Thanks to Kath & Kim, I can now knit a gumnut bonnet with wattle pompom. How cute is that? Too bad Joey and Kurt (Snookums’s nephew) are too old to wear then. (Link courtesy of Mary-Helen.)

Wow. Some guy from Wolcottville, Indiana (where I grew up) started a bison ranch! I’m trying to remember if I ever met Pete Cook. The name sounds really familiar.

Check out my signage.
No, that’s not a euphemism. Katherine visited the shop Monday and took a picture of the wool section, and lo and behold, there’s one of the many, many signs I created! (Once it became known that I know my way around Illustrator, I got handed the task of designing all the sale signage.) That one is actually my favorite, because it just says: “Add to your stash. All knitting yarns 30% off.” For some reason those short imperative sentences really crack me up.

So I’ve had 48 hours to recuperate from my first Tapestry Craft sale experience… and I’m still a little wrecked. We ended up working til 3 a.m. Friday night setting things up, which meant I only had about three (crap) hours of sleep before heading back the next day. The old ladies were lined up six deep by the time the doors opened. It was a melee. It was a madhouse. It was like the footage they show on the news of women fighting each other at the annual Harrods sale. Surprisingly, I didn’t touch a cash register until the very end of the day. I spent every other second helping people in the wool section. We’d been worried that people wouldn’t buy much since it’s the end of the knitting season, but instead folks were walking out with hundreds of dollars worth of stuff. By lunchtime I realized that I needed real food (as opposed to the Diet Coke and Krispy Kremes I’d been subsisting on for the past 24 hours) so I headed next door to a coffeeshop. I ran into Helen and her boyfriend Clinton on the way so they joined me. That was nice. Thirty short minutes later I was back into the fray. We didn’t actually get the last customer out the door til nearly an hour after our official closing time. Even Albert the owner was amazed. (Apparently it was really weird to have a sale day that was full-on busy all day without any slow periods at all.) We ended up having our biggest sales total in shop history, which is pretty amazing. I just stood there dazed, looking at the knee-deep piles of wool on the floor and dreading the clean-up. Luckily everyone else was just as tired as me so we left it and went home. Since then I’ve pretty much been knitting, sleeping, and watching TV. Unfortunately, this is going to be the pattern for the next, oh, three weeks. Gahhhh…

A-ha! So this is why I’ve been getting dozens of idiotic tourists coming in the shop looking for knitted poncho patterns.

Holy crap. I’ve been at work for sixteen hours straight now…

Wow. Another Lakeland Laker has a weblog!

Tapestry Craft is having a Relocation Sale and it starts tomorrow! I’ve spent the last few days designing signage, fixing up the website, and trying to get our e-mail mailing list in order. It’s gonna be a busy month…

Tonight I joined the Snook out at Westfield Bondi Junction (a big fancy-pants shopping mall) to see Wimbledon with the rest of his co-workers. Their boss had booked a Gold Class showing for us, which was pretty sweet. It’s basically a private theater – no more than 40 people – and everybody has big plush recliners to sit in. Unfortunately the concept of “open bar” and “two hour movie” don’t go so well together… I myself had to get up and wee twice during the film, and I hate missing the movie. Luckily I didn’t miss much, as this is a strictly formulaic rom-com. I never really bought into the love story at all, mostly because Kirsten Dunst annoyed the crap out of me. I guess I’m over her. Paul Bettany was great, though, and I found him really believable as a tennis player. The Snook and I also got a kick out seeing some shots of London and Brighton. (We also had fun speculating on how the tennis sequences were filmed; the IMDb trivia page confirms that the ball was CGed in afterwards.) So all in all, a fun evening… but way, WAY too many carbs. Ick.

Body temperature.
Good grief. It’s 37 degrees here today. That’s 37 degrees Celsius, which to us uninformed Americans equals 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s stinkin’ hot. Spring stuck around for, like, three weeks before turning into summer.