Spinning has taken a back seat to knitting lately. But I've taken to my wheel again with a passion. There's an annual spinning challenge called the Tour de Fleece that coincides with the Tour de France bike race. I'm a huge fan of challenges, even if I don't always have the best record of follow through.

However I have started the Tour de Fleece and have made some progress. I'm averaging an ounce spun every day so far. Which means I have four ounces spun up so far!

The first bobbin is four ounces of Polwarth wool dyed by Adrian of Hello Yarn for Yarn School 2010. The colorway is called Roasted and the colors make me think of a roasted veggie kabob. Not sure what I'm going to do with it yet. Ply with something else, chain ply, leave as a single...who knows?

Right now my goal is just to spin as much as possible and worry about the plying later. Of course, I may (and probably will) change my mind about that sometime along the way.

So I had a dream this week that I had found a new rental house. A very cute little house in a city neighborhood that reminded me somewhat of downtown Muncie, Indiana.

In the dream, my dad helped me move. Not a practical thing to do in reality since he lives about eight hours drive from me. Before leaving me to my own devices, he left me a pet cow.

I know, right? Where did he get this cow? Why did he leave it with me? What the heck? But who is to argue with the logic of dreams. We just blithely accept these odd things as reality and move on.

So I milked the cow and made a bed for it on the kitchen floor. In the morning, I decided it should probably go outside in the yard. However, with no fence or leash I was concerned that it might run away. I decided that I should take the cow outside anyway since I really didn’t want cow waste on my kitchen floor.

Here’s the thing, I didn't want anyone to know that I had a cow in the city. I wasn't sure if something like that was permitted and did not really want to get into trouble. So I dressed it up in overalls. You know, as one is wont to do when attempting to disguise one’s pet cow. Yes, it made perfect sense in my dream but sounds ridiculous in reality.

Once thoroughly disguised so as to fool exactly no one, we walked down the street and I ran into a group of friends at an outdoor market. Surprisingly everyone is fooled by the cow except for one woman. She comes up to me and tells me I didn't need to dress up the cow after all. She had a cow in the city too and proceeded to assure me that it was no big deal.

So I turn to the cow and I see that it is standing on its hind legs trying to blend in with the crowd. He turns to me and says, "I'm going back to the house to change and clean up.”  I ask why and he says, "Because I just shit my pants." Looking down I notice that sure enough, there’s a huge load in the overalls. I ask if he wants me to go with him and he assures me he knows the way. That he'll meet up with me later.

At this moment, several thoughts are going through my dream state mind:

1. I feel kinda bad that I forgot that avoiding a messy cow waste incident was the whole reason for us going outside and I had dressed him in overalls. This only exacerbated the problem, of course.
2. I suddenly realized that this is a male cow. I’d been thinking of it as an it all this time but once I heard it speak, I knew it was male.
3. The cow was speaking. and standing upright. This just got a little strange.
4. Hey, if the cow is male, why does it have udders? Wait, are they really udders? Uh oh, I milked the cow the night before. What does this mean. Did I give a cow an awkward udder hand job thingy or what?

So I hang out with my friends at the outdoor market for a little bit and then walk the few blocks back to my place.  Thinking all the time about how awkward this is going to be when I get to see him again. I mean, I didn't exactly act shocked when it started talking to me or anything...but I was kinda weirded out.

As I walk back to my place I try not to freak out about whether this strange cow wanted more awkward udder jobs from me or perhaps even more. That’s when I see that the cow is all cleaned up in the back yard and is not alone. He is hanging out with an elephant that is painted all over to look like a cow. They are cuddling in the garden in the back yard and are clearly together in a romantic sense. I didn’t witness anything graphic, mind you. Thank goodness as I’m sure my head would most certainly have exploded at that point.

I walk into the house but they saw me and the elephant immediately leaves. The cow saunters into the house (still on hind legs, mind you) and says that he can't stay with me any longer. That he and his boyfriend are moving in together and he just needed to crash at my place the one night. I'm cool with that so the cow leaves.

Shortly after that I wake up and realize, I was just dumped by a gay cow.

Well, I’ve had worse relationships.

I'm still working on the silk and rayon sweater. I'm thrilled with how it is knitting up so far. The yarn itself is pretty slubby which is giving the final fabric a lovely appearance.

I'm doing a simple stitch pattern of three stockinette rows and one purl ridge row. It is easy to keep track of and also helps me see the progress as I'm going along.

I have been trying it on as I go...about every eight rows or so. Overkill? Perhaps. But I think that if I remain conscious of how it's fitting then I will be able to identify any issues right away. Here's something radically different that I've done from past sweaters: I cast on for the medium size. Which seems a little crazy since I'm actually a couple sizes larger than that. However, this is a top down raglan and so the whole sweater hangs from my shoulders. And as I've gained weight over the years, my shoulders have stayed in the same place. So, I've increased as appropriate for my size but I think starting with the smaller size is going to be a trick I will be using again in the future.