How exciting is this?

We all love getting surprise packages in the mail. Can you imagine my delight in opening these two.
These beautiful fat balls of silk/cashmere and merino/alpaca came all the way from the Emerald Isle and our friend Jo. They are to be dyed (by the person who has never dyed anything, at least since the tie dye experiments of my childhood). They had some lovely little carved wooden symbol thingies wound in, which I forgot to photograph. One is a tiny serpent to represent the House of Slitherin (which Jo and I feel has been overly maligned, there must be some brilliant and not too evil wizards there), another is a Celtic spiral to represent infinity.
And then there was a box of squishy, glowing goodness from Vermont from K and W. This is from Coppermoose and the Cinnamon one is Silk Tussah while the silver is Alpaca. Coppermoose has some lovely multi-color spindles that look tempting.

What these say is that my friends have much faith in my untested abilities to spin and dye. I shall be working on that spindle this week, having found a lovely little book by Priscilla Gibson Roberts called Spinning in the Old Way, a rave on the virtues of top whorl spindling, which she claims is as fast and more controllable than a wheel, and much more portable.
Since my knitting lately is just more of the same (sock one in Sock Hop is at the toe, sock two started, STR Solstice Slip is getting a heel on sock one) I shall fill in with some photos of one of my assistants, in knitting as well as the office. Here is Paprikas, AKA Poppy, as a most adorable kitten. This photo is "Where is Waldo Poppy? She seems to think she would pass for a routing book. She was there for hours before I saw her. And this is quite a high shelf, which you can't tell from the photo.
And here is Poppy warming the files, a very important job.
And here she has managed to file herself. Barely saw her this time before closing her up in the file drawer for the week-end. Since Persians don't make noises, I suppose I would not have found her until the next time I opened the file drawer. These are not unusual places to find this young lady, she wants so badly to be in the fat middle of everything. Her new trick is draping herself in front of the monitor with her fat paws laid over the keyboard, so that every time I try to see the screen, I see her tail instead.

Who is going to the midnight showing of the new Harry Potter film? ME!!! I tried to tempt some of my Sisters of the Wool, since opening night is knitting night, but I don't think anyone bit. My oldest son and I did it last time and had a blast, there is just something so delicious about catching a midnight premiere. Though we barely got in and they were showing it in every theater in the cineplex, like on ten screens. It was that full! Evidently they are showing it at the Omni theater, on that huge surround screen. That would make for some wild visuals. Might try that. As one of the Sisters said, can you imagine Quidditch in the round? Better catch an extra hour of sleep the night before.