Sorry, that bit got away from me

I had a post that I meant to post, but then it all went haywire and the post vanished into the ether.

Very busy couple of weeks.  Ran some fiber up to the fiber mill.  I have a ton of beautiful fiber for spinning, but I have had no time to actually comb or card much of it.  I also had a beautiful cormo fleece that had been washed several times but was still absolutely full of lanolin.  So the cormo fleece went up to the mill to be washed and I took a partial fleece in grey to the mill to be carded and drawn out into roving.

They are going to call me when the cormo is washed so we can discuss carding it.  When I go pick those up, I'm going to take several more fleeces up to be carded into roving. 

My thought process here is that I don't have a fleece smaller than 3 pounds.  It can take an hour or sometimes more to process 4 ounces of fiber and that doesn't include doing anything like dyeing it or blending it with something else.

Let's take a rough guesstimate at how much fleece I have in the house and say 30 pounds (I know this is way low, but let's go with that.  ;) 

So that's 4 hours per pound, 30 pounds, for a total of 120 hours or more.  That would be 3 weeks at a full time job.  And I already have one of those.

So the fiber is going to the mill.

There are some exceptions that I want to process on my own.  I have a fleece that is beautiful but is not strong enough to go through an industrial carder.  That one has to be processed by hand. 

I have one that is in pearly white ringlets.  That one I want to process myself because most of its appeal is the ringlet structure.  But basic fleece?  that can just be processed by the mill.

We're slowly seeing life return to normal around the house.  The cat still insists that the rocking chair is his favorite place in the world...  as long as I'm willing to sit there and rock while holding him.

The bird is still convinced that Shredded Wheat cereal is probably the best thing I've ever bought as a bird treat.  And that the Trader Joe's Soycatash is the best veggie mix he's ever gotten.

Oh, have you heard about the Montsano corn?  Yeah, this is why I switched to the Trader Joe's veggies.  Montsano has genetically engineered a corn that carries bug poison in the kernels.  DEADLY bug poison.  They swear (of course) that the poison breaks down before the corn reaches your dinner table, but tests have shown that it does not.  Rats that ate the corn did show the poison, and so did humans.  I don't eat a huge amount of corn.  I love corn, but I don't eat a lot of it because it's pure starch and carbs.  But the bird gets corn in his veggie mix every day.  I should decrease how much corn he gets but seriously, he's a 20+ year old bird of a species that only lives about 20 years...  if he likes corn, he can have some every day.

However, I'm not going to feed him corn that is genetically engineered to be poisonous.  No chance.

I found out that Trader Joe's sources their in house vegetables specifically to make sure that the veggies are NOT genetically altered in any way.  Including the corn.  And they've dropped farmers and even legally prosecuted them for using genetically altered veggies in the Trader Joe's shipments.

Trader Joe's for the win.  I now buy a bag of the Soycatash and some other frozen veggie mix that doesn't include corn, I mix them together and that is what the bird veggies are every morning.

And now that i've rambled way longer than I meant to...  It's time to get some more things done today.