WTF? Stew

This will be one of those posts that make you roll your eyes and wonder what the hell I'm talking about. Rest assured, I don't plan it - it is the part of my Southern heritage that I am forced to keep alive - like I've been implanted with some sort of microchip that enables me to talk about 50 different things at once. After 1.5 weeks of delay(which begins to get kinda eery when you're looking at crazy mishaps and bad hatches) the cornish X chicks (aka - meat chicks but I don't want to be offensive) have arrived. Obviously, they are in tall demand this summer since our local town store could only get 1/2 of what they ordered and almost two weeks late to boot! So, we were happy to bring 15 of them home but the nice people at our mill really thought there should be some compensation for that and the fact that three of our turkeys didn't even make it home last week. A skeptical person might say - just give me my refund and leave me alone. But, I like them and they manage the grain supply for my beloved sheeps and I felt bad for them because they've been locked up with a bunch of peeping chicks for a week and they are starting to look slightly deranged...so I listened. Somehow, I got 10 turkeys (triple the cost of a chick, usually) for the remaining 10 chicks we should have received. WTf? The nice people at the mill didn't mind so, now I have WAY MORE TURKEYS THAN i meant to. hmmm. We were a little nervous since turkeys are more work at the onset. For instance, you have to teach them to eat. Evidence of the problem is right before your eyes. First, they jump in their food. Then, they roll around until the container dumps out (unless you're crafty like hubster and devise a very heavy container to stop this wasteful madness). Lastly, they will use their tray as a toilet. All the while, frantically peeping like they are starved. Yes, for some it is difficult to understand. You literally have to open their beaks and put a few grains of feed in their mouths. Then, you have to show them where it came from. A few will forget by tomorrow so you need beer to keep you patient. This time we're playing it safe by giving them a little touch of electrolytes and such in their water - in case they forget again tomorrow and try to starve to death. Darwin, uh, I need to talk to you....just how the heck did turkeys make it this far? It has to be something in the domestication of them because our wild turkeys are far more aggressive, quick witted, and danged mean. A few summers ago, our little dog accidentally peed on a bush that housed a setting turkey hen. She came out of that bush hissing and spitting and chased us all home. It is hard to reason that these two birds are the same. Perplexing.

This would be a good time for me to thank the blogger brains for installing autosave.

A few weeks back, I blabbed on and on about some 'secret' knitted thing I'd made and called it a vest and promised pics of it and, of course, flaked out. Here's the problem - I suck at photography. I used to blame it on my cheap, crappy camera but then hubster got me a better one last year and I don't need to tell you that it hasn't changed much. I've tried inside. I've adjusted the exposure, the setting, the daylight, the frigging degrees of rotation of the planet - it matters not, I still get a droopy, dark and dingy photo. At last, I have had to resort to taking the darned thing outside to take a pic which makes it look less of the rich brown that it is and sort of gives it a troll flare. It could be worse....trust me on this. Also, there's been a bit of spinning going on (the left). As for the vest, I love it. I have no pattern but it is basically a flared skirt with a fitted sheath stitch waist and a sort of turkish style to the top (the vest stops under boobage and sides wrap around boobage. It definitely requires an undershirt but doesn't make your boobs look like oil tankers like some sweaters can. It is lovely. It fits well and I will use the sheath stitch again for ribbed fitting. It was so easy and it has great stretch and give - much like a 2x2 rib.

Show season means I'm knitting lots of hats, bags, scarves, mitts - you know, the table stuff. At Fiber Frolic, I saw a woman with an incredibly cute knit llama bag. She said she knit it out of the Andean Folk Knits book. I wish I could buy every knitting book I've ever wanted but the truth is that books are a greedily horded commodity here at our place. I'm already saving the book budget for three months to purchase the new Harry Potter and Paolini books for the Things. They'd hardly forgive me if I slipped and bought a knitting book. Although....we all had a hearty laugh when we sat down at the copy I requested at our library and starting reading and talking, and grabbing the book away from each other like a genuine bunch of fiber geeks. This is an excellent book. The patterns are unique and well balanced for level of knitting expertise required. But what we like best about it is that three pages of the book kept us all cackling for almost an hour. It was the too cute llama bag followed up by a few articles about llamas and peppered with the rich cultural traditions of their native home. We are geeks, no two ways about it.

Now, I burn with the NEED to knit this bag. Only, I don't have the hair OFF the llama - YET. I think I have to make it with handspun and what I want to know is - do you think the llama police will come after me if I knit the bag out of SHEEP HAIR? These are the kinds of things I worry about. Yes, yes, do like everyone else - back away slowly and then make a run for it.