The other day I was walking to the market for lunch when suddenly every bone in my body was urging me to stop, lie down on the sidewalk and take a nap.  My eyelids were heavy and the warm concrete beneath my feet looked so inviting and divine.  I never thought I would think that taking a nap in the middle of the sidewalk would ever be so tempting.  Maybe when I was little I took naps on the sidewalk, but that must have been after hours of bike riding and sidewalk chalkin’ and (most likely because I was a weird kid) eating grass.  Did you ever eat grass?  I have a distinct memory of lying underneath a trampoline eating grass because I wanted to be a cow.  Grass underneath a trampoline is probably the most nutritious of grasses because they’re safe from trampling feet.  Additionally, the trampoline provides coverage from the ever watchful eyes of adults who frown upon grass/bark/twig/bug eating.

That tangent has nothing to do with knitting, I know.  The important thing that I want you take home from this post is that I recently procured a mother-fiber-load of yarn.  Couple of birthday presents:

From a friend: Handspun and dyed wool from Snowberry Studio Yarns on Lopez Island.  Probably going to turn this into a chunky cowl of sorts.

From the sister: A skein of Tiny Annapurna in Coral Reef from A Verb for Keeping Warm in the Bay Area.  I see a beanie in it’s future.

From myself: I got me a whole box of yarn.  Because I deserve it and because I have big plans for a couple of sweaters.  Holly aka sillylittlelady and I are about to venture into a knit-a-long.  We’ve both been admiring Aidez for a long time and finally decided that we needed to do this. now.  Thus I have begun:

I still don’t own a ball winder and I honestly have no free time to go to a yarn store to use theirs.  So I will be using my overturned chair and kitchen utensil method to wind 11 hanks into semi decent center pull balls.  You may think that this is a horribly bad and tedious thing.  But I assure you it is not.  I wound one hank and it was the most personally rewarding thing I’ve done all week.  It put a smile on my face.  I knit a swatch and I felt even more accomplished.  It’s really the little things that get me excited…even if it is eating grass.