Spinning in the Dark

 Last night we had a rather wicked monsoon storm.  Over 32,000 homes and businesses in Tucson lost power.  A special thank you needs to go out to all he crews and staff of Tucson Electric Power Company who cut their weekend short to work through the night to get the power restored to the greater Pima County area.  There were still pockets of power outages this morning.  However the vast majority of businesses and homes had their power restored.  

Now it’s the turn of the cable companies, phone companies and data processors to fix their end of their share of the damage so businesses can run smoothly again.  I know that this will involve replacing some electronic equipment and rebooting other equipment.  This always takes longer.  

What we were doing during all of this.  We were out to dinner when the storm hit.  I just watched the very heavy rains while eating dinner.  It was not until we got closer to home that we saw and had to drive around tree branches that had snapped off of the trees. When we got to the house we realized we had lost power when we couldn’t open the garage door.  

John got all the flashlights ready.  He even had one that was powered off a drill battery.  It was too dark to knit because all of my projects are currently using dark yarn.  So I took my flashlight and grabbed a bowl of spinning.  We moved to the back yard to cool off.  The backyard was cooler than the house. I managed to spin almost 3 rolags in the dark.  I was using one of my Golding drop spindles.  I would highly recommend this spindle for spinning in the dark. The grove can be felt by finger tip. It’s very well balanced. The hook is very easily managed in the dark. Below is a picture of last nights spinning.  For a very low light spin, I am happy with the results.

Plying Yarn

 I took my Hansen mini e-spinner pro on another test drive today.  I set things up to ply yarn.  It took me a few minutes to change the direction of the spin to clockwise.  There were a few bumps that were soon fixed.  The e-spinner is very intuitive.  I finished a skein and 1/2 of art yarn plying.  The only other way that I have gotten my plying so consistent is with a Golding or Forrester drop spindles.  I have not managed that level of consistency with either of my spinning wheels.  

I find it very interesting that I can achieve great results in plying with very old school spinning equipment and very new school equipment.  Just not on the middle ground of equipment.  I will have to ruminate on this for a few days to try to figure this out.  If you have any ideas or opinions, I would be very interested in hearing from you.  

My only regret with my Hansen mini Pro e-spinner is that I did not order 5 bobbins, I only ordered 3 purple ones to match the wood.  I am sure that this is easily fixed when I have time.  

I do need the input from my younger readers.  Today while shopping at Sephora.  I was checking out and the sales person who I did not know called me mom instead of ma’am.  Is that a new thing among younger people to call older women mom or was she just not sure of the etiquette of the situation.  I was really taken a back by this.  Then probably spent too much time overthinking it. If this is a corporate thing, just stop, it’s rude and some people who are older have never had kids so they don’t want to be called mom. Please feel free to weigh in on this.  

TTFN

Cravings

 Tonight was just a top off to a bad body day.  I was craving ice cream and chocolate pudding. Both of which are big no no’s on my post retooling diet. I am on a very low fat diet. It’s great for the scale, I have dropped  8 pounds down since the retooling and 13 since I got sick. This is very bad for my bad inclinations of eat yummy high fat food occasionally. I landed up settling for chai with soy nog and a few low fat cookies.  

Tomorrow I am going to be ordering more low fat vanilla soy milk. 

On the bright side I plyed 1 small skein of yarn on my favorite Golding Drop Spindle.  I also got 2 more ready for plying.  I returned 2 drop spindles to their homes. I also played with a very lightweight drop spindle to start spinning the 1st shearing of some baby alpaca, talk about a heavenly spin.  

Well it’s getting late and sleep is necessary for healing.  

To get your own Golding Drop Spindle go to www.goldingfibertools.com.  I have several and you can never go wrong with buy a Golding spindle. They make great gifts too.