Ouch! That Hurt!

I fell and fell hard. Women who are as big as I am don't fall softly. We fall and we fall hard. I tripped and where did I trip??? I tripped in the church. This is a very good place to trip and fall because you can start talking to God right away. Things like,
"OK God, am I still alive?" and "Why would I be punished by a fall such as this in your house?" and "Are you trying to tell me something." Then there is, "#$@$@@%@ God, that hurts!" and @#$#^*&^ how do I get up out of this God when everything is hurting so badly," and, "(sigh) I think I'll just stay here on the floor." Then there was, "God, that was a nasty lesson in humility!" and "Am I that bad???" and "Holy Cow..... sorry God I was a bit dilusional there." What it comes down to is, "Ouch! That hurt."

I have been nursing sore body parts ever since. Particularly my nose. I thought I had broken it since it was what broke my fall. Daughter #2 was there at the time and had the presence of thought to go get an ice pack for me. Since there was no ice my ice pack came in a very strange shape. There I sat on the floor of the sanctuary (never did I need that more) bleeding (from the nose that broke my fall) crying and laughing at the same time. Why laughing you ask? Because I had a pack of frozen wieners on my nose.... in the church..... on the floor.....

I am happy to report that the nose is not broken. My knee is only bruised and my elbow is slightly skinned out. I'll live.

I fell again the next day. This time the dog tripped me. I walked out onto the deck at my house.... the dog was lying peacefully. She looked up and noticed I was coming which must mean there are deer in the yard because the owner (me) doesn't come out on the deck this time of the year without there being deer around. She spotted one which happened to be on the other side of me and so she proceeded to run pell mell for the deer, taking me out like a bowling pin in the process. I landed on the top two steps with my head slamming against the rail.... now I have a bruise on my hip and a golf ball sized lump on my head. Ouch! That hurt!

Today I managed to get to the church for a meeting with the Archdeacon (demon as he lightly calls himself) of the Anglican church, the Lutheran pastor for the parish of Dawson Creek, and a retired UC minister. I, as lay preacher here at St Peter's Church, thought this would be a good meeting to enable this parish to move forward, since our deacon just retired. Instead we went backwards. I am not allowed to serve the Reserve Sacrament any more and as a lay preacher I don't think I ever was since this Bishop was installed. Somehow, after I was given permission with the old Bishop before he retired, something went wrong. The new Bishop re-instated me as a lay reader after he became Bishop, but somehow my full abilities were limited because of new rules in the National Anglican Church.... someone forgot to tell me that. For the last five years I've been serving Reserve Sacrament and not sanctioned by the greater church.

Sunday I fell!
Monday I fell!
Tuesday I fell from grace!

I am afraid of tomorrow.

The Dark Days Are Over

It's Feb 2nd.... and while that doesn't make it spring it does mean that the really short days are over. I noticed last evening that at 6 p.m. there was still light in the sky. This morning Hubby and the girls just left for school and there is light in the sky. I really like the fact that the days are getting longer.

Our living room faces due South and so in the day while the sun is still low in the sky the room is bathed in glorious sunshine. It makes for a wonderful feeling to sit where that sun shines full on me and get the benefits of vitamin D. I spin and feel that warmth on me and patiently wait till spring when I can do the same outdoors on the deck.

The thing that I don't like about February is the fact that the snow is melting and leaving treacherous ice in its wake. There's not a place you can walk without feeling like your feet are going to fly out from under you and land you on your back with a knob forming on the back of your head.

The other thing I don't like about this time of the year is the poo. It is everywhere. Dog poo, in frozen chunks shows its disgusting lumps through the white of the snow and just grosses me out. Llama poo is everywhere in great towering piles. Alpaca poo spreads out from one spot to another like a wave of algae on an infested lake. Sheep poo is just a murky squashy mess to walk in.... it is everywhere... you can't avoid it. The cats bury theirs but you can smell it under the deck waiting to make it's spring debut until I can pour bleach (two or three containers) over it to lessen the stench. Why can't animals use a toilet like people.... then it just disintegrates underground.

Hubby wants a little tractor so that he can pile up the poo to compost and be turned to soil. I'm beginning to think this wouldn't be such a bad idea. I've never had this much poo to deal with.....

I remember one of the first water colours that I painted was of seagulls on the rocks by the sea shore and I painted their droppings and all. The one thing I have discovered is that people do not want to buy paintings where poo is prevalent. We like to gloss over the fact that faeces are a fact of life and if you don't like it you had better not farm or bird watch either. Many times I have been watching chickadees come to our feeder and thought how gross the feeder looks with all the bird poo on it. Even the chicken coop is a mass of poo this time of the year. Makes you almost long for some snow to cover it up....

The fact is that I like to shovel the stuff in the evenings when it is frozen but not frozen in to the snow yet. That way you can shovel it up and away without gagging from the smell. Frozen poo is much better to deal with than soft thawed decaying stuff.

February is heart and stroke month. It's Valentine's month. It's roses and get romantic month but I think it should be ice and poo month! Can't wait till March.

Another bit of W.A.W.O.W.

Ta Da! All finished.

W.A.W.O.W.

This has been What A Week Of Work thus the W.A.W.O.W. I have been busy all week. I haven't been out through the door. Now you may think that is terrible since the weather has turned milder. You might think its a chance to be lazy but for me it meant a week of catching up on my level 2 homework. I am not caught up, but I am making progress. I am not reading, and I am not watching T.V., (we don't have that anyway), I haven't been wasting my time on the internet. No, indeed, I've been spinning and I have pictures to prove it.

I started out the week with the very good intentions of getting the section of questions on mohair finished but then I got caught in another power outage. I couldn't weigh my blended fibre as I have an electric weigh scales and so I looked through my questions to see what I could work on that didn't require a blend. Ah ha! I found a question regarding needlework. The question said to spin a yarn (wool so no blending) appropriate for needlework and finish a small needlework sampler with your yarn. I began by reading what was considered a good yarn for needlework and decided on duplicating a three ply called Persian. I copied that as best I could in yellow, wine, and blue. I spun a ten yard skein in each colour to include as my samples along with enough to finish the sampler. Then I dug out a needle appropriate for needlework (not all of them are you know... go figure!) and began to investigate which stitches I would be using.

I had taken out a library book some time ago on the stitches used for needlework in which there are over 200. Sheesh! Deciding which stitches to use was not going to be easy. I started in on the stitching and what do you know..... I Iike needlework! I can see how this could become addictive. I am just about finished and as usual I can't wait to show it off.

Meanwhile once the lights came back on there was all the mohair I had been working on lying all over the living room. so in between finishing the yarn for the needlework and actually doing the needlework I have been carding, combing and spinning mohair and mohair blends. I also was trying to get everything that I had done in my book with labels and commentaries and everything that needed to be done to meet the requirements for my homework. I have accomplished a lot I think. Have a look.

This is llama spun and in my book with a 3"x3" sample for a vest.



This is a sample of a knitted shawl in alpaca.



These are yarn samples I have spun this week. The three top ones in wine, blue, and yellow are the samples for the needlework.



This is my needlework sample.



This last sample is a blend of mohair, wool, and silk which I will use for my mohair with texture sample. I can't wait to spin it!



So there you have it.... W.A.W.O.W.

Crude, Rude and Socially Unacceptable

Please excuse the crude, rude and socially unacceptable vocabulary used in the previous post. My excuse is that I was in this state....

Actually this pic was taken a few years ago and I can't drink wine any more since I have developed my most inconvenient allergy to alcohol. I would have liked to have been in that state however, I was more in this state.....

In The Dark

We lost the power today. Late afternoon came and Hubby and the Daughters came home from school. I went out to help Hubby feed the animals and when I came back in the lights were out. Those of you who live in a city or at least a town where water is supplied by the powers that be, won't understand that when your water comes from a cistern that means that you can't use the sh-t-er. So for a few hours you turn red, and squeeze your legs together in the hopes that you won't be the first to leave a deposit that just won't go away. Worse still, once there has been a deposit you really don't want to be the next to have to lift the toilet seat and have to smell the deposit while you add to it. Cisterns mean pumps, pumps mean electricity, electricity means power, no power no flushing. Yuck!

Another negative is that when the power goes off in the winter there is no way to cook in this house. We don't even have a propane barbeque on which we can heat something. Hubby did go out and brave the cold and warm some IMPs on a Coleman stove. Thank God for Mr. Coleman. We as Canadian Rangers leaders have on hand at any given time enough food to keep us through any state of emergency for a week. IMPs are the army's way of feeding soldiers in the field. IMP stands for Individual Meal Packet. These are not the worst thing in life to have to expose yourself to and some of the meals are downright tolerable, but to have to live on them for any length of time is to put yourself through meal monotony. They all have a packaged taste that ruins any other effect that might make them good. They also have a bad effect in that the amount of dietary fibre is just not sufficient to do the job. Not to mention the amount of calories that are meant to enable a soldier to live in strenuous conditions and would pile on the weight for any average joe. A week of IMPs and you wouldn't be able to walk because you would be stuck in the chair since your a-- would be permanently jammed into it from the extra unnecessary fat added. For tonight when the power was off though, IMPs meant full tummies on a cold night.

Speaking of cold.... losing the power here means putting on sweaters and praying that the power comes on again before the pipes freeze. I was just starting to feel chilled when the power came on and the furnace blasted into life again. I can safely say I breathed a sigh of relief.

Also, losing the power means Hubby or I have to take the girls to my parents place for showers so that in the morning they don't look and feel fousty. (Fousty is a Newfy term which you will just have to look up). Tonight Hubby was cajoled into doing that, which meant he had to sit with his in-laws for a period of time. This can or cannot be good depending on whether he is enlisted to fix something. Fixing things irritates Hubby no matter who asks.

All I know is, losing the power is an opportunity to take pleasure in knowing that next year when the renovations are complete and we have a wood stove that heats, cooks, lights, and gives joy to those who need to use the facilities, we won't have to rely on IMPs to take away the need.

Meandering Mind

I'm sitting here after a very busy and tiring day, (I spent the day cleaning my house... no small feat let me assure you) and I am listening to some music in an effort to relax. My mind keeps wandering to different topics and ideas. It is actually quite relaxing to listen to music and to let your mind wander all over the place. You are in for a very weird experience since I thought that it might be cool to just write about what ever pops into my mind.

I am listening to Since You've Been Gone by Theory Of A Deadman..... seriously depressing words.... lovely music. Wonderful harmonizing. I can't believe that there is more modern music that I actually like. Most of the music these days has warbling girls who can't sing for beans. They warble all over the place and you have to wonder who actually told them that they could sing.

Hubby and I like to listen to Randy Bachman on Vinyl Cafe on CBC radio on Saturday nights. He usually has good music and gives you a lot of information that you would likely never know, unless you did a lot of research. A few months ago I sent an email and they actually read it out loud.

Hubby keeps distracting me by talking to me and here I am trying to write this and listen to my music and then he keeps talking to me which means I have to pull the head phones out of my ears and he tells me something interesting that Randy just said on the radio which means I'm not getting to listen a whole lot to my music.

My living room looks nice again and I changed the furniture around.... I figure I might as well change the furniture if I am going to have to pull out the furniture to vaccuum under it anyway. A change is as good as a rest they say and I tend to agree. The fact is that the woolies from spinning so much this week was starting to get away from me. The whole house had dust bunnies that were growling when you passed them... they were starting to escape the dark corners and chase us around. Scarey!

I know when the dust bunnies get out of hand that I have been remiss in my housewifely duties. Hubby doesn't see dirt and the kids know that if they complain they will be enlisted to help, so they tend to keep quiet too. I know when they do start to complain that I have really gone too long with out vaccuuming and dusting.

Duff is the culprit. She is so hairy and big and when she sheds hair its just nasty. Tootsie is a non-shedding dog and I like that. Do yourself a fovour and if you get a dog get one that doesn't shed.

I have never been the kind of person who puts housework at the front of priorities.... it is something that gets done when I have no choice but to be swallowed alive by nuclear dust bunnies or the kitchen floor can't support any more sticky stuff. I know that maybe the house needs some attention when there is a shower of stuff that comes down off the steps when someone walks down over them. When the logs in our house start to look grey instead of golden then it is time to vaccuum them too. There are just too many better things to spend my time on. You know. Family, spinning, friends, knitting, strangers, weaving, dogs, felting, farm, writing, spining, spinning and spinning some more. There's just not enough time to sweat the dust and dirt.... I try to get over it and clean when it gets out of hand. I figure I only have 70 odd or 80 odd years to live and I'm not going to spend any more time cleaning than necessary.

Well I had better go to bed and sleep because I need a clear mind for the Church AGM tomorrow...
Does your mind meander too?