Thu Nov 17 - I was about to dash out the door to the studio when our bassist called to say he couldn't make it. This was great, since I'd just noticed a small calculation error in my band postcard promoting our Sat Dec 3rd show. (If you live in Southern CA, you're coming to see me, right? Right?)

Have you ever noticed that the post office insists on putting these little stickers with bar codes on them on the bottom of the front of postcards now? So it dawned on me that I need to change the postcard design to take this into account, and since I didn't have to race to the studio, I came back to my desk, fixed the file, and emailed it a second time.

(Again, for those of you keeping track, I finished reading the July archives, and have started on August. Before leaving work. On Thursday. Um, right after fixing the postcard. Yes, it is my vice.)

From work I headed over to Erika's apartment to carpool to the midnight movie. And because I have these darned lovely freeways memorized now, once again I marveled at my clever ability to skip the crowded freeways and find the one route that seemed unclogged for the majority of the trip. (Yay me!) I even managed to negotiate some completely untried and new side-streets to avoid the one traffic snarl right at my normal off-ramp, and made it to Erika's in record time. So quickly even, that I had to wait out front until she was out of the shower to hear me phoning to ask her to let me in the (locked) building front doors.

We had so much extra time that I got to spend some quality time cuddling the kitty-cat and then we went to Starbucks to stock up on caffeine for the movie. Saul was funny, calling several times to find out where we were and when we were going to be there, but all went well and the drive down Sunset Blvd was uneventful.

(Is it just me, or do the billboards on Sunset just seem to get larger and more plentiful year to year? That is the strangest drive, for the whole-building-advertisements alone.)

We arrived in plenty of time, and I got to see the Grauman's Chinese Theatre for the first time, although I really didn't know what I was seeing until today and I looked up the theatre online. Wow. Dude. Very cool.

Anyways, the latest Harry Potter movie was amazing (I will not write any spoilers, but you should see the movie!) but the best thing really was seeing it at Grauman's on opening night at midnight with *that crowd.* There's something unique about a packed house that will cheer if the lights dim and come back up again. Even the little tester promo logo things at the beginning, showing off the features of the sound system, got lots of cheers. So you know that gasping or boo'ing or cheering or clapping or crying will be normal (and expected!) throughout the movie. And I *love* to talk back and cheer and clap and gasp and jump during a movie.

I do have to apologize to Saul for being a little *too* talkative (sorry dear!), but I got the funniest compliment from Jonathan afterwards. He was three seats over from me, but after the movie he exclaimed that he =always= wants to see movies with me because I'm so much fun (to watch?) in a movie. And there were definitely plenty of places to cheer and gasp and jump and yelp and clap in this movie.

I used to never got around to watching movies, and almost certainly never got to see movies *in* the theatre. But that had more to do with having no one to go out with than anything else. Now I have this gaggle of 20-something friends who are big on going to movies, and even bigger on going to really good movie premiers, and they tend to invite me now. So I'm having an absolute blast finally seeing movies *with* friends and with crowds that love to cheer at the screen. =That's= my kind of crowd.

Fri Nov 18 - So technically the rest of the evening falls under "Friday" although coming in at 3 am doesn't really feel like "today," it definitely feels like "yesterday" to me. The nicest thing about carpooling with Erika had to be that last 10 minutes of the drive from Hollywood back to the Westside when my eyes started drooping and my brain started to fuzz over. I barely got to the couch and was passed out in probably 10 minutes. I know that I heard Ben come in, I said "hi" and "goodnight" and they were working on the laptop in the living room on the other couch (right next to me) with the lights on, but I don't remember them getting up to go to sleep. I was gone.

And that 5:45 am / 6:00 am alarm came *much* too soon. But I got home safely (and ahead of the nasty traffic), showered, dressed, coffee & breakfast, and started taping West Wing down from my TiVo long before the shower guy came to fix the leaks from my shower door. And after I'd finished breakfast, I realized I really wanted to try out my spinning wheel again and see if that would be a good multi-tasking tv-time activity.

First I found some old white wool I used to spin on my wheel to make a chunky two-ply yarn, and got my chops back again spinning and then plying (that's where you take a one-strand yarn and spin it the other direction around another one-strand yarn, to have a completed two-strand yarn when you're done). Once I used up a pile of that wool, I took some of my roving (clean, combed wool that's all arranged in these long tubes of fibers going the same direction) that I dyed at the workshop this summer. And I took another huge leap in my wheel-spinning—I finally figured out how to make a very thin yarn/thread on the wheel. Yay me!

And just to start a new tradition in my journal, I took photos. Enjoy dearies!



The skein of practice yarn. Very uneven, very chunky, but it got me back into the feel of working on the spinning wheel again.



The half-filled bobbin. You cannot see that the inner layer is entirely pink, but you can pick out a little green where the indigo and osage orange (a yellow) blended, and in the center you can see a little purple where the indigo and cochineal (pink from little bugs) blended.



The bobbin, and all the roving still coming next. There's white undyed portions, indigo blue, cochineal pink, osage orange (which is yellow), plus green and purple blended sections.



Comparing the chunkiness of the practice skein to the wonder of my first really small wheel-spun yarn. I've spun small diameter/thickness yarns on a drop spindle, but never on a wheel. I'm really jazzed!

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Today's Achievements: One of my goals/projects is to get back into spinning, and maybe learn to make specific yarns for knitting, crocheting, or weaving projects. So today I started my first bobbin of wheel-spun, very thin single-ply, of some naturally dyed roving that I worked on this summer.

Today's Blessing That I'm Thankful For: Bjo, for the Dyestuffs Retreats and getting me excited about fiber arts again.