Mortgages

I hate the word "mortgage." This is a new thing. For most of my life, I was able to hear the word without a full-body cringe, but not anymore. You see, I just signed our 4th (yes, 4th) set of mortgage papers today for the new townhouse. Not that we have 4 mortgages, oh, no. We will end up with just one. But our mortgage "broker" (I will insert here that to call someone a "broker" assumes that he makes agreements. Ours doesn't. He prints out pieces of paper and then explains why they won't work for us.) keeps running into snags. This morning he told me very nicely that this never happens. That for most people, one visit with him is all it takes. But not for us. I have been there every day this week, and will probably have to go there tomorrow.

Ha. I just looked up the etymology of "Mortgage." Makes sense, no?

Building inspection with our friend Chad this afternoon. I haven't decided yet whether I want him to discover that it's all fine and nice, so that we can buy it, or if I'd rather have him discover dry rot, termites, and lead paint so we can end this silly business once and for all.

But it would be nice to get out of the hobbit hole.

Pictures!

Here is some of my recent spinning and dyeing:

The green is some unbelievably soft Cormo wool purchased as roving from a grab bag I got on Ebay for $5. Considering there were also 2 ounces of multicolored silk roving and 4 ounces of baby blue merino in addition to the 8 ounces of Cormo, I got an incredible deal. The dye job is a little greener than I'd like, but it is still lovely and warm, and I am happy with my nearly-regular fingering weight spinning job. The wool was a bit neppy, which made spinning a constant single difficult, but things evened out with the plying.

The multicolored yarn is some self-striping blue-faced leicester, Navajo plied. Ick. Navajo plying is like eating jellybeans with toothpicks.

The blue is my Value Village thrift store sweater experiment, in which a baby pink extra-large cardigan made in Vietnam was ruthlessly unraveled, skeined, and simmered for an hour in a Wilton's cake-dye bath. It turned out pretty well, if I do say so myself. I managed to unravel about 1200 yards intact, so that will be enough to make some kind of pullover or cardi. It's a nice lambswool-angora blend, too, which makes me happy.

In other news, here is the current pair of socks, being knitted on Bryspun 2's in KnitPicks' Simple Stripes, in the Crayons colorway.


And finally, the now-defunct lacy shrug, tonight ripped out to make way for a Shapely Tank knitted in Reynolds Saucy, which is worsted weight, not the sport weight called for by the pattern. So I'm kind of making it up as I go along. I'll keep you posted.

Freedom

I signed out of my classroom today, so now I should be able to get in some daily quality knitting time. Tonight: Pictures of the works in progress. I've spun up some lovely Cormo, dyed the ex-sweater, and begun a lacy cotton shrug. Yea for summer.

In other news, the mortgage documents get signed today, so we're one step closer to leaving the Hobbit-hole.