Famous last words

Sunday night. The phone rings. It's Jo.

"It seemed like a good idea at the time," she said.

"What did?" I asked, somewhat warily.

"Well, when I bought them, I thought I was going to use them together so I..."

"Uh-oh."

"Can I borrow you and your ball-winder?"

"Sure."

Jo had some white lace-weight alpaca. Jo also had some pink lace-weight alpaca. She decided they should mate. (This is where, were I planning ahead, I would have inserted a picture). However, the white yarn had filed for divorce from the pink yarn, and she needed an extra ball winder and an extra arm to help them divide their assets.

"Are you sure this is going to work," said I.

"Of course! I've done it before. No big deal."

So, she took the white end, I took the pink end, and we started to crank:


All went well for about, oh... 30 seconds. But then the pink yarn decided it wasn't going to allow the divorce after all. As the yarn came out of the ball, it twisted in on itself, curling up like a little marled pig's tail, and would not be separated.



We tried winding it towards ourselves. We tried winding away from ourselves. We tried winding opposite each other. Still: Overtwistedness.

Jo struggled to pull it apart.



Did I mention alpaca is fuzzy. Sort of like velcro.
Eventually, there was nothing for it but the scissors, and the offending bits were sacrificed to adorn the menacing red eyes of the Cat Goddess:



We started over:



"There is some fundamental law of physics that we must be violating," I decided. The yarn comes out of the cake separate, then twists on the way to the ball winders, no matter which direction we crank.

Jos, as you know, are not good at numbers, except in the vague abstract - picas. Pixels. Numbers of columns, pages in a section. Jos don't do physics.

"Somebody with a rudimentary knowledge of mathematics would walk in here and say 'You two are dumbasses,'" Jo agreed.

"We are dumbasses."

Alejandro, as we were fighting the fuzz, got tired of all this math talk, and decided that we needed to be rescued from the giant sweet-smelling cotton candy cobweb that was tightening like a noose around His People:



At this point, Jo completely flipped her biscuit and began to shriek "GO AWAY!!!!!!!!" at the top of her lungs, but she could not spare a hand with which to beat off the cougar attack for fear of re-mating the yarn.

The spouse, of course, rather than come to our aid, sat on the couch and laughed at us and took pictures.

Jo had an epiphany. "Does this have to do with Z twists and S twists?"

"Yes," I agreed, feeling smug and smart that I had thought we knew that all along.

"Oh," she said. "Maybe we don't need a math genius, we just need Teri."

At that point, our attempt at manfully fighting through the tension hit a small snag. As in, the cone from Jo's ballwinder popped off the crank and launched itself straight at my face.



It stopped being amusing after the fifth time.



The Cat Goddess received another burnt offering.



The yarn kicked and screamed until the bitter end, but eventually we prevailed.



After the salvageable pieces of each ball were knotted and/or spit-spliced together, Jo casually mentioned that she had brought another ball of mated yarn in her knitting bag, and by the way, it happened to be mohair.

We decided to let it remain in its purple halo of wedded bliss.

Even the Cat Goddess deferred to this wise judgment.