Show and Tell

This is Teddy, aka Theodore Honorius Bearpaw, as painted by Cezanne. Teddy is my email man, and is also known as The Supreme Being, due to the fact that he is able to open doors just by looking at them. He is around 23 years old, which is a respectable age for a Supreme Being. He no longer owns his own teeth, they have retired to the choir invisible long since. Witnessing him skin and swallow mice is an act never forgotten. He also possesses the uncanny ability to sense a lap forming, and will seemingly appear out of nowhere once a lap has emerged, and levitate himself onto the fundament. Hence his fondness for email, and other activities undertaken in a sitting position.

Now, if I may direct your attention below and to the left, this hideous creature is a test swatch. It is the result of a color blunder I made by ordering online without an actual sample card. I was going for a turquoise and buckskin color combination, and happened upon a turquoiseish sample of Telemark in the Knitpicks catalogue. Too sure of myself, I ordered 5 balls of the greenish color, which is known as "tidepool". It did look turquoise in the catalogue, however, when I received it I was surprised to see that it was much more vivid in person, like a drunken auntie. I decided to knit it up with a buckskinesque mate, not in the pattern I'm intending but in something easy just to see how they work together. The answer my friends, is that they do not work together. They work together about as well as a stripper and a girl guide.

So I frogged them, starting with the brassy one, and found this, which is semi-interesting from a knitterly point of view. Perhaps this might be useful knowledge at some point very far down the line.

Moving on to other things, still knitting though, (I apologize to those of you who come here for squalid excitement and find none): I finished another pair of socks sometime last week. These are called Schoolhouse and they were made with a now extinct yarn by elann. I used almost the entire ball each time, as I cannot see any reason to make short socks, except for those to be worn in summer, which is, let's face it, only about two months of the year in these parts. Don't they look like they've just come off the legs of Charles the First? All museumy on that persian rug.
In Farm News, there is very little to report. Both of my livestock waterers are inoperative. One waits for a pump switch that is very like the kind of switch used in your dryer or refrigerator door to turn the light on or off depending on the position of the door. The other waits for a great deal of fiddling among the nether parts where the connections reside to have the element replaced and reconnected and make the thermostat either work or not work. In the meantime, I must cart pails of water to the basins to water my flock.

Farm equipment is woefully underdesigned. It's ridiculous actually. It's as if all the graduates of industrial design had been lured away by the riches that await them as plastic surgeons, no wait, that's medical practitioners. Anyway, I could go on about farm machinery and devices and their attendant lack of good, common sense design. It's all jury-rigged. For example, instead of creating a waterer that plugs into an outlet, you must wire the waterer directly into electrical cable. Seems logical? Try repairing something that is marretted and electrical taped together then mashed into a receptacle box in minus 30 degree weather. No can do. Why not just provide a plug that can commingle with an outlet (on a GFI of course) like the rest of the world does? Huh? Please, if anyone out there is an up and coming industrial designer, please I beg of you, do some Brauning or Boseing or whatever high design you choose to our poor farm equipment. And please, don't forget that not all people who operate or who wish to operate equipment are 6 foot 4 Viking males. Some of us are petite women, and the deadman switch on tractors needs to take into account our smaller frames. In addition to chains, I have to carry around a 50 lb cement block on the back of my yard tractor so I can get enough traction to move the thing in snow, because I'm not husky. Even with that, I still can get stuck going up hills, because the snowthrower on the front is so diabolically heavy that only an offensive lineman can make the thing go uphill naturally in the snow. (I've tried being offensive, but no amount of c*cks*ckery or bad personal hygiene seems to work).

On the weather front, we have almost no snow, and this witch is predicting a dry dry summer. Some wag in town was loudly predicting storms here, I quote, March 30, 31 and April 12. I believe that the reason people like to predict the weather is that they believe in some twisted way that it means they control it, humans having a propensity for the control of all things. I pooh poohed this to my informant, and had an eye cocked in my direction with that warning look prevalent among the superstitious, when they give you the look that says .... but what if there is a hell, what then? So naturally I'm eager to see these storms called down upon us like a judgement from the all-knowing. Oh, speaking of which, here's the Supreme Being, and he's hungry.