Got home this evening from errands and realized I’ve been running around town looking like some kind of survival horror game protagonist.
I’m out here in my jeans and boots and hoodie and old green field jacket, just carrying groceries, but I look like I should be running around and yelling “Mia!!” and/or “Rose!!” a lot.
Things That People Have Said To Me Since I Started Working In A Yarn Shop
“i need more of the rowan felted tweed, i’m making some first-world-war balaclavas and i’ve run out”
“i’m making my husband an x-files themed jumper for christmas and i can’t find a good colour for the spaceship”
“do you have any wool/acrylic blends on sale, i’m making hats for the seamen’s mission to give to sailors and i know they say to use acrylics because they’re cheap but it gets awfully cold at sea and i worry”
“i need some black wool for gloves, but it has to be flame-proof because i’m making them for the beltane fire-jugglers”
“could you see if you have another copy of this pattern for a baby shawl, i’ve knitted it in different colours for all of my six children and twelve grandchildren but it’s started to fall apart a bit"
[from a blond, six-foot surfer dude] “yeah, do you have any really light needles, i’m going backpacking around argentina and i want to do some socks while i’m on the coach but there isn’t much room in my rucksack”
“which of these colours do you think would be best for a knitted corgi”
“do you have any patterns for dog hats”
like honestly you don’t even understand how happy this makes me, like half the time these women are really self-deprecating about it - “oh this is probably a really silly question”, “you’re going to think this is really weird but -” - and i’m just like no!! this is amazing!!! yes, we do have patterns for dog hats!!! please tell me all about why you’re knitting a dog hat!!!!
and i mean, some of the stuff they make is unbelievable. there’s one lady who knits wedding-ring shawls, these enormous lace shawls they do on shetland that’re about six feet across and made out of yarn that’s basically thread, which you can pull through a wedding ring because they’re so fine. and there’s another lady who knits dolls about three inches tall and she’s like eighty and she’s done maybe two thousand of them and i found this out yesterday when she came in for a pattern for an entire knitted nativity scene, including the animals and the star. and there’s all the ladies who knit clothes to donate to the refugees and tiny, tiny clothes for premature or stillborn babies at the maternity unit and hats for the seamen’s mission and jumpers for the homeless, and all the ladies making this incredible stuff for their friends or their relatives or just because they feel like it, and it’s just, they’re my favourite, every single one of these people is my favourite
Some more notable wool shop tales:
- “I need all of the different skin tones you’ve got. I’m knitting titties for charity, you see.”
- “What do you think would be best for a onezie for my dog?”
- “So I’m making a giant jellyfish to scare my flatmate…”
- “Which shade of purple would look best for a rhino?”
And yet, the silliest question I’ve ever heard was 5 years ago when I first wandered into what would one day become my place of work and, baffled by the sheer volume of choice available, blurted out to the shop assistant: “Which colour do I pick?????”
I love that, like. He KNOWS the audience want to clap and so he’s using them as an extra instrument. He turns around and goes hey, stop, and hopes they understand conductor gestures and it works, and then he has clapping he can use when he wants
As the treasurer for the Jewish club on campus, I once accidentally put in a request for 10,000 dollars for our Hanukkah party.
What was even more insane about this is that said request was automatically approved through the school’s system, hypothetically granting me the power to get a used car in the name of the Maccabees. So, for a good thirty minutes before my frantic email to every financial institution in my school was answered, I was plagued with two questions.
What the hell was the club going to do if all the funding we would be allotted for the next two years had to be spent in one evening?
If tasked with this enormous amount of money, what kind of rager would I now have to undertake in order to properly disperse the money?
Before Carl from accounting kindly answered my email at 9 PM on a Wednesday , I’d been researching the going rates for rent-a-penguins. Surprisingly much more affordable than you’d think.
I feel like I’m the last person alive writing in Word, but wanted to share this because it might save someone some heartache.
I am used to Word autosaving relentlessly; for the last few years it didn’t really even have a “File>Save” command that I could see–it just autosaved like every five seconds or something. It took me a long time to get used not clicking File>Save at the end of every writing session, and I never really trusted it–with good reason, it turns out.
Apparently, when you turn off Word’s new ai features, AutoSave is disabled and cannot be turned back on. There is toggle button in the upper left for it, but when I try to toggle it on, it says “Autosave is not available because of your privacy settings.” I worked in my document yesterday, put my computer to sleep with the doc still open on the taskbar (my usual habit), and when I opened it today, the new work I did yesterday was gone.
This time I only lost about 300 words, which I had typed into my document from my longhand-writing in a notebook (so I guess I kind of autosaved them that way!), but if I’d really been on a roll, this could have been a disaster.
Be careful out there. Everything is terrible!
Yeah, they’re baking it into essential compontents now so we’ll stop turning it off. Noticed that in several programs. FFS I hate all of these tech bros.
the paris catacombs are 1000x more fucked up than i imagined
did you know the cops once found a fully functioning movie theater with a well-stocked bar inside the catacombs and they when they tried to go back later to formally investigate it was completely emptied out save for a note that read “don’t search for us”
Underground french cinema
my little bro is part of the catacombs community and yeah, it’s basically a fully autonomous society! enough that when my bro goes in on a friday night, they don’t come out until monday for work- sometimes longer if they took days off.
some of the rooms have fully stocked pantries with cooking equipment, some have movies like the one described above, some have books you’re allowed to just take but people always put back- every day people bring things from the outside. artists often set up galleries there. there are rooms with mattresses and hammocks set up for people to sleep. one of the room is just a place where people leave shoes for the fun of it.
this is Known, it’s not a secret by any means. the catacombs are as big as paris itself, and people live there just as people live above. it’s wonderful when you think about it.
A little update! My little bro is now my little sister. Please don’t misgender her :)
