Packing continues here in lovely Apopka. The yarn room continues to be filled with more boxes and containers than were even in there previously. It is interesting to see the house seem to gradually empty into a couple of rooms which are completely impassible. It will be an experience for me once everything is once again out of the house to see it’s bones. I don’t think it has been completely empty since I bought it. I spent a couple of weeks cleaning it before I moved in with my friend Liuba as there was a lot of, well, gunk on the walls in the kitchen and stuff like that. We had it mostly empty while we remodeled it a while back, but not completely empty. I am going to be sad to leave this house. I bought it when I was only 21 not knowing just how hard buying a house is supposed to be! I think that had I known I wouldn’t have done it. I’m not going to say that this is one of those fantastic stories that you hear about all the time, where someone buys a house down on it’s luck and magically transforms it into a palace. It isn’t, the house still has serious limitations but I am leaving it a much more livable structure than the one that I bought. (For example, it has A/C now. It didn’t when I bought it. Seriously. I lived here for a year with no A/C.). Still, I have spent a third of my life here and it will be hard to say goodbye…..
Wool washing also continues. Luckily, wool washing appears to be coming to an end. I am on my last sheep fleece from Rhinebeck, all I have left after that is to wash lovely Chico’s blanket and everybody is clean… I finished washing the Romney’s fleece and it is even more lovely clean than it was greasy. It has more silver in it than I even thought. Now I am working on the Romney-Rambouillet crossed fleece which is another of the white fleeces. Lots of soaking it in the washer and hauling hot pans of water out to it. I’m glad that the alpaca fleece doesn’t need hot water since it has no grease in it.
With random balls of yarn that I have found around the house as I was packing, I have broken 1000 on the Ravelry stash list. That means that I have 1000 different kinds of yarn, not 1000 skeins or balls of yarn. I have way more than 1000 skeins since many of the kinds of yarn that I have I own more than one ball of it. Still, it is dubiously a banner day for me!
I am optimistically hopeful that we may have found a place that will work for us in the UK. Not only would we be able to live there but the entire zoo as well. I don’t want to talk about it too much for fear of jinxing it, but I will say that it even has a greenhouse!!!
I’m not going to talk about the inauguration here. I listened to it on NPR and I am sure that there are LOTS of folks blogging about it. I’m just glad, in a perverse way, that it is happening before I move overseas. For the past 8 years I have felt that I had to apologize when I told people over there that I was an American. I no longer feel that way. I am happy and proud to be an American and I hope that I stay that way…..
(MSW-101, Birthday-spa day-11)
Sarah Jane Humke 