From: li%polari@uunet.UU.NET (liralen li) 
Date: Wed, 13 May 92 21:42:50 PDT 
Subject: The Ten Day Weekend 
Message-Id: <9205132142.AA19301@polari.uucp>

Work is fun.

:)  About says it all, doesn't it?  O.K. O.K.... just so you don't all
kill me.  Grin... life is fun, Fezzik is Big, and I've got a doozy of a
challange, a responsible manager, and a great project team to work with.
How's THAT for all ones wishes coming true?  Laughter... I even get my
very own Sparc, and I'm gonna name him Hasaki, just so he can give me the
greatest amount of potential trouble.  Edges of blades are notorious for
cutting both ways, and no machine I've ever met couldn't work as quickly
on a useless problem as it could on a useful one.

The project is gross.  It's huge.  It's gonna help out a lot of people.
It's got a ton of grundge ground work...  laid there by years of having
people write software who didn't know the problems and pitfalls of
software written in haste.  Decide in haste, repent in leasure, or so the
adage goes. Problem is that there is no leasure with this kind of
repentance.  Just a lot of work.  It's also something that's *perfect* for
my perfectionist's mentality.  I *like* getting deep into the dirt and
start just cleaning things up.  Some of it has already been done by the
people that have had to deal with the shit for *their* jobs.  There are
couple of sections that I've been targetted at.

A few of you will be amused to learn that I've been targetted to rewrite
the onboard debugger... chuckle...  after AMC, they sorta assumed that I'd
know something of debuggers.  Silly them.  What's really frightening,
though, has been realizing that I really *do* know more about debuggers
than the folks that wrote the one that presently exists.  I've also been
scheduled to start looking at a lint for the language that the programmers
use in putting stuff into those pesky programmables.

It's a little like looking at a mountain and starting up the foothills.
The foothills aren't all *that* interesting and it's not very hard, and it
doesn't really ever feel like they're going to end, until you find out
that you're actually *climbing* the mountain...  grin.  I'm getting far
enough into the stuff to actually start understanding stuff and start to
figure out not only how I might straighten some of it out, but what I'd
rather just toss and redo completely.  I never thought I'd be this
comfortable with software development, but after seeing the code that
already exists, I'm pretty happy with my coding style and my knowledge of
what I can contribute to making what's there better.

Cool.

It's *neat* knowing that I'm really Useful again and not being taken for
granted by folks is cool as well.

Hmmm... details of the ten day weekend?  :)

Well, you all heard about the U2 concert.  We also got a Hot tub in that
day.  The deliverer tried to dump it down one of our ravines (he had gone
past our driveway, taken out a map to look at it, and forgot to set the
hand brake.  The truck and trailer rolled *backwards* and the trailer
slide down to rest at a 30 degree angle in the ravine. When the guy tried
to pull it out, the trailer only slipped further in, so John hooked the
Range Rover up to keep it up and the two of them pulled it out of the
ravine) but we rescued it and with eight people ran it around the house,
and dropped it into the hole that John had made for it in our porch.  It
is a *wonderful* hot tub, very hot... grin... with a Power Seat with 20
jets and a lounge that has rotating jets, etc.  Fun stuff.

During those ten days, I also finished the brown shawl... the one that
I've been working two years on, the one that was made from the fleece that
John and I had bought on our first anniversary from the shepherdess on the
Olympic peninsula, the one that I was working on in England, Mexico,
Minnesota, the Bay Area, and all up and down the West Coast on our various
drives.  It turned out... well... amazing.  It's six feet by six feet and
six ounces in weight.  It's as multi-colored as the original fleece was,
brown with streaks of silver, accidentally balanced in the center and
along the borders, and carefully balanced in the edging.  It looks a
little like a cobweb, and when I was pinning it out and spraying it with
my water bottle, the 'cobwebs' pattern on the shawl looked JUST like a
morning dew covered web...

It's weird seeing it.  In one way it's dead now.  It's no longer growing,
no longer something to worry about, something to plan, something to work
on and watch grow.  It's Done.  And it's Scary in some ways.  Two years is
a major chunk of my life that that shawl's seen.  The final blocking
process was a little like watching a butterfly come out of its cocoon,
what with the fact that it looked like nothing more than a very badly
crumpled brown bag before the blocking phase.

Sigh...  It is done.

And I wasn't quite sure if I should be celebrating or mourning.  Grin. It
is also very brown, a very warm color that doesn't really go well with my
colors.  I'm better in brights and clear, sharp, cool colors, and my
coloring doesn't offset the coloring of the shawl very well at all.  So I
started inquiring into how I might sell it.  I'd been thinking of selling
my shawls for a while as I'm starting to run out of people to give them to
that really want them.  So I talked to the friendly ladies at the Weaving
Works.

I'd been visiting the Weaving Works fairly often, partially to just drool
over their fiber collection, and partially because the ladies there really
do understand how real those shawls are. How much work goes into them, how
much time they take, and they love seeing how it grows.  While I
wasworking on it I had asked them where would be a good place to sell
them, and they told me that the Flying Shuttle was a shop in downtown that
specialized in hand-made products.  I called them and the manager wasn't
very encouraging (in fact, she said that knitted things didn't have the
mystic that woven things do because almost everyone knows someone that
knits, but very few people know what it take so weave something by hand).
So I asked her if I could just come by with my shawls and have her tell me
if it was even worth pursueing their juried show option.

Well, when I went in and pulled the shawl out her jaw dropped. Mystic my
foot.  A shawl that can fit the fairy tale requirement of going through a
wedding ring has all the mystic it needs.  She was slightly flabbergasted
by the two that I'd brought (I also have a gold colored silk scarf) and
said that she'd never seen anything so fine. One of the fiber artists that
sold through there came in while we were looking at them, and she couldn't
believe that I'd spun that myself. The manager also said, rather matter of
factly that they wouldn't be able to sell my pieces at their store.  Their
clientele expected something that would be more durable, something that
wouldn't have to be treated like a piece of art.

She said all that with a rather wistful expression, and then she thought a
while and lit up.  "Hey, why don't you try the Seattle Art Museum's gift
shop?  They handle things like this, with an old World feel to them, and
the people that buy from them expect to treat their pieces like art.
Wearable art...."  She gave me the name of the manager of the Seattle Art
Museum, and then said that a museum that would REALLY be interested in
them would be the Minneapolis Art Museum, because it was the most
extensive textiles museum in the country.  Surprised the *heck* out of me,
expeically when the other weaver said, that the Bellevue Art museum would
probably be interested in them as well, especially for the yearly Arts and
Crafts juried show that happens during the summer.  Then, half laughingly,
the manager said, "You normally just give these to your friends and
family?"  I nodded, half smiling.  She grinned at me and said, "How can I
get to be your friend?"

So.  I guess that that is going to be the next step when I find the time
out of my life to pursue it. Just the other day I got a single pound of
Australian Sharlea Merino wool... it cost me $25, but it normally costs
almost $50 per pound, because it's the finest wool that exists in the
world.  Besides, if I can make a shawl out of four ounces of the stuff,
it's enough to make three shawls (there is about a 25% loss due to
washing, fiber preparation, and getting only the fibers that are useful
for really fine spinning).  Most local wools cost about $3.50 per pound,
so it's a touch extravigant; but the yarns I'm getting from it are
absolutely insane.  I knitted an 8" by 8" square from two locks of the
stuff that John could blow 10' with a single puff of air...

The ladies at the Weaving Works have offered to let me teach a class on
the spinning and another class on knitting with the fine yarns. It's
probably going to be a great deal of fun with a bunch of ladies that
really *want* to learn all the details that I've tried to refrain from
boring you all with.  :) And they actulaly know enough of the basics to
understand and appreciate the extra tricks that I bring to it all.  So
that should be fun, and I'll probably learn a lot, too, because these
ladies are really experienced spinners and knitters.

One mixed blessing that happened over the ten day weekend was that Clarion
got back to me and said that they didn't think I was quite ready yet for
their classes.  It was a little sad to know that I wasn't good enough, but
a little glad as well because when I really looked at it, I couldn't
really see how in the world I'd actually work getting six weeks off in the
middle of the summer, especially since I'd just started this job, and we
had things that we really had to do for almost two weeks in July that
would have overlapped an entire two weeks of the workshop.  Yow.

So, August is completely booked, presently, July has one free weekend,
June hasn't been entirely filled, yet.  Too much living has already been
planned.  Grin.  Add to all that the fact that I'm on two soccer teams,
we're thinking of joining a volleyball team, and Fezzik needs more walks,
now that the development neighbors have moved in and he's proved somewhat
unwelcome at some of those places.  We've pretty much kept him in his pen
whenever we can't pay attention to him so that he doesn't make his rounds
in the afternoon and risk getting squashed on the main roads.  Luckily, he
loves soccer games and gets not only a lot of attention, but usually a bit
of a workout with other people's dogs or with other memers of the soccer
team who like to run around with him because he's fast.  One of our
strikers likes using Fezzik, sometimes, for the later part of his warm up
so that he has someone that's about as fast as he is to run with.

Yes, the hot tub is *wonderful* after a soccer game.  :)

Sorry it took me so long to get a thorough report out.  I'll try to be
better about it from now on.

Hugs, all.

Liralen