In early December I made a short trip to Berkeley, California, to give a luncheon speech at a conference. The conference started Saturday evening and went through Sunday, so I flew overnight from Honolulu on Friday night, arriving in San Francisco very early in the morning on Saturday. The conference organizers had kindly arranged for me to get into my room at the Faculty Club in the morning, and had sent me a basic map of the campus.
The van driver was sure he could find the location, although he was busily consulting the map and his GPS before we even left the airport. It was still dark when the driver pulled up at the Haas Business School and told me that if I just walked through that gate, the faculty club was right there. I paid the driver and set off through the gate. Fortunately, I had only a small wheeled weekend suitcase and my wheeled computer bag. I wheeled them through the gate and quickly discovered that it was not possible to get past the Business School to the Faculty Club from that location. Instead, I was on an elevated plaza with a railing looking down at the campus, with the Business School buildings on both sides. In the dark I could see no way to get down into the rest of the campus from there. I found a lighted doorway and consulted my map. It looked like I would need to go back to the street and find the next roadway into the campus in order to get to the Faculty Grove, where the Faculty Club was located.
I went down the street about a block and found a spot where a road seemed to be heading into the campus. With some trepidation I wheeled my two bags down the sloping road in the dark. As I passed some other campus buildings I stopped wherever there was a light to consult my map, and I seemed to be heading in the right direction. I reached a little plaza with a direction sign that pointed to the Faculty Grove off to the left. The first entry to the Grove involved a flight of steps that I did not want to negotiate with two bags, but a bit farther along I found a path that led down into the grove. At the bottom I found paths going in several directions and a statue, but still could not find the Faculty Club in the dark.
Thank heavens for cell phones! I called the Faculty Club and described my location to the person on night duty. He said I was very close, and just needed to head north. Of course I had no idea which way was north! He finally walked out of the Faculty Club and with some further guidance in the very dim light I could see him waving to me from across a wide lawn off to the left. And so I made it to the Faculty Club and was able to sleep for a few hours.
When I woke up I still had time for an afternoon yarn excursion. I had previously looked up several yarn stores in the Berkeley and Oakland area. A consultation with the young woman at the desk led me to choose a shop called Stash that had recently moved to Colusa Avenue in the Solano district of north Berkeley as the closest and safest location. She wrote down the name and phone number of a taxi driver named Biswas whom she assured me knew how to get right to the back door of the Faculty Club.
He did indeed, and he took me right to the yarn shop. The shop was a small knitting store, but it had a nice selection of unusual yarns along with the more ordinary ones. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, and in fact was feeling a bit guilty about spending any more money on yarn because I had been doing more yarn buying than weaving during a busy fall of teaching and traveling. I spent a pleasant hour going through everything and then finally selected just four skeins of yarn.
Two skeins of Twisted Sisters handpainted yarn.
Two skeins were handpainted silk and merino wool yarn from the Twisted Sisters, whose sock knitting books I was familiar with. The yarn was a worsted weight and I thought it might work as stripes in a warp, which could be positioned for an ikat effect since the pattern was on about a one-yard repeat. I bought two skeins of it to make sure I would have enough to do something interesting.
Four skeins of yarn from the Stash yarn store in Berkeley.
Then I could not resist two small skeins of a beautiful yarn called haiku from Alchemy. They were silk and mohair, hand-dyed but essentially variations of one color. The yarn was a lace weight with a delicate mohair quality, although they were suggesting size 8 knitting needles. It was much finer than I would use all alone for weaving, but I thought it would be gorgeous doubled with something else in a scarf. I bought one skein of lavender and another of a rose-rust color.
By the time I had finished my yarn buying and had taken a quick look around the interesting neighborhood, I just had time to get a chai at the Starbucks on the corner before returning to the Faculty Club. I called Biswas the cab driver and he told me to wait in the Starbucks until he arrived.
As I was drinking my chai in a comfortable chair in Starbucks, I noticed a homeless man pushing a grocery cart of his belongings on the street outside. I immediately felt guilty, thinking about sitting in Starbucks drinking my expensive drink while he was outside homeless on the street. Then, to my amazement, he parked his cart on the corner, came into the Starbucks, and ordered his own expensive coffee! Ah yes, that is what being homeless in Berkeley is about.
[...] I had two lovely skeins of handpainted Twisted Sisters yarn I had purchased in Berkeley and wanted to use it for warp stripes in a shawl. I had read an [...]