inkyblack.net

I have a horrible tendency to self-edit.  I will find tons of reasons why I won’t write, usually for family reasons.  I generally try to avoid pushback on delicate subjects, mainly because I know that “The Family” has my URL, and it would cause Teh Dramas.

I’m trying to overcome that.  I had thought that maybe I would keep a “sooper seekrud journal” elsewhere…maybe on Livejournal or Blogspot, but just couldn’t bring myself to do that.  I still have my old LJ account, and it gets dusted off once in a while to  put something that just needs to get out that I don’t want the general public to see.  Thing is…while starting yet another journal holds some sort of appeal, I’ve been blogging in this one for years, albeit off & on.

So, needless to day, I’ll try to do better.

This is my piano.  She doesn’t have a name.  She never did.  The information on her sound board indicates that she was “registered” in July of 1900, which means that she was likely built somewhere between 1895 and 1900.  The manufacturer name is Gerhard Heintzman, who built pianos for a short while back at the turn of the last century.

I’ve mentioned in the past that I grew up in a very artistic family.  My parents gave my brother and I a lot of encouragement towards art and music.  What many people don’t realize is that piano took up much of my formative years, and while some can walk away from their early training, I really miss it.

I expressed an interest in lessons around the age of 10.  Knowing that I’d dropped out of about 3 dance classes & was having trouble fitting into Girl Guides, Mum and Dad didn’t put a lot of faith into any long-term musical interest.  Plus, the age of 10 is a little late to start lessons — many serious pianists start developing their skills about 4  or 5 years earlier.  For the first year or so, I would practice at the church across the street for about a half hour each day at lunch with my friend Heather.  It soon became evident that I would need a piano of my own.

I seem to recall being sick near my birthday, so I was home from school.  I wasn’t allowed to come downstairs that day…and when she was moved in and situated in our living room, they let me come down and see her.  The picture really doesn’t do her justice, because the finish is nothing like it was back then — also…the living room of that house suited her.  If I recall, Mum & Dad picked her up from a neighbour whose sister had gone into nursing care & would no longer be playing.  Later, I was told that they almost literally got her “for a song”.

I didn’t stop after 2 years of lessons.  She moved with us to Yellowknife, where I completed my Royal Conservatory of Music Grade 8 Practical (I also finished my first year of Harmony, which is kinda like the equivalent of Musical Math & Composition).

She probably should have stayed in Yellowknife.  I had gone to college, and the thought was always there that once I grew up & got my own place, I would call for my piano and have it moved.  Mum and Dad, however, moved to Calgary, and brought her with them.  There was no room in their living room, so they put her in the sunroom, where she’s been ever since.  I moved from their house to a small townhouse, then a tiny apartment, and then to a house where we wouldn’t have been able to get her up the stairs to the living room (plus, we were never sure how long we would be there).  Finally, we bought our pretty little home in the Northeast of the city…and there’s no room for her here.  Actually, there’s some room in the basement, but we’d never get her down the stairs.  Pianos aren’t built like IKEA furniture.

Mum and Dad had her assessed for sale recently, as they want to clean up & fix the sunroom.  Her finish is crackled from moisture, her soundboard has some small cracks.  She needs to be re-strung, as she still has the original steel wires (amazingly enough, they haven’t rusted).  I gather she needs new felts, and I’m sure there is more damage that I’m not remembering.  She’s 110 years old.  When 110 years old you are, look as good you will not.

I’m hoping that Mum is able to post up her info on Kijiji and find a new home for her.  I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that her time on earth may just be over.  She’s come a long way from the front parlour of our old Victorian home. Dad has mentioned that if they can’t find a buyer or someone to move her away, he’ll have to dismantle her & take her to the dump.  There is a wee part of my heart that hopes that if this happens, he turns her case into a nice cabinet or desk (I’ve seen it done..it can look very pretty).

Myself, I’m keeping an eye out for a digital piano.  When we have the money to do so, I’ll be visiting the dealers in the city to try out their showroom models, and will either look into a new unit, or see what’s on the second-hand market.  I’m thankful that my parents found my sheet music and my Flute…so I’m looking forward to playing again.  Never know…I may decide to finish my training and get my teacher’s certificate

I seem to be having one of those months.  The rainy weather really really really isn’t helping.  I’m thinking that I should just go crawl into a nice hot bath and soak away the world for a while…such a girly thing to do.

I’d show everyone what’s on the sticks at the moment, because it’s really a very cheery looking piece of knitting, but I won’t…because Mum looks at this blog once in a while, and that would spoil the surprise.  Pictures will likely be posted either by the end of this week or the beginning of next.

Instead, I’ll share with you an (old) parody of the classic Canadian film/video icon, “Hinterland Who’s Who“.  Believe it or not, I actually forced my parents to sit down and learn about the Crack Spider’s Bitch a couple of weeks ago…

Sometimes you have to do a reality check, and remember the bits of awesome all around you.  Folks may have noticed that I haven’t blogged recently (not sure if anyone other than family reads this, but it’s true*).  Mostly that’s because life has been crazy lately, particularly with trips to various doctors for various things.  Nothing serious…one doctor who doesn’t believe my blood pressure is perfectly fine had me do a 24-hour heart monitor that, in the end, proved that (for once) I was right.  Yay!  Other trips to doctors were for girlie things that I’m sure the public doesn’t need to know about.  The last visit (yesterday) left me feeling so flattened that I had to take the day off work today to recover — headaches, what felt like a mild fever, and tummy upsets.  Yuck.  Should be all better for tomorrow, though.  A hot bath and a long lie-in will help that.

But instead of wallowing in feeling ugh-ey (yeah, that word?  It’s MINE), I decided to actually write a little & share some bits of awesome.  It’s been a grey, rainy day, so why not a little cheer?

Tulips!  After my chiropractor visits, I have to take a little walk afterwards to loosen everything up.  On one of those trips, I took this picture of one of the gardens along my route.  There are a couple of spectactular gardens to be seen, let me say.

Yep.  These are the kind of folks I work with.  While I may not be approving of the pretentious inner-city gas-guzzling sport pickup truck (I mean…really), I think the bumper sticker is 100% pure awesome.

No, don’t adjust your monitor.  Those cookies are green.  GREEN.  They were even greener in person, and really really tasty.  Last week, when I was doing that heart-monitor thinger, I had some fun in the kitchen.  I took my Mum’s tried & true chocolate chip cookie recipe & altered it to have less sugar and gluten.  Not that I’m gluten sensitive, but every bit counts.  I substituted the sugars with Splenda & Splenda blend, and the white flour with Pea Flour & Whole Wheat.  Awesomely tasty!

That?  That would be BPAL.  Sniffies of various scents from Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs.  Took forever to get here, but well worth the wait…AND they threw in some extra imps (that’s what the wee samplers are called).  Most of the scents in my order were intended for the Husbeast’s use, and most of the extras seem to have been along that vein.  Yay!  And now I have more of my favourite scent, “Gluttony”.  YUM.  These have been camped out in my living room for a couple of weeks, since either we’re too lazy to take them upstairs, or we’re enjoying trying the scents in the much larger environment downstairs (less shower & hair style product smells to interfere).

Just off the needles, a Baby Surprise Jacket!  And yes, even though it’s acrylic, it’s awesome.  What’s also awesome is the fact that I have figured out how to knit using straight needles.  The set shown are a pair of aluminum needles by Boye, which seem to do the trick quite well.   Folks who remember how long it took to make the last two BSJs will be glad to note that this one took maybe 2 weeks.

This is a sock in progress out of Online Supersocke yarn in a pattern by Wendy Johnson of Wendyknits.  They’re turning out rather pretty, and I’m enjoying playing with my circular needles again after spending some quality time with straight needles.  No, this isn’t Wendy’s latest book…I haven’t yet picked that one up.  Expect a review of the older one soonish (really, the books came out rather close together, and while I love a prolific author, I haven’t finished with the first book yet!)

I’ve saved this bit of awesome for last.  Mainly because I have no idea how to be eloquent about it.  My brother and his family brought this little girl back home with them from the US, and my Mum & Dad made sure we brought her home to our place.  I’m hoping that the picture can show just what it is we see in her when we look at her.  It’s a kind of awesome malevolence.  Don’t think we don’t appreciate her…we’re far too scared of her to do otherwise.  Yes, she’s still in the packaging.  Generally, she’s in the glass cabinet in our living room.  Why?  Because if she’s in the sealed package, behind glass, she can’t get out. (And no, we wouldn’t display her if we didn’t think she was cool.  Otherwise, we’d stick her at the back of a closet, probably in a salted circle, wrapped in charmed ribbons.  Yes, seriously.)

And yeah.  You DO see a Douglas Adams book and 3 different varieties of Munchkin.  Because that is exactly how we roll around here.

* I figure that I can never become a hit knit-blogger because I’m just not alternative enough.  I haven’t eschewed all modern conveniences, adopted the latest gizmos, and become vegan.  I live in what passes around here as the burbs, have a mortgage, and like to eat meat too much to give it all up for coolness.  I also don’t have a way-cool alternative-type job that lets me be creative-as-fuck all day.  Otherwise, I’m sure there would be more finished projects.  Sad, eh?
And yes, that was all said tongue-in-cheek

There’s a ton of wildlife in Calgary, and it has a tendency to just pop up wherever.  We went for breakfast down at the Blackfoot Diner with Chelsea…and what should be parked on top of Chels’s building?  A Canada Goose, full of attitude, honking away on the roof.

We walked down to the Diner, and Chels showed off her new toes.  Well…she’s always had ‘em, but now she’s got ‘em on display.  Apparently she had to get the more audacious colour, too.  Bright, bright pink.  Now…both Robin and I had heard of these things, and had been very curious about them, but had no idea where to get them.  Apparently MEC carries them for a very reasonable price.  We stopped in after breakfast and picked me up a pair of Vibram 5-Fingers Sprints.  What most folks probably don’t know is that I have horrid posture & my back has been killing me like crazy for a good part of the last month.  Barefooting is supposed to help that.  We’ll see how that turns out.

After getting home, and putting on those bad-boys, we went for a walk over to Dale & Morgan’s place & then walked back, taking a stop off at the Safeway for a brief coffee with friends… and saw a wee froggie on our walkway (he posed for a photo-op.  The bunny that wandered past our garage the day before didn’t stop long enough for that).  We ended the day with some meat on the grill, the remains of a bottle of chardonnay, and a bit of knitting in the last few sunbeams of the day.

Hope everyone else had an equally good weekend!

You’d be surprised what I get up to when I’m left alone for any given amount of time.

It started innocently enough…I updated flickr. I updated my blogging (below). I updated Livejournal (bet that’s a name some never thought they’d hear my mention again). I went looking for my old backup HTML of inkyblack.net because I wanted to look over past iterations & possibly incorporate them into Wordpress.

I found some things on CD that never need to see the light of day again.  There’s something to be said for more than 10 years of working on one’s maturity.

But at any rate, that had me looking up inkyblack.net on the wayback machine.  I saw inkyblacks going back to at least 2001.  There have been quite a few versions, particularly when I had other artnerds around me for long amounts of time.  I think that in one year I had over 4 versions of inkyblack.  Yeek!  Even more yeek-worthy?  I’ve used this template since at least 2007.   That’s a LOT of years of artnerd laziness.  Ouch.

I also noticed that I used to keep a couple of different blogrolls.    Three, actually.  One for folks I knew from work (not particularly relevant now).  One from friends on LJ (if they’re still on LJ, then I’m still reading bits & pieces as they’re posted)…and then there was the third, the list of “people I don’t know in RL, but whose blogs seemed interesting”.  Out of that last group of 19 blogs, only 7 are still blogging, at least at the domains they used to use.  I found maybe 2 or 3 who haven’t updated in a long damn time (anywhere from a year to over 4 years).

So in honour of nostalgia (and possibly I will be visiting those sites more often again, we’ll see), I’m listing them here:

Christine - Big Pink Cookie
Joelle - Tenth Muse
Kristine – Kadyellebee (more like a lifestream than a blog now)
Meredith –  Amanita.net (lifestream & blog mashup)
Mikey – electricbugaloo.com
Pamela – blackdaisies.com
Trish - scalewhore.com

Well, this isn’t the sum total of what I did on my vacation, but it took up a good part of last weekend.  I had a couple of sweaters-worth of yarn hanging around in my basement.  One lot was from Robin’s Grandfolks.  They had bought it on a trip to Ireland, and nobody had ever made use of it.  There was an attempt at the start of a sweater, but the aran pattern was definitely lost in the richness of the colour.  It looked like a muddy steel colour, but in the sunlight it showed hints of all kinds of blues.  The other yarn was from my mother — it had survived a basement flood in our old home in Yellowknife, where Mum had been storing it in a cardboard box (since then, any yarn stash in our family exists in Rubbermaid.  Just sayin’).  It looked to be a nice yellowish off-white.

Both yarns were in dire need of washing.  I picked up a bottle of SOAK at one of the local yarn stores ($16 at Pudding Yarn downtown) and got to it.

First things first, some skeining had to be done.  As can be seen in the picture above, most of the yarn (at least from Mum) came in factory-wound balls.  You’ll notice that the ball-bands are home-made, and just have the number “23″ on them.  I am not sure of the significance of the number (neither does Mum…I asked her when she first gave me the yarn), but the original ball-bands were lost in the aforementioned basement flood.  Far as we know, the light-coloured yarn is wool.  That’s about *all* we know.  Domo-kun is wearing a home-made skein as a stylish hat.  This is easily done by wrapping the yarn around a couple of chair backs.

Once the yarn has met the Domo-kun seal of approval, into the wash it goes!  The instructions on the bottle of SOAK indicate that a capful of SOAK should be enough for about a gallon of water.  Doing things the usual Maire-way translates to “squirt soapy stuff into sink & fill with cold water.  If you’re lucky, you get bubbles.   Bubbles, yay!”

Here we have the Yellowknife yarn, and what was left over after the Yk yarn came out of the bath.  GROSS!  Yes, this is why the yarn was kinda yellowish.  And a little stinky.  And more than a little rough on the hands.  Ewwwww!  I didn’t get a chance to get a picture of the water after the Irish yarn had finished soaking & had been wrung out, but that’s because there was very little water left in the sink. I have a dual-basin sink, so I had actually wrung out the Irish yarn in the empty basin.  Mainly because the skeins were so very heavy.  The Yk yarn?  Not so much.  Smaller skeins mean greater ease in wringing.

Of course, all this washing and wringing reminded me of my Grandmother Smith’s old soaker washer with wringer.  While I love my clothes-washer & dryer, and wouldn’t give them up for the world, there are times (usually when I’m washing hand-knits) that I would love a wringer-washer.  I wonder if they still make them, and if so, whether they have any smaller, portable, pack-away-able sized wringers?  It would get rid of about 95% more water, and not felt the fabric.  This *is* a concern

Toss the now-clean skeins into a laundry basket, truck ‘em on out to the patio & hang ‘em on your handy-dandy portable clothes-dryer.  If you’re like me and you live in the suburbs, chances are pretty good that there’s a bylaw that states you can’t have a clothesline.  Far as I know, there’s no law against using a portable dryer.  As long as you’re not flying the flag of Fruit of the Loom, I don’t think your neighbours are going to mind too much.
When you’re done, you’ll probably have a nice, big, pile of dry yarn.  You’ll notice in the picture on the far right just how fluffy and…downright HAPPY…that yarn looks.  It took about 2 days to dry properly.  We were lucky to have a very sunny, very warm weekend when I pulled off this little stunt (as a comparison, I woke up to snow on the patio this morning).  You’ll notice, also, that the dark-coloured yarn in that middle photo is most decidedly BLUE.  A very lovely deep blue.  As I look at the wound balls in my little office this morning, they look more neutral-grey.  It all depends on the light.  Whenever possible, look at your clean yarn in honest daylight.  It will tell you more about the yarn than you thought.  While the colour looks kinda blah to me right now, I know that the Husbeast will have one kick-arse blue sweater when I’m done.

Here’s my gauge swatch.  Looks like we have a winner!  After I finished knitting this, I washed it again, stuck it on the porch railing to dry, and measured it again.  We have gauge.  Robin will hopefully have a sweater sometime in the next decade.  Huzzah!

(special thanks to Chelsea, who provided run-on commentary and hand-holding where necessary)

At least, nothing productive on the computer.

I’m not sure if she’s saying “You need to pay more attention to me”, or “your keyboard was dirty.  I cleaned it”, or simply “Make with the food, bitch.”

Go ahead and leave your own caption in the comments.  I dares ya.

Today’s post is courtesy of Chelsea, who started making up stories when Robin switched to another Rockband character (not his usual Lance  Pyston) in order to make her some monies to buy clothes to make the backing band look cool.

Lance Pyston’s meteoric rock career looked like it was due for a stall when the renowned guitarist reported a repetitive stress injury to his right wrist (eff you, he got it playing guitar) and a strict six months off the axe in the midst of an 81 date international tour.  But rather than cut a tour short, Pyston hired a series of stand in guitarists and took on the role of lead vocals for the tour, introducing the rock world to unsung stars.

Frankly, Rolling Stone doesn’t know what to make of it, as all Pyston’s choices for chops have been chicks.

But the big surprise of the international tour has been an online run of Lance Pyston-endorsed wrist braces, styled with studded and tooled leather depicting nautical tattoo motifs. Braces have been flying out of the warehouse and command sums in the thousands on e-bay. In six months, Lance Pyston has generated more income from medical devices as he has in the last two years of the extensive, gruelling tour schedule he’s maintained since superstardom.

Last night Lance appeared on stage long enough to tune a guitar and strum a few chords. Fans went mad, and the 17 second YouTube video has netted a half-million views.

Thursday evening we got word that there was going to be a snowstorm on Friday.  We didn’t think too much about it…after all, it wasn’t snowing at that point.  We kept an eye on the weather, though.  Our plans were to head down to m1 in the morning to take a look at the saxony wheel again.

Well…that didn’t happen.  We were going to give Bess some time to get opened up before we went, and by the time we stirred our stumps, the snow was falling.  Realizing that it was coming down like crazy, plans immediately reverted to “snowed in” status.  Hit the Safeway down the street for food for the next couple of days, and hunkered down.

For those not in the know, Fridays and Saturday are our days off around here, so that left us with the pleasant knowledge of not having to go outside again after we got home from the store.  We played a little Katamari Damacy (mad fun), then stuck in a movie or two or three.  I managed to finish the knitting portion of the Creamsicle BSJ, and the socks I’m working on are also not far from completion.  I had given myself a deadline of this weekend for them, so we’re doing better than I thought.  I have my next project queued up and the pattern printed, so hopefully that will be on the needles shortly, with another pair of socks to replace the current ones in the wings.

I’m looking forward to yet another day of cuddles, hot drinks, some knitting, and maybe capping the day with a little snuggling by the fire.  Not just the one on Channel 2, thank you Shaw – though we did tune in to hear a little crackling & popping last night.  We have a gas fireplace with a prepped pilot light.

btw…the yarn in the picture above is destined to be something nifty like a koolhaas or gretel.  I got a kick out of the fact that Tanis writes a little something on the inside of each ball band.  Cute!

Yes, I’m linking to Flickr searches instead of Ravelry for those patterns.  Why?  Because not everyone subscribes to Ravelry, even though they should

Leaving you with a picture taken by Robin during his shovelling of the walk.  Just a little background here…the two houses at the end of the cul-de-sac are assumed by us (and anyone who visits us) to be multi-family dwellings.  The sheer volume of cars seems to bear this out.  Often the overage will spill out in front of our place, usually at precisely the wrong time (ie: we are entertaining and need parking space ourselves).  One of the neighbours is a cabbie.  He couldn’t QUITE make it into his driveway this morning.  In fact…he’s parked in the middle of the cul-de-sac.  Not much better than one of our other neighbours, who missed his driveway entirely last night and parked in the space between  the two driveways (we were woken up by him rocking and digging himself out this AM).

Here’s the cab for your edification.  Whee!