public service announcements

Today's public service announcements are brought to you courtesy of the Minnesota State Fair.

#1: Should you wish to start out your day at the fair with crying, screaming, kicking and flailing, this is easily achieved by giving your three year old a one dollar bill so she doesn't feel left out when the older kids have spending money. She will clutch the dollar bill tightly in her fist, but will want to point out some just-born piglets to you. When she does, the dollar will fall, she will lose it, and the crying, screaming, kicking and flailing will commence.

It's really quite a foolproof process.

This picture shows a three year old at the beginning of this process. The dollar was dropped shortly thereafter.

#2: Fried cheese curds have no calories and contain properties that effortlessly slim your hips. You can drop two dress sizes by the time your day at the fair is through.

#3: Hotdish is best on a stick. Try it at your next family gathering. Here's an easy recipe:

Combine in a ceramic baking dish:

-- One can condensed cream of mushroom soup

-- One can chunk light tuna packed in water

-- One package frozen peas

-- One pound of egg noodles

-- One cup of water

Mix until combined. Bake in a preheated 350 degree oven for 40 minutes. Remove from oven and cover mixture with 6-8 cups of mozzarella cheese. Cheese should be approximately three inches thick. Return to oven until cheese is melted and a brown crust begins to form; approximately 20 minutes. Remove hotdish from oven and place immediately into the refrigerator for a minimum of three hours to allow mixture to gelatinize.

When cold, cut into four inch squares and spear with a bamboo skewer. Serve cold, and with lots of pop. If you have no idea what pop and hotdish are, do not attempt to make this at home.

#4: Consuming 3/4 of a bucket of cookies will not prevent you from getting sunburned.

#5: Cows that weigh 2,400 pounds make excellent playground equipment.

#6: 1,400 pound pigs are not something to be proud of.  If you have one, don't bring it to the state fair. Unless this is how you want to be remembered.

#7: Don't let the talk of crowds dissuade you from attending: 1.7 million of the nicest people on earth have all congregated in one place!

#8: Add large quantities of seeds to your bomb and tornado shelters. If worse comes to worst, at least you'll have art to cheer you.

Be sure to include enough seed for the art and for the replanting after the tornado destroys your farm.

#9: When they say the Minnesota State Fair is one of the largest state fairs in the world, what they really mean is that we have the most chickens.

#10: The State Fair does not have a concierge service. If you would like to purchase 950 pounds of pumpkin, you will have to roll it home yourself.

Thus concludes this test of the emergency broadcast system.

What are you doing here?

Not you, THEM:

The boats. There are five of them. We're not talking little fishing boats, I mean BIG boats, of the cargo ship, 700-1,000 foot variety.

Boats like these:

I didn't have my telephoto lens with me, so you can't see them well. But they're there.

On the other hand, check out the clouds. They were sitting over the Lake like a blanket of fluffy roving, and you could see the sun at the corners of the blanket.

They were dredging the canal at the same time -- five boats and a dredging is a lot of activity for one morning.

Surprisingly, boat captains do not prefer to run aground while entering the port of Duluth.

Because we're Minnesota Nice, we get out there at the crack of dawn and dredge it for them.

There's a reason Duluth is the world's largest inland port. It has nothing to do with geography. It's that we're the nicest.

The Ice House is a fixture of the Duluth waterfront -- it's an abandoned structure that used to serve as a storage location for... ice. Ice cut from Lake Superior. So people could have cold drinks and keep their food fresh.

Now teenagers congregate at the top of it and jump off in the summertime.

Adults do not do this. If you are an adult and you're jumping off the ice house, it's time for a reality check, folks. You are no longer 17. The jig is up.

I can see a glimpse of the Lake from the second floor of my house -- I'm lucky to live two blocks from this beautiful body of water.

I will tell you something about the people that live here. We put up with a lot of flack about the cold, and there is definitely some cold.

But we never, never get tired of looking at the water. We never stop admiring the boats and the clouds and the ice and the waves and the breeze.

It ain't the tropics, but I wouldn't want it to be -- I sunburn too easily.

And I work with large quantities of wool.

grade one

That's what she's going into. Grade one.

I remember 1st grade. My hair was long and blonde. I sat next to a girl named Natalie. I raced through my work and always did poorly on the handwriting exercises. One day, I was so bored with having to write in cursive that I pretend-scribbled all over the whole worksheet and then tried in vain to erase all of my marks. The teacher was not impressed that I had defaced the assigned work in such a manner.

But my daughter would never do such a thing. She loves to write carefully and neatly, and every day makes herself a new book with folded paper, drawings, and a story.

Her eyesight is perfect -- she's wearing my glasses in this picture.

She does have my sense of humor, though -- silliness comes easily to her.

Did I mention she just lost her first tooth? She did.

Before:

Six years after:

Some things never change.

behind the scenes

I'm just going to come right out and say it: our yarn clubs are the best.

I don't say that to be prideful, I don't say it to put anyone else down. I'm just stating a fact. They're the best.

I could give you a litany of reasons why they're so awesome: great colorways, great yarns, great format, great customer service. But the truth of the matter is that they're the best because of the people in them.

Nice, nice, fun, awesome people. They make the marathon days at the end of the month leading up to club shipping worth it.

It takes a long time to dye close to 1,000 skeins of yarn. It takes an entire day to do all the prep work to ship multiple truck loads of packages.

Because people can order as many skeins as they want, very few packages are the same, which means there is no assembly line of packages where we put one skein in an envelope, slap a label on it, and call it cool.

You can see an example of my color coded shipping list. It takes 5-8 hours just to make the color coded shipping lists.

It then takes about six hours just to run all of the shipping labels. Because people order different quantities and are located all over the world, I can't just do a mail merge and set the weight and walk away.

And it takes three people two days just to label everything. By the end of the prep day, the studio looks like a maze -- we've got individual orders set aside, ready to be packed, we've got all of the sock club extras assembled and ready, we've got snacks and music and iced tea.

Tomorrow's the big day! Fly away, little babies!

for the first time in decades...

I am not going back to school this year.

I'm also now old enough to say "It's been decades."

That makes me old.

Of course, I went back to school every September as a child and teenager. Then I went to college. And then I became a teacher. Hence, every single year for decades I've been doing back to school shopping in August.

As a teacher, I at least attempted to dress in a pseudo-stylish manner. I had a large wardrobe of skirts that I usually paired with a brightly colored, fitted T-shirt, a cardigan, and shoes like these:

Now, the only back to school shopping I've done is for my children. Which is fun in its own way, but involves a lot more of saying, "No, I won't buy you shoes that light up and sing songs! What is this world coming to? What has gotten into young people these days?"

Which is further evidence of my oldness. I'm officially asking what has gotten into young people these days.

I have also started turning up the television extra loud and muttering under my breath about the music that the young scallywags in my town blast from their vibrating cars.

So now I wear shoes like these, all day every day. They're comfortable and slip resistant, which is useful when your floors are in a perpetual state of dampness.

I sigh about it and keep a pair of sandals under my desk and look for reasons to wear my stylish clothing. Whenever I wear anything other than my work uniform -- a black T-shirt with our logo on it, a pair of dye stained pants or shorts, and Crocs -- people notice.

"You look nice," my family says, as I leave the house in a black T-shirt with our logo on it, a pair of dye stained pants and loafers. Loafers are enough of a wardrobe upgrade that people take note when I wear them.

 I no longer have much use for pretties like this:

Being a Full Time Yarnista certainly has its advantages. Wardrobe ain't one of them.

And you know what I miss most about being a teacher?

My colleagues (and friends) who made getting up at 4:30 am worth it.

Happy back to school to all of you, whether you're a teacher or a parent or a grandparent or just someone who wants the scallywags off the street and safely corralled into school where they belong.

And here's a coupon code good for free shipping on anything on our site: AUGSHIP. It will expire at the end of the day on August 31st, so use it while you can!

Go shopping!