Hiccup

It's amazing just how much having no phone or internet affects the tone of one's weekend, even if one did indulge themselves in a new MacBook Pro whose iPhoto now puts things somewhere else so that as they were trying to gather the pictures for a blog post, they couldn't find their latest pictures of things (which were fewer than they'd like to tell you about, but they neglected to photograph the pink handspun cashmere lace baby hat that should almost be at the recipient in San Francisco, as well as the silk blouse which they are wearing today).

Not to worry, I found them eventually (the ones I actually photographed).

First is a class sample for what I've been calling my Alexandra Chain, this one with each unit pointing in the same direction like a little chain of arrows. The one with units in alternating directions now belongs to Amy, so there had better be another class sample in the works.

This evening I'm teaching Isis beaded beads.

They're kind of spicy to make, and as I was sewing the samples above and below (but the one below is based on an earlier version; that's why I had to make the purple one), it occurred to me that perhaps I was in a bit too much of a hurry, and perhaps there should be more overlay, more embellishment, but I guess that's something for another day.

This class I'm feeling all organised, as I'm simultaneously putting a kit together which I'll be able to release after I've made one more sample.

The cashmere baby hat is for very dear friends who suddenly (i.e. much sooner than they'd anticipated) have become adoptive parents of a new baby girl, and even though they said they didn't need more clothes, (a) a newborn-sized hat is all I could come up with on such short notice and (b) I doubt whether she has one. My response to new babies is via knitting - isn't that the norm?

And I had to make a silk shirt because I just spent all my money on a new MacBook and my existing clothes don't mesh well with the temperatures at work and besides, my fabric closet isn't getting any emptier.

So when you're cut off from all civilization for three whole days, blogging takes a back seat, even though the MacDonalds up the road has free wifi in the parking lot (so you don't have to change out of your jammies). Just downloading email and ensuring that pattern buyers on Etsy got their PDFs within twenty-four hours was about all I could manage, since most of my available energy was directed at being furious with Charter Communications Customer quote-unquote Service, about whom I cannot say enough bad things.

I don't usually go off all nasty here, but I had no phone and no internet, and even though I possess a cell phone, it's a pay-go and for emergencies only and few people even have the number, and I'm doubly annoyed that I had to waste so many minutes on hold, or being shunted from one useless, lying customer service agent to another.

I hate that I had to make threats and tell people how much their company sucks in order to get anything done. I'm more comfortable being a poor facsimile of Oscar Wilde, making supercilious comments about the riff-raff than actually saying mean things to people who may not be personally responsible for my situation, but who apparently will not take action unless I do so. And I did have to, because they really didn't want to send anyone to fix my service until I was firmly ensconced at work on Monday. The thought of wasting precious PTO was too much to bear, not to mention that I WANTED MY SERVICES BACK!

And the irony of it all? Desmond, their repair guy, not only fixed it in two seconds flat (something outside had shifted or jiggled or otherwise become unconnected - and he assured me that I could neither have discerned the problem nor corrected it), but said he'd been on call the entire weekend, working on much lower priority service calls than mine.

Apparently the FCC expects telephone providers to fix services outages within twenty-four hours, giving said repairs the highest priority. And equally apparently, Charter doesn't give a crap.

Nice.