Sunday, 07 March 2004

Looking ahead to the writing retreat next July, I've been trying to spend some time working on my laptop, making sure it's got all the stuff I need to do my writing. It's the same one I took to Clarion, but I've upgraded it to MacOS X since then.

So, instead of sitting in the study at my desktop, I'm sitting in the living room with my laptop. I'm sorting through my iTunes songs and copying stuff from the desktop machine to the laptop. Jackie was tidying for a while, but now she's spinning.

Jackie just bought a new fleece (all the wool from one sheep). It's the same breed of sheep (Gotland) that was used to make the cloaks in the "Lord of the Rings" movie, and Jackie's planning to make a cloak out of the wool she's spinning. The fiber is grey (various shades of grey, each fiber being varicolored), but the color changes depending on the light, and it is quite prone to appearing greenish. Clearly the costume designers knew what they were doing when they picked Gotland for making the elvish cloaks.

She's only spun a small fraction of the wool, but has been using what she's spun so far to do experiments with weaving it, seeing how it comes out if she weaves singles or plied yarn; weaving it loosely and then washing it versus washing the yarn and then doing a tighter weave.

The local yarn store Needleworks asked to sell some of Jackie's handspun yarn on consignment. She's turning into a yarn mogul.

It's very companionable to sit here with Jackie.

(Added later: Besides making sure I have all the software I need for writing on my laptop, I was also kind of hoping that it'd turn out to be unsatisfactory in some way, and I'd have an excuse to buy a new one. And, in fact, it did act up a bit--it went to sleep without warning when it was still reporting that the battery was good for another hour. I'm not sure that justifies buying a new one, since I'd mostly use it plugged in at a writing workshop. No writing to speak of today.)