Week 7 - Mini Swap Hell

So why is it that when you try to do something nice, it ends up biting you in the butt? The week started on a sour note and it just kept giving.

Before I start complaining about yarn, I should say that it pales in comparison to starting the week hearing that a good friend and her husband had covid. He'd gone for a test a week earlier, which came up negative. But when Cindy started having symptoms a week later, they both went for testing and both came back positive. It's worrisome but I'm hoping she'll have a mild case.

Now for the yarn bitching. I volunteered to coordinate a swap of sock yarn minis, which I'd done before and had a horrible time with it. But since I'd learned so much that time, I figured it would be easy this time. Yeah, right. I'd been receiving packages of minis for the previous month and someone sent moth ball smelling yarn! What century is this anyway? But I'd bagged that up separately and gotten volunteers to take the stinky yarn so Andrea and I were ready to sort minis on Monday night. It was a stressful fiasco due to those bags of stinky yarn messing up the count but I thought we were good to go when we left the library, where we'd sorted on the counters of the old computer room. Then I got home to find an envelope of yarn from someone who'd never confirmed that she sent them, even though she was late. I'd messaged her 3 times and got no response. I was pissed! But I pulled from all the other envelopes to get her some minis, posted a rant in the swap group then started printing shipping labels and scheduled a pick up before heading to bed.

I printed more labels the next morning then more at lunch. I finished the last one (to Australia!) on Wednesday and called it done. Then the packages started arriving and the complaints started. In all the frantic sorting on Monday night, clearly some minis had gotten mixed up and 3 people complained that they'd gotten their own back. Really? I was NOT happy.

So in bitter cold weather with blowing snow, I went to the post office at lunch on Friday and mailed off 3 envelopes of extra minis from my stash to the 3 complainers, spending $12 of my own money. The complainers all said it wasn't necessary but then why did they complain? What did they expect to accomplish? On top of going out when I'd had no intention of leaving my house until the weather warmed up, my car barely started and it was so cold that I left the car running while I went into the post office. Damn! Did I mention that the high temp on Friday was zero? Yes, that was the high and the wind chill was brutal. Not the day to be going out at all, never mind to placate whiners.

That trip out of the way, I was ready to hunker down. The finale episode of The Stand had dropped on CBS All Access so I was ready to binge! The Stand is my favorite book of all time so I was perfectly happy to sit and knit, toasty warm while it was freezing outside. The high on Saturday was 5 and on Sunday was -5. The high temp. I had the oven going for hours, making homemade baked beans, cheesy baked cauliflower, anadama bread (it's got cornmeal and molasses - yum), apple brown betty... I cooked all weekend. So after a hellish week of yarn stress and ingrates, I at least got to enjoy my hunkered down weekend. And it's a good thing I did all that cooking because there was even colder weather on the horizon. I am SO over this winter!