a petty victory, maybe

Guess what arrived in the post today?

I put it together and spun it around, but my current project is being made from Louisa Harding's Grace, which comes in pre-wound balls, and thus has no need for a swift, so I have yet to properly use it. But I am looking forward to it. I am a simple, happy yarn geek, and my needs are few and usually made from all-natural materials.

Oh, I lie. It turns out there is quite a lot of stuff involved in feeding a fibre arts habit, but unlike, say, a smack habit, the stuff you need is perfectly legal. Even the hemp! Not that I've bought or used hemp yarn yet, because we are falling deep deep deep into crunchy granola hippie territory by even mentioning it, and anyway, as I have moaned about extensively before, plant fibres make my hands hurt. So no hemp, or at least not until I see some I like. It reminds me way too much of some of the truly obnoxious people I used to know back at university, people who loved to wear (ugly) clothing made from (scratchy) hemp, and who enjoyed telling anybody who could handle the body odor long enough to listen that Hemp is good stuff, man! It's so much better for the environment than cotton, man! And they are right, and I am totally on their side with the Legalize It! movement, but after the fiftieth time listening to the same lecture, I would find myself thinking, Dude, you're a burnout, and you really don't need to justify it to me, so enough already.

I'm pretty sure that's the first time I've used the word "burnout" in at least a decade, incidentally.

Anyway, in a petty triumph on the consumer rights front, I finally got a reply from Bodum, after one polite e-mail and one mildly irritated follow-up asking why they hadn't answered my first e-mail, and the reply was worth waiting for, because all I was really hoping was that I'd be allowed to purchase a new "unbreakable" carafe for my electric espresso maker, and instead, with absolutely no proof of purchase requested, they are sending me a brand new one next week, when they're back in stock. Now, assuming a) they really do send me a new one and, b) it doesn't disappear into the gaping, thieving maw of the Royal Mail, I will be one very, very happy little consumer. I'm already very pleased, because I actually did something about it, instead of, as usual, just assuming I was screwed, and because a company whose products I generally like very much has not ended up on my vindictive never-ever-again-I-hate-you shitlist without a chance to redeem themselves. This, all joking aside, is a really big step for me, because I am usually such a total wuss when dealing with stuff like this. I provisionally love you, Bodum, thank you for eventually trying to appease me. I look forward to being heavily overcaffeinated again very soon.