Canada, but for years, my only footwear purchases were done in the good ole US of A. Chuck didn't understand, saying, " There are 30 million people in Canada, certainly they must have shoes for sale up here." Well, you know what, dear husband of 25 years as of next week?  They might have them here in the True North, but why then, do so many people cross the border to buy them?

It's all about selection and price, Not just women, mind you, I just came back from Black Friday weekend at a U.S. outlet mall, and there were an awful lot of shoe boxes and old shoes discarded in the parking lot. Vans, Adidas, Nine West, you name it. Shoe boxes in the parking lot - a telltale sign of Canadians in the midst. Supposedly the favourite smuggle-able item of cross border shoppers, next to gas. We have a reputation of keeping our shoes in spotless, as good as new, ah hem, condition. Of course that's a north bound reputation. Those US border guards think we have the stinkiest, well worn footwear on earth.

So, I'm at the Bass outlet with my favourite cross border shopper, Lynn. We do a yearly Christmas shopping trip together. Forgetting it was US Thanksgiving weekend until the last minute (bad American citizen points for me - is it my imagination or did they time Turkey Day early this year?), we proceeded anyway, strategically timing our crossings. Did you know that some Canadian shoppers wanted needed shoes so badly that they waited 3.5 hours on a border lineup to return to our shoeless country?

Lynn had met her patriotic south of the border shopping obligations by buying two pairs plus slippers by the time she had reached the Bass store. I was making my mortgage payment at Jones New York before meeting her. Arriving at Bass, I could see Lynn, through the window, fondling the leather. She was in good company, judging by the number of British Columbia license plates in the parking lot. I snuck in, sinking into the sock racks so as not to be noticed by the shoppers. I took a deep breath, and in my best authoritative voice, projecting as I was trained to, in the old fashioned days when theatre was done without those microphones attached to one's face, I proclaimed "STEP AWAY FROM THE SHOES."

There was a store-wide collective gasp, followed by a meek voice, a complete stranger, "I wasn't going to buy any, I've already bought four pairs...eh?"

A guilty conscience needs no accuser.

A little something for you dog lovers: What breed are you? Go on, you always wanted to know. Come back and share your results.

Before and after

The before shot doesn't look as bad as it really was and the after doesn't look as good as it really does.  Isn't it funny how a pretty driveway makes an ugly garage door look uglier?

Bryant discovers the curling iron. Before and after:

On our October vacation, Blogless Marsha told me if I was going to carry my knitting around after 5:00 on a cruise ship, I needed to consider an evening knitting bag. Before:

After:

The best part? 35% off the last marked price:

Back in the day...an example of how technology has complicated life

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:

Cultivating bad habits

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.

 

The doily on roids

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.

They call this service?

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.

 

Two, Five and Nine

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.

Nothing but colours

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.