…like being pecked to death, by ducks

Yesterday was a lesson in frustration. By the end of the day I was ready to punch a baby in the face – but it was good, too, to know that not every day is going to be unicorns pooping rainbows around here (or cupcakes). Without the frustrating to compare the wonderful with, how would we know it’s wonderful? Without something better or worse to tip the scale in either direction, we just… are. Nothing good, nothing bad… like limbo. BORING.

Anyway. My day, let me tell you about it.

For the first time in a while I woke up with a “there’s too much to do today” feeling. I have yarn that needs to be wound. I have molds that need to be poured. And I have a laptop that needs to be rebuilt.

Hanks is going to have a table at the Florida Fiber-In. I have about a dozen skeins of sport-weight yarn that I dyed a week or so ago and I need to get them rewound and labeled and given to Sharon by the end of the day today so that she has time to put price tags on them when packing for the show. They’ve been dry for a while and I could have rewound them at any time, but honestly I’ve been putting more of my time into HaldeCraft since nothing seems to be going on much with Hanks right now (that’ll change in a couple weeks when it’s time to dye for sock and lace club! JOIN MY YARN CLUBS  – what, was that out loud?). So I admit, is where I’m going with this, that I’ve been slacking off on winding yarn and have only myself to blame for letting it go until the last minute. Frustration with self: one.

In addition, for Fiber-In, I’d like to debut 12 yarn mugs. I have six completed, two about to be glazed and fired this week, two in greenware cleaned and ready to fire, and one poured yesterday that’s still wet. I can’t pour another one until tomorrow (the plaster mold needs adequate time to dry between pourings). I try to fire on Thursdays, and I don’t know if the two wet ones will be dry enough to fire this week. I will only have enough product to fire twice between now and Fiber-In, which means anything I want to be completed by then needs to be fired for the first time the day after tomorrow. But really, is it the end of the universe if I only have ten instead of twelve? I don’t know. No? Yes, if people want more than I have? But not really the end of the universe? Brain flail: one.

My laptop has really been shitting it’s pants recently. It’ll just freeze, booping freakily, not responding and then trying to respond to everything at once… freezing… the tipping point for me was the other night when it took me almost 40 minutes to email someone that their soap order was ready. I had to keep turning the computer off and on, CTRL-ALT-DEL doesn’t do a thing… I was seriously ready to brick this fucker. I started looking up prices for new laptops where this laptop could see me, hoping to shame it into working. Fortunately, Chris came to my rescue and wiped the whole thing and now I’m starting over from scratch. Already I can see a difference, and it’s running soooooo much better. It’s like a new machine! With none of my contacts and emails lost! But it meant that yesterday I needed to spend a good portion of time updating and reinstalling, which meant that I needed Internet access. So of course something happened yesterday morning, a power fluctuation, and the Internet spent a good portion of the day having seizures. Basically, I would have internet access only as long as I didn’t try to access anything. Oh, look! I’m connected! Quick, run to Laughing Squid and see what my mail server settings are supposed to be– crap, Internet went out. Oh it’s back on! No it’s not. And so on, and so on. And then also little shit that I know how to do but do so infrequently that it takes me forever. Like getting the laptop to recognize my phone so I can sync it (that took about 45 minutes)… or getting it hooked up to the wireless printer (also took about 45 minutes). Sigh. It’s all good now, but … at the time? Gah. Frustration with inanimate objects: three.

So what am I doing today? I should be up and winding yarn already. But the vet is coming in an hour to do a check-up on the kitties (they’re fine, it’s just scheduled maintenance). Then I’ll wind yarn. Meeting some friends this afternoon, have a Hanks meeting, need to run some errands… and I have about three dozen bars of soap that need to be popped out of molds and photographed and wrapped. Things to do! People to see! A day to have! But hopefully not an endlessly frustrating day like yesterday!