WHAT boxes of yarn?

My husband uttered the following words, in the following order: “So, is it OK if I throw away that yarn out in the shed?”

I will give you a moment to recover from the shock. No, I can’t believe he’d even ask such a thing, either. And yes, it is technically permissible to use those words in that order. I checked.

Even more surprising is the fact that I did, indeed, give the blessing to throwing away a fairly considerable amount of yarn. Which is not actually yarn-yarn. You know. Yarn-for-knitting.

This was yarn-for-…I don’t know, exactly. Creating your own sandpaper? Developing bullet-proof shawls? The only use I ever found for this stuff was making rugs – and it was about as pleasant as knitting with steel wool.

I have hated that wool with a mad passion ever since it arrived. Let’s just say that sometimes, a sample card does not paint a true and accurate picture of a yarn. But it was 100% wool and thus I kept it. In case the social order broke down and all the local sheep died leaving me adrift in a post-LYS apocalypse with no wool yarn. (This is why I also keep my drop spindles, spinning wheel, and hand carders – in case the social order breaks down and I am forced to do all this myself rather than, in the unlikely event that a fleece lands on my doorstep [which has actually happened, more than once], sending it out to be washed and combed into roving.)

But the other yarn? Which I had forgotten was even out in the shed? (Well. Partial fib, there – I had in fact just said musingly to myself, “Don’t I have a big old cone of white cotton suitable for dish towels out in the shed?”

Why, yes! But no!

Not “a” cone.

Most like…six cones. And another eight cones in ‘natural’. Plus also the missing box of remnant wool balls in assorted colors that were way too much to toss yet somehow never quite enough for whatever project I had in my brain, the box I was sure I had kept, but couldn’t find and had eventually assumed had been maliciously snuck out of the house from beneath my very nose in the dead of the night on moon-dark by my horrible husband who doesn’t understand me at all mislaid in one of our infrequent cleaning spasms.

Nope.

I put it out in the shed, apparently.

I already had achieved SABLE (stash acquisition beyond life expectancy).

Now I need a new acronym, which sums up hoarding not only beyond one’s life expectancy, but that of one’s children and children’s children.

And also, I need to stop giggling like this and clutching the colorful little lost balls to my bosom.

The children are getting jealous.