Well, another week, another chance (I hope) to get my furnace fixed.

Not an auspicious beginning to the week re: my office/classroom building: came in to no power, no computer networks (not even printing), and no heat. I wound up cancelling my 8 am class because there were no lights in the room.

The power and network is back but apparently there's a problem in the heating/ac system. And the guy working on it says he thinks these monthly-or-so power outages are NOT squirrels bent on destruction, but bad wiring in the building.

Lovely. So I might come in some morning and find I don't have an office or classroom any more.

I DID get a lot of knitting done over the weekend - the right front of the vest is done and the back has been started. I also worked some on the Mosaic scarf (which is not looking AT ALL multidirectional-diagonal; this is not a good pattern for novelty yarns with bits and bobs hanging off of them).

Also, my buttons for the vest arrived. Ordered the grey antler buttons in the appropriate size from Morehouse Farm. This is the second or third time I've ordered from them and been very happy. They ship fast. They have neat products, things you don't see just anywhere. A lot of the patterns are fairly simple but they're unusual enough that they look nice.

There was also an error in this particular order - the price given on the site was higher than the actual price, so someone called me and offered: we can void out your order and redo it, or you can take a couple extra buttons, or you can pick a pattern to fulfill the overcharge. So I chose the igloo hat pattern, and they included another one (the fishnit wrap) apparently gratis. I like Morehouse Farm; they have good stuff, they seem to be a small, family-or-small-group run business. Sort of like a Farmer's Market of yarn.

That's what I like, I guess. The idea that I'm supporting a small business, where they care enough about the customer (and about honesty) to call them up and say "whoops, we overcharged you." I honestly would never have known the buttons were cheaper than what the website said - they could have charged me the full website price and I'd've been none the wiser. I was willing to pay the higher price for the buttons, or else I wouldn't have ordered them.

But they bothered to call me, and to go to a little additional trouble, just to make things right. They did the right thing, even though I wouldn't have known if they hadn't. I'll definitely order from them again in the future, and if you like natural, good-quality wool yarn (what I would call "good old plain wool") and some interesting kits and interesting patterns, I highly recommend them.

I guess it's sad that I'm making such a big thing of a company doing that, but I wonder how many would? I can't IMAGINE, for example, Wal-Mart calling me up after I bought a pound of apples and telling me "we charged you 50 cents too much; next time you come in we'll take it off your bill" (In fact, I've had to wrangle with my local Wal-Mart several times about charging prices HIGHER than what's posted for produce).