asl

(A word to the wise- Don't get your significant other into blogging. If he's anything like mine, he'll hog the computer and seriously cut into your posting time.)

Anyway,
For the past three years or so, I've taken classes in American Sign Language, which I absolutely love. At the beginning of this semester, we had to pretend we owned a small store. Let me tell you, it took me, like twenty seconds to decide what kind of a store I would have. Any guesses? Here's a clue: it's a yarn shop. What I didn't know was that we were going to have to design the store (way too much fun, btw), then present it to the class and have them "shop" there. I felt pretty dorky when I realized this, as all of the other stores were either coffee shops, grocery stores, or pet stores. And there I was trying to explain the difference between cotton and wool- in sign language. As a result of all this, I've learned a few things. First, if you are not a knitter (which was, oh, everyone in my class), you cannot comprehend spending $16 on a skein of sock yarn. (We won't even get into the discussions on the cost of handspun alpaca.) Second, my teacher is not all that familiar with the signs for knitters' jargon, which means I had to fingerspell a lot of it. Then I had to spell it again, since the class was pretty convinced I didn't actually spell b-a-m-b-o-o y-a-r-n. Surely no such yarn exists. Lastly, I enjoyed owning my own yarn shop way more than I should. Even if the store was fake. And even if it was full of non-knitters. And even though I couldn't actually knit while I pretended to work there. (Leave it to me to study the one language that you simply cannot speak while knitting. Yeah, you kind of need full use of your hands for this one.) It really was fun to admire the (pretend) hanks of beautiful handspun yarn hanging from the rafters in my old-barn-converted-to-a-yarn-shop (I took that from The Wool Patch) or to (imagine) see(ing) the sock yarns snuggled together in bins by the (fake) register. Not to mention the pleasure of rescuing (imaginary) non-knitters from the (very real) dark side. This experience has made me realize not only that owning a yarn store would be amazingly cool, but also that it may be time to up my medications, since clearly the hallucinations have returned.
Oh well. At least they're pretty.