local sheep, local food

The lack of spell check that uses my gender editing and has all my yarn-y words added to it is killing me- and really, I aplogize for the spelling and typos. You can really blame it on either, since there is about an equal chance of both. Oh, and I despise IE on principal, so it is killing me to have to use it- the particular laptop I am using (since mine stayed at home- though there are at least 3 computers on the boat that I am aware of, lest you worry that we are not properly connected to the outside world here) has nothing exciting on it, including lacking Moxzilla.

I was pleased to see not only Plenty: Eating Locally on the 100-Mile Diet
at the book store up here in Ganges, but also one of the biggest selections of environmental and green living (including cob and strawbale) books I have seen in one area. Alisa Smith is also the author of "Plenty", another local eating book, and they run the 100 mile diet webpage, which is often discussed with other sites like Eat Local, The compact (the yahoo group and blog), and a variety of other locavore sites. Yea, there is even a wikipedia entry for locavore now.

When I told my dad how excited I was about this he told me I should start a farm with sheep and an alpaca to guard them, and even some chickens (not for eating of course for me...). I had to remind him that I go through way too much wool to keep my own sheep- if you have seen the giant box of doom full of 30 pounds sock yarn sitting in my house recently, you know what I mean (I'll spare you the annoyance of trying to fit over a hundred pounds of wool plus an obscene amount of clothing and even more yarn in to any given storage space). Nevermind the fact that I can only handle lanolin in small amounts, which makes processing anything more than a couple pounds a huge annoyance. So much for the sheep idea eh?

Along the same lines of sheep...previously that morning we had tried to rent a car (we meaning my dad, since I of course can't rent a car [have to be 23]) to go visit a local sheep farm, only to find there were absolutely no rental cars on the island. Bummer. Only lots and lots of scooters. Considering the road conditions- super fun gravel with potholes- and lacking proper attire or even leather jackets with us, we settled for just searching out some of the fleece from ArtCraft, one of the local galleries instead.

Woolen/batt comboish prep, naturally colored, and lends itself wonderfully to a combo of worsted and woolen spinning. Altogether a nice break from my usual roving, though it would have been nice to have the elctric wheel here to get the higher ratios I need for a proper sock or lace weight with the long draw. I settled for spinning it with the combo method (lest I kill my legs, it is quite hard on the ankles to peddle madly like that) and navajo plying it to a very light dk- not quite fingering weight though.

The lady on the boat next to me wanted to know if I was weaving or knitting. I haven't had someone confuse my Kiwi with weaving since highschool (the principal, no less!). After assuring her that the fustic dyed skeins (bright yellow natural dye) I was hanging from the deck were in fact, not the act of me weaving, my dad cut in to tell her that they were actually the result of spinning to make the yarn for the weaving or knitting. And told her all about how I dyed the fiber myself too, and how we had found fleece at ArtCraft and how that was what I was spinning now.

Whew. It is abolutely amazing to me how much of a time suck the internet can be, judging by the length of this post. :). I am still annoyed at the lack of a spell check.