This and That

Thank you for all the great ideas that you’ve come up with for our anniversary! I even got a comment from someone who wrote the book on what to do in Minnesota! Thanks Amy. Thanks also for MNLacer’s very thorough research! And indigorose has faith that I would be able to conquer my fear of heights and to go up in a hot air balloon! Anita and Dave have good ideas too, we’ll have to consider them. Miss T, I’m not going anywhere downtown until the RNC is over!! I’ll leave the contest open until Wednesday morning at 10 AM central time in case there is someone else out there that still wants to comment. The Compadre and I have had lots of fun discussing what we’ll do and considering all your ideas!

I’ve been continuing to work on the fleece that I washed. I spun some of the carded wool and found that it made very nice yarn if I didn’t care about the slubs that I got from the neps (little bumps) in the fiber. I did some internet research and found out that some people use a tool called a flick carder to tease the wool apart and also to remove some of the short fibers that cause slubs or neps in the spun fiber. I happened to have that and tried it. Gosh – more work before I can actually spin this fiber. Yes, it worked, but I got tired of it really fast. I might as well have hand carded it. More experimenting is in order. Maybe I’m “teasing” the fiber too much and can put it through my drum carder partially teased. I’ll keep you posted. There is a meeting of the spinning study group tomorrow and I might be able to get advice from them.

Saturday morning the Compadre and I had great fun going to the St. Paul farmer’s market. I rode my scooter and he rode his bicycle. It was a role reversal. He’s always been a much stronger bicyclist than I ever was and so it was so much fun to see him biking as fast as he could and I was just putzing along going really slow. Of course I had a 50 cc motor helping me :-). The farmer’s market was crowded with people. We don’t go very often because it’s so far from our home it’s hard to justify the miles but it’s fun. Live music, friendly people, colorful produce, heavenly baked goods, and on and on, it’s too bad I forgot my camera. Now that we can go by scooter and bicycle maybe we’ll be able to justify it more often. And the trip itself is part of the fun.

On our way back we passed a shop that sells motor bikes and I noticed that they sold jackets. I’ve been told that even though I ride a scooter that it would be wise to have a better jacket than my denim Taz jacket. I bought a high tech, pink and white real motorcycle jacket. It has “armor” or hard pads in the arms, shoulders and even a pad on the back. But it has a removable lining and when you do, the air flows right through it so I’ll be able to wear it even when it is hot out. Yay! I'll have to wear Taz for non scooter outings! We stopped at the grocery store also on our trip so we found out how much we can carry home between the scooter and the bicycle. My pink crate on the back was full and the Compadre had a pack on the back of the bicycle. We could carry even more if he were to put full panniers on.