If Red – she of the hilarious, manifold obsessions – and this person were to meet…:

A convent, 20 miles away from my house, with their own llamas. They harvest the wool. They spin the wool. They dye the wool. Then they sell the yarn. THEY SELL THE YARN!!! Nun spun wool, I couldn’t make this sh*t up if I tried! Well, I made up the name, because “nun spun wool” is just too perfect of a name…but that’s another story.

ANYWAY, so earlier this week I gave a shout out to the good nuns at the convent. You can’t just send them and e-mail. You have to actually call. I hate talking on the phone. I HATE calling people on the phone. It goes back to my fear of ordering pizza. But I overcame my fear for the yarn. For the sake of the yarn folks. The lady I talked to (Sr. Schwarzenflugenflagenfluagel or something like that) told me she only had a little in stock because she spins it up as they need it, but that she could spin me some if she knew what I wanted.

SHE IS GOING TO CUSTOM SPIN MY YARN!!! I’m thinking at this point that it’s going to be like a bajamillion dollars or something. Nope, they sell it by the ounce, and it’s only $2.00 an ounce. Which makes me feel like a drug dealer…with nuns…and yarn…but like a drug dealer nonetheless.

All of this to say, yesterday I went out to the convent and hung out with the head spinner. Not the HEAD spinner. The head SPINNER. You have to put the right emphasis on the right word. She let me play with the llamas. She let me touch ALL of the wool. She showed me the whole process and I got a back stage tour of the convent. It totally rocked. I bought all of the yarn she had on hand, and ordered enough to keep her busy until the second coming of Christ.

As I was leaving I asked her if she ever taught people how to spin. She said they have retreats every year, but this year they didn’t have a place to do it so she didn’t know if it was going to happen. I volunteered my house. She accepted my offer. So in January I’m going to have a house full of nuns who will teach me how to spin my own yarn. I’m so freeking excited I could actually spit back at the llamas!!!!

I know I’ve joked about becoming a nun at various points in my life. But had I known there was a convent where they played with llamas and knit and spun yarn all day I would have likely followed through with it by now.

…would the combined levels of obsession open a rift in the time/space continuum that would alter the state of matter?

Just curious.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Tuesday, October 9th, 2007 at 5:39 am and is filed under Blogs, Geekery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.