Friday, January 13th

I love cuckoo clocks. I don’t know if it’s because my mom has one and as a child I wanted to be like her, or because of the intricate detail you find on them that means you can stare at them for a long time and always see something new, or the hidden bird, or… don’t know. Don’t care. Don’t need to know. Just do. Whoa, I sound like Yoda there. There is no analyze; there is simply like. This is Aunt Gay and Uncle Joe’s clock. Would you believe that for as much as I love them, I don’t own one? I KNOW! Maybe I should put one on my Christmas wish list this year. Oh, well, I sort of have one — I have a charm on a necklace. I also have something that fills my heart with the same happy (I may have to photograph it today, oh, wait, I’ve photographed it before… no, never mind, I can’t find the photo… but here’s one of Tim’s parent’s cuckoo clock I took in 2006…).

ANYWAY. The thing I’m talking about is a weather house; a tiny German-style cottage with a boy and girl in doors. They’re attached to a thermometer and I think there’s some sort of barometer inside (?) (or it’s magic) because the girl comes out when it’s going to be nice out and the boy comes out when it’s going to rain. STOP LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT I’M NOT CRAZY! Clearly that should be my photo today.

:shifty eyes: What was I rambling on about, then?

Yesterday. Yesterday I wound some yarn and made some lotion, but mostly got sidetracked by putting a good portion of my yarn stash into new bins, shaking everything out and checking for bugs and seeing if I had things I’d never added to Ravelry. There’s one thing touching all of your yarn will make you want to do — cast on about six billion projects. End result of stash cleaning? Five bins of fiber (two are just fiber from the sheep at my dad’s farm); one bin of handspun; one bin of solid-color sock yarn; 3/4ths of a bin of multi-colored sock yarn; 3/4ths of a bin of cotton; a bin of single skeins (not sock weight); a bin of project quantities (two skeins or more); half a bin of things to sell combined with half a bin of random ball ends from other projects. 12 bins in all. Clearly I need to spin more, as that’s the largest quantity!

As soon as the kiln drops about an other ten degrees, and it warms up another ten degrees outside, I’ll be able to open the kiln and empty it from yesterday’s firing. That’s almost 100% of custom work, so I’m very anxious to see that everything fired fine. Not so anxious that I’d risk cracking all the pieces from massive temperature difference… but still. Excited. Hopeful. As Pooh says, it’s not the moment you open the honey jar, it’s the moment right before you open the honey jar.