What a week!

It's a bit difficult for me to believe that Friday has finally arrived, and I'm still more or less in one piece (barring my still-injured right hip, but the less said about that, the better). It started with a lovely Mother's Day, marred by bad news (more on that next week), then the build up to a shop update (always tiring), then a lovely trip to the Knitting and Stitching Show at Olympia yesterday, and culminating in a fabulous morning doing a spinning demo at the Campaign for Wool's Wool House exhibit at Somerset House. I'm exhausted!

Since there has been so much this week, I'm going to spread out the events over several posts, otherwise this post will be waaaaay too long. Let's start with the easiest first:

The Spring Knitting and Stitching show at Olympia Kensington, running from 14th-17th March

.

I went to the Ally Pally K&S Show

in October, 2011, but I had an even better time this go around. Maybe it was because I had company, maybe it was because I managed to find some goodies to take home. In any event,

Alli

and I had a fabulous time.

We arrived promptly at 10:00, and headed inside. First up were the quilts. Many, many amazingly fantastic and glorious quilts. Here are a few of my favorites.

More pictures in

this Flickr set

. After the quilts, we did a strategic walk through of the entire show. Which is to say, we wandered up and down the aisles dreamily for a couple of hours.

I first fell off the wagon at the

Textile Garden

button booth. Alli actually wandered off for a while because I was so obsessed. I came home with plenty of buttons for at least 5 sweaters...

That's ten buttons each of five different styles.

I love the jumping sheep (hello baby sweaters!), and the others are all slated for various sweater designs.

Next falling-down point: a pile of bagged yarn at

Black Sheep Wools

. And Alli actually did fall down in it to reach a particularly fetching shade of red (sadly I was not quick enough on the draw to snap a photo).

Bags and bags and bags of wool. I ended up with three bags (oops). Two bags of Rowan Wool Silk DK in a lovely pale lilac.

And one bag of orange (!!!) Luxury Cotton DK - Alli insisted it was my color.

I keep telling myself that my fascination with orange is a recent thing, but

clearly that is not the case

. It might be time for me to actually make myself a freakin' orange sweater just to get it out of my system.

Final purchase: an alpaca dress (!!!!) from Toft Alpacas. No picture taken at the time, but you can see me wearing it today at

Wool House

 and babbling on about my miniSpinner. More on that next post...

Harlot's here!

Or will be here some time in the next 7 hours. And I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Devil and Ironman are well enough to keep each other company in their tummy bug misery while Boo and I venture up to Spring to see the Harlot. (And if anyone up there is listening? Please don't let Boo come down with this nastiness in the middle of the Harlot's talk. I've been at home with a sick kid since LAST THURSDAY and I need a night off. Thanks!)

Tour de Farce*

* with thanks to NPR's All Things Considered for the title

I got sucked in to cycling when I moved to Tucson when I finished grad school to wait for then-only-boyfriend IronMan to finish his graduate adventures. He was doing a lot of road riding at the time, and if ever any place was made for cycling, it’s Tucson, so after a half-hearted attempt to go my own way, I succumbed. I joined a team, I did a bit of racing, and then got in to triathlon, but still kept road riding. One of the highlights of every summer was following the Tour de France as it unfolded. This was in the heart of the Lance Armstrong years, and besides being a fantastic story about overcoming cancer, watching him basically win at will was almost incomprehensible, even though we were watching as it happened.

And now I don’t think I want to follow pro cycling ever again. It started off this spring when several of the major contenders for the overall classification were linked with a doping scandal, and were not allowed to race. A former Tour winner admitted to doping to win the race. One of the sports best sprinters tested positive in the Giro d'Italia (but was later cleared). Then the race started, and riders started dropping like flies. A member of the T-Mobile team was found to have had an elevated testosterone level in a previous test and was not allowed to start. A rider who many expected to be on the podium was kicked off his national team for failing to keep the national doping agency informed of his whereabouts last month. A well known, well respected rider won a time trial one day, lost major time the next day, and then won a mountain stage on the third day, only to be found to have blood doped – he and his team left the race. Then yesterday, another rider and team withdrew after a high testosterone test. Even worse then that, late yesterday the current overall leader Michael Rasmussen (rider previously kicked off his national team), after winning the toughest stage of the race and virtually locking up victory for his team, was suddenly fired and kicked out of the race. I am just amazed.

I’m torn between being glad that the authorities in pro cycling are (maybe) finally getting tough on doping, and being concerned that this is a witch hunt that is tarnishing the names and reputations of innocent people. All of these expulsions have come before confirmation of the test results using B samples – if those samples come back negative, then the original conclusion of doping has to be thrown out since it can’t be replicated. And there are always questions about chain of custody and what lab is doing the tests and who they’re linked to that might influence events. As a scientist, I’d like to believe that there isn’t any issue with the actual tests being run or the way experiments are done, but that hasn’t always been the case in the past. I'd also like to believe that the riders are smart enough to know that these tests are out there, the authorities are out to hunt down the dopers, and it makes no sense to blood dope (for example) when you will get caught. Particularly if you win a stage! Maybe I’m just being stupid to think that all these protestations of innocence from the riders aren’t lies, and maybe they are all doped to the gills, and the ones that don’t get caught just have better doctors. It’s a sad state of affairs that the strategies for doping in cycling (and triathlon for that matter) are far ahead of most of the available tests to detect doping.

I don’t know what the answer to this problem is, but I do know that I’m very, very, very disappointed. And not very interested in participating as a spectator any more.

ETA: Oh, this just keeps getting better!

Waiting...

Thanks to this and this, I now know that I will be able to get in on the party that is Ravelry on July 30, 2007.

Not like I don't already have enough ways to waste time...