I like to make official, separate posts for my FOs--a conceit of the tag organization Blogger didn't support when I was first blogging--so Norberta will follow as promised.
The adventure started Friday night. Our friends, Mike and Andrea, live down in Ypsilanti (what a silly name for a town, I've always thought), but they'd moved into a new apartment since the last time we went to see them. Beforehand, we remembered to ask for, and write down, the new directions...the bulk of the trip was still the same highways, with some different surface streets at the end.
However, we didn't realize until we were staring at nine floors' worth of anonymous door buzzers that we'd not been given their apartment number.
So we waited all of 30 seconds before someone was on their way out to get in, then found an elderly man sitting in a little office just inside the entrance to help us. I hesitate to call him a "doorman", since that's not what he was there for...I'm actually not sure what he was there for. But he had a list of the names of everyone in the building.
Which apparently hadn't been updated since Mike and Andrea moved in.
Now, this all could have been solved if I'd had the presence of mind to copy their cell phone #'s on to the new directions...they were on the old ones, but I was in a hurry, and I didn't think about it. There was a phone in the office (we don't have cell phones ourselves, neither myself or my husband comes even close to needing one) and we could have called and asked.
So RJ memorized the numbers of all the blank apartments and prepared to start buzzing, the logic being that if they were really empty, we wouldn't be bothering anyone, and eventually we'd find who we were looking for.
Lucky for us, they lived in the first one we tried.
The rest of the night and most of the day Saturday passed in a haze of video games, catching up and gossiping, and eating Andrea's wonderful cooking.
Then, there was a yarn shop adventure. There's this place Andrea had heard about this little place in the middle of nowhere, Forma. It was so in the middle of nowhere that the directions we got online pointed us towards an empty field....once we got out there and didn't find anything, we called the shop again to find out if we were totally lost. Turns out we hadn't gone far enough down the dirt road that put us off in the first place!
The shop is primarily about weaving...there were racks and racks of cones for sale, and probably about a dozen looms, all in use for the weaving classes taught there, all with something beautiful on them. It made me miss weaving, which I learned in college, but not having a loom, couldn't really continue doing past that class I took.
But, there was a set of cabinets holding a complete color selection of Lamb's Pride--and I do mean "complete", it was like seeing rainbows when you pulled the door open--and a smaller side room, sunlit and with a stereo system playing soothing background music, filled with all sorts of interesting knitting yarns. There were brand names there, but I couldn't tell you any of them, because the two of us immediately started fondling all the stuff that was only marked with little white tags bearing fiber content, yardage, and price. There were hanks and hanks of loop and baby loop mohair in solids and multis, hand-dyed silk/rayon that I probably picked up and put down a dozen times while deciding if I had to take it home with me, and a section of richly colored yarns I can only describe as "rustic"...they reminded me, texturally, of wool tweed, but these weren't actually tweedy. I guess I need to work on my vocabulary a bit....
Andrea walked away with loads of stuff on sale, and I managed to get out with only three skeins of a hand-dyed silk/wool/rayon that will make its debut this Friday.
In the interest of not making this entry any more of a wall of text than it already is, my review of Saturday's dinner and a movie can wait.
Labels: adventures
