I'm Officially OLD

So...you know those days when you're stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic for hours, and you spend about 45 minutes behind some big SUV, and you sit there wondering to yourself why they have such an odd rear window sticker of a small, oddly-shaped kid standing underneath a slender, stately rose...until you realize half an hour later that the "sticker" is really just two big blobs of bird shit? That's how tired I've been lately.

I think it's because I am officially old. I turned the big 3-0 last Saturday. I can no longer say "I'm in my twenties" and let people think I'm as young as they want because even if I was 29, I still wouldn't be old. But now I'm old. Hear that sound? Yeah. Those are my bones creaking.

But I guess turning 30 wasn't all that bad. I got to go to the LYS for my birthday month discount. Woohoo! I headed over there last Sunday and picked up some yarn I had been planning on. One of my goals this year is to jump the hurdle and actually learn to do some colorwork, so I was picking up some Brown Sheep wool for the Wobbly Circles Tote from IK. I also wanted some white feltable yarn for the Calla Lily Bag from the Knitter's Book of Yarn. No one who worked there knew which white yarns would felt, and the guy who rang me up said flat out that NO white yarns would EVER felt. I know he was totally wrong and that some do, but I wasn't going to stand there and argue so I just got what I wanted and left.

Along with the tote bag yarn, I browsed around and found some Baruffa Merinos Sei in a very pretty Deep Eggplant color. It seemed very soft to me, and I really like the color. Normally I don't buy yarn without a specific purpose for it, but I have a lot of sweaters that I want to make, and I figured this yarn would work for one of them. I had the Sideways Spencer by Annie Modesitt in mind since I just bought the pattern and I thought the yarn would make the cables really stand out. Now, I'm no expert on yarn and I thought it felt a little thin, but the sign above the shelves told me in no uncertain terms that this was WORSTED WEIGHT yarn. So I scrounged through the bins to come up with 9 balls of the stuff and bought it.

I was more than a little disgusted when I came home to discover, after I looked up the yarn online, that it is really DK WEIGHT. This will not work for the sweater I had in mind at all, since the Sideways Spencer calls for worsted or heavy worsted yarn, and I simply don't have the wherewithall to try to convert all those cables to a lighter weight yarn. I went on Ravelry and through all my pattern books and magazines for some other options that I could make and I did find some...but I may not have enough yarn for them. I have just enough for some of the patterns, but I have very long arms and always need extra yarn to accommodate that.

So now I'm just really annoyed at that yarn store. First they tell me that "white wool won't felt", then they have improper signs up that get me to buy the wrong yarn. My birthday month is over and the discount only worked on one purchase anyway, so there's not a whole lot I can do. I think that yarn store is really cute, but I haven't ever really been impressed with their yarn selection anyway so I don't think I'll be back.

In knitting news: none to speak of. This week was full of final exams and presentations for the classes that don't last all semester. I did get a tentative offer of partnership with some sort of start-up online business based on my presentation to a group of employees from a well-known internet company that recently avoided a takeover...but since I know absolutely nothing about designing websites, that's not likely to pan out. If anyone knows Casey and Jess and thinks they would want to partner with me, I know a big company who said they would buy my idea. ;-)