Yarn and small stuff.

One of my holiday gifts was yarn stash replenishment from Mel and Angela. After all that holiday knitting I was pretty much empty. In Fiberland, one must always have fiber options. Perhaps a very soft alpaca yarn spoke to you at the yarn shop and you bought the three skeins they had in your preferred color with a specific project in mind. Maybe when you got home you added it to the stash and either forgot what project you had in mind or changed your mind and used a different yarn. Will the alpaca be wasted? Of course not, another project will come along and it will be used. My point here is that stashes are quite natural and necessary, almost required, even. Here is the beginning of the "new" stash:



I was appalled at the amount of trash/recycling we had accumulated over the last four days. Now that I haul the garbage and recycling myself to the dump and sort it all out, I am truly horrified. To that end I have another rant:

Oh, Toy-Companies-of-the-World-that-import-goods-from-China, hear my plea! Please, oh for the love of Whomever You Hold Dear, please stop packaging everything in fifty-four small bags, carefully encased in five super-taped cardboard boxes. This may be some Holy Toy Company number, but I beseech you....STOP! Spend some of your million in profits to mold yet another plastic item - one in which all the small, itty-bitty bits will be kept safe, neat,and unable to be consumed by the all-powerful Electrolux (speak thou not against the sacred dirt sucker), or eaten by a dog.

You may not realize this, O Great Beings, but your karma is damaged by the negative energy of parents everywhere cursing the names of the Great Toy Companies. Ye of little faith, we would pay two dollars more a box to have less annoying packaging! Considering that people are obviously sorting small treasures into piles to send down a conveyor belt to be shrink wrapped, why not just put them into a little reusable box? Surely, O Wise Ones, this has crossed your minds. Why must parents be inflicted with the great anguish of children when a pirate's two centimeter gun, or three millimeter treasure gets lost? You may not know this, O Great Molders of Plastic, but I will not buy another set to stop the sorrow of small children. If the small pieces can jangle against each other in a small plastic bag, will they not be fine to so cohabitate in a plastic box on their long over sea adventure?

Thank you for considering my humble request. May all the plastic you create be returned to you sevenfold.


Here is a really small sample. I didn't include the treasure boxes filled with tiny jewels (we have two of those) the small rats, spiders, skull heads (for ship decoration), etc. It's all really cool stuff (I like pirates, myself. Hell, I even have a pirate name.) it's just that there is a lot of it...And it's all over the house.