Last month, I had it in my head that I MUST KNIT LACE. I tried charting up a design but didn’t do anything about it. Then, as luck would have it, my local yarn shop (Babetta’s Yarn Cafe) advertised a lace knitting class!

One of my book club buds and I signed up for it and, on August 4th, I cast on my first ever lace shawl. I opted to go with Jatta Saukko’s Zetor shawl. I wasn’t so concerned with the actual lace pattern but was really eager to learn the construction techniques behind triangular shawl.

(It still amazes me that you can start off with TWO stitches and end up with a beautiful garment!)

Thanks to our intrepid instructor, Gustine, we learned how to do a provisional cast on WITHOUT the use of crochet (v. good as I don’t know how to crochet!) and, after that first class, I was off and running.

I finished up the shawl last night and blocked it this morning.

Isn’t it purty?

I’m still very excited about lace possibilities. What to make next?

So what do you think “old school fun and games” might be?

No, not cow tipping, no Nicky Nicky Nine Doors, no burning bags of poop on people’s porches…I’m talking about board games!

Every Thursday night, a bunch of us get together for “Game Night”. We meet at K & K’s house (because they have all the good games), enjoy a nice dinner, and then it’s “Let the games begin!”

Currently, our favourites are Ligretto, Settlers of Catan, and Carcassonne.

Ligretto is a wild and wooly card game. We’ve found it’s best played towards the end of the night (once we’re all a bit in our cups); it can get truly crazy. Lots of swearing, cursing, name-calling, and (above all) tons of fun. I think the rules have you keeping score but, by the end of the night, math just isn’t one of our strong points so we just dispense with that part of the rules.

Settlers of Catan is a board game where the board can change every time you play it. There’s strategy involved but not so much that you have to be running on all brain cells. (Hmmm. I think I’m detecting a previously unrecognised theme here…)

Carcassonne is a tile-based game that is a ton of fun. It reminds me a wee bit of Risk but without the whole military-must-take-over-the-world ‘tude.

Game Night has become a real treat for all of us. Good food, good games, and good friends…does it get any better?

So, when did we become a society that is completely incapable of fixing something?

Over the past few weeks, things around the house have been breaking down. Nothing major…just little things going wrong.

First, it was the spark module on the stove. The oven itself is just fine…when it lights. The thermostat for the oven is super (as in fairly accurate), the burners are beautifully adjustable–it’s a good stove. But, when the spark module “went”, do you know how hard it was to find a part? It’s as if one is expected to just replace a perfectly good appliance because a (relatively) inexpensive but critical part has reached the end of its life.

I was finally able to locate an appliance repair shop a few “towns” over. Added bonus? they could order the part.

The next thing to go was the gasket on the lawn mower’s carburetor. (I cannot believe I spelt that correctly on the first go! Yea, me!)

The lawn mower is ten years old and works perfectly. Well, worked perfectly until the gasket on its carb gave up the ghost. Now, even I learned how to rebuild a lawn mower engine; wasn’t the old Briggs & Stratton rebuild project a staple of most high school shop classes?

If that’s so, then why can you not, for love nor money, buy lawn mower engine parts?

I guess we’re expected to just run out and buy a new lawn mower. Probably from the same place we’ve just bought our new stove.

Luckily, we have eBay. The new gasket is winging its way to our house, at a cost of around $5.00. I suppose in a pinch, one could just cut your own gasket (assuming you can still buy gasket material!).

Today’s broken bit was a threaded ring on the pool sweep. It cracked, almost in two, and could no longer be threaded onto the sweep. Okay, this is the straw that broke the camel’s back and triggered this rant…

A pool sweep is not a cheap piece of equipment. This thing the size of a typewriter (remember those?) costs about half as much as a stove. It’s an investment!

With that being the case, why, oh why, must you replace it when a $5.00 part on it cracks?

Epoxy and a vise seemed like a better option and Scooter (my name for the pool sweep) is busy doing his pool duties as I write this.

The money involved in replacing these objects isn’t really an issue. What I really want to know is this: when did we become a society that is incapable of fixing simple items? When did it become okay to just throw perfectly good objects, albeit ones needing minor (and I mean really minor) repairs away?

Sometimes the wastefulness of our society just seems so very, very obscene.

Pattern is from JL Yarnworks; my modifications are listed on my Ravelry project page (Rav link).