I have a few more stories of NHS&W tiredness and friedness (Q: How do you know a dye artist is suffering from sleep deprivation? A: She is sitting up late writing the mini-manual for a Dye It Yourself kit and she turns to you and says “You’d better proofread this, because apparently I just wrote something about adding more hot water to raise the head of the donkey.”*), but I imagine you’ve already got the picture - even though there are no pictures. No pictures of Nora, growing like the proverbial weed. No pictures of the dye studio. No pictures of the yarns we worked on. No pictures of the farm or the breathtakingly tiny newborn lambs.

(Actually, though - ! There is one picture from the show! No thanks to either of us, of course. I have received via e-mail a copy of the picture of me with the little octopus and the sunglasses! Srsly! Have requested permission to post it here. Please, pretty please? Turns out it was taken by metak, and the octopus and squid were both made by boojum.)

So I’m going to move on to something much more important and exciting than our Tales of Tiredness - and almost equally picture-free. At least, it’s important and exciting to us, and I hope it will prove auspicious for everyone who has dealings with us. It’s this: as of last Tuesday or so,

WE HAZ A TSERF!

Yup. One of the reasons I stayed at Jennifer’s for several days after the show was so that we could meet with the new member of our team, who if all goes according to plan is going to be gradually taking over some of the more onerous tasks of organization and production for Tsarskoe Tsocko. She will be ordering/organizing supplies, printing patterns, assembling beads and doo-dads for the kits, and generally helping keep us unruly artist types up to the mark.

NB the primary distinctions between between the old-time serf and the modern-day Tserf are twofold:

1. The modern-day Tserf is paid;
2. The modern-day Tserf cracks the whip and keeps us nominal monarchs in line - at least that’s what we’re hoping for.

On the face of it, this will be a bigger help to me than to Jennifer, especially at first - but there are a number of ways in which it will benefit her too, increasingly so over time. In typical fashion we have begun with building the cart and are going to let the horse evolve at its own pace - that is to say, we aren’t sure yet exactly what the job is, only that it exists and that we have found the person who can do it, who miraculously wants to do it.

In equally typical fashion, and in a continuation of the Bad Blogger theme… we took pictures when she was with us - but not of her, or of the three of us together. No, no, that would be too… Normal, you know, and after all this is us we’re talking about. The pictures we took are of her foot and of the gifties she brought me.

ZaftigWendy please note: here is the foot, beautifully housed in the blueberry version of your PPCW sock:

And here it is again with an appropriate addition all her own - she made this stitch marker, including the clay, um, bead, herself:

Yes, our Tserf is a woman of many talents. (BTW I don’t mean to be all coy about who she is, or anything - I just haven’t yet discussed with her the question of how she wants to be identified. You know. Cart first; horse later.)

She makes other kinds of stitch markers too, and these were for me because the little flower bells kind of reminded her of… something I’m interested in, don’t you know.

Pretty pretty!

Oh yeah, I can be bribed. But it really wasn’t necessary to bring me presents. She had me at “Hello.” And if she hadn’t had me then, she totally had me at “You leave all that grunt work to me so you can concentrate on designing.”

Twist my arm. HIRED!

* Um, actually Jennifer made me promise not to tell anybody about this, but then she herself up and told everybody who crossed our paths during the ensuing several days, so I consider the promise invalidated. Blog fodder is blog fodder, after all, and fair’s fair.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 19th, 2008 at 11:33 am and is filed under Bloggerei. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.