Where Next Do I Go? What Next Do I Do?

Right... I'm ready for spring. It all looks so bare around here. Sometimes I wonder what all the hullaballoo is about when it comes to Christmas, and sometimes its a dread getting all the decorating done, but when the lights come down and the decorations are stowed for another year, there is simply a sense of loss. It's all rather anti-climatic... I look around me today and I feel rather directionless.
With all the decorations down, there just seems to be a lack lustre, non sparkly, drab kind of, pffsstt in the air! I mean, everyone likes a little sparkly in their lives, right? If your Hubby hands you a diamond ring you don't just look at it like it is mud! Well it's like that with Christmas lights... they bring a little cheer into our lives when sunsets and sunrises are drab at best and non existent at worst. Our house is getting back to normal... well as normal as it can be anyway (see annual family Christmas pic in previous post) and while that is nice... you do miss those shiny things dangling all over the place. We have wrapped and boxed the decorations
and we have shoved and pushed furniture here and there and this evening it looks like Santa never made his debut at all. I have one lonely wreath sitting on a wall with a cardinal which will come down tomorrow when Hubby stops off at the grocery store to rummage through their stock of boxes for one large enough to pack the wreath in and then that too will face the darkness of the storage closet for another year. This all means that I am ready for the snow to melt, the temperatures to turn balmy, and for my deck to start to produce pleasurable hours of vitamin D intake. Har! Not likely for another month yet and then only on a sporadic day when the sun forgets it is winter and shed rays in an effort to encourage the hibernators that something better is coming. That's me.... I'm a hibernator... I'm waiting for that sunshine to reach me and ripple my skin...

Meanwhile Hubby put the three Christmas trees out in the paddocks. Now the alpacas are proceeding to munch on them.... how they manage those sharp little pins is beyond me!

I have been spinning today. Not for the jacket commission but for my level 3.... I am working on a silk sample from a silk hanky.... 'argh' is how I would describe my progress. However, I shall persevere. I'm not sure I like silk hankies and what's more is they hurt! Drafting out the fibres rips into your skin because, of course, the fibre is one of the strongest protein fibres there is, and when it cuts into your skin as you draft the fibres it actually cuts... like bleeding cuts.... like, "oh d-mn that hurts," cuts! That's not a pleasurable thing you know... but I will get this done and by Wednesday too thank you very much!

So what does the void of Christmas leave me with??? Well here's my list..

Things I don't want to face on..
1. Losing my extra Christmas weight to the tune of 10 lbs... hmmm... : {
2. A jacket commission that I am down to the wire on.
3. Level 3 which should have been much farther along if I want to be honest.
4. A house that needs a good clean. (well that always seems the case)

Things I do want to face..
1. Learning Tai Chi
2. Level 3 homework which I'm actually excited about.
3. Courses to pay for and apartments to book for my week in Olds.
4. Teaching a friend to drop spindle.
5. A really good book to read that I am only allowing myself a half hour before bedtime.
6. Ever increasing daylight. That's a really happy one. Keep an eye to the right.... look at that we are up to 25 mins..... woo hoo!

To all of you who are old bears too..... here's to the sunshine... I'm off to drink some wine. So much for the weight loss. (sigh)



4

Is It Really 2010

Sorry about not blogging yesterday. I actually sat down and started to write but somehow what I wrote seemed boring.... (well I can't always have scintillating things to write about!) All day I kept thinking, I'll get back to that later, but my brain was on Rodent mode and we all know how small a Rodent's brain is.

Mostly I was spinning yesterday. I didn't blow through my rolags as I thought I would. But I am almost out of them now. I have a spool of spun singles that I am happy with. Today I may do some more work on preparing more rolags or I might actually get out some silk hankies and try to do my level 3 homework. We'll see.

Today is our last day with the Christmas decorations. We will be taking down our trees and all our decorations and settling back into our regular household scheme.

It is hard to believe that 9 days of 2010 has gone by so fast. As I get older I realize that time moves more quickly than it used to. 1 week out of ten is done and then we will have March break. I realize that wishing your time away is not good so I try to live in the moment as much as possible. There is one thing I am looking forward to and that is the NPSW annual February retreat. The third weekend of February I will be heading off to a log lodge for a weekend of laughter and fun while spinning and picking wool with others who are of a like mind. For a while I thought that I would have to bring the Daughters with me as Hubby was scheduled for a trip to Victoria at the same time, but that has changed. Yesterday we received an email notifying him that his trip would be postponed to a later date due to a conflict with the 2010 Olympics. That's about the only good thing that came out of the Olympics (oops! did I say that out loud?!!) So I will be traveling to the log lodge of my dreams with no children attached for a weekend of pure pleasure.

This week has been a shock in more ways than one. Daughter #1 had a terrible shock when she got back to school.... it was a rough week with two tests and a major power point presentation for homework. She made it through though, and I am happy to say that she did quite well with her marks. We still don't know what her mark is on her power point... that will come next week. She is starting on her first set of mid-term exams in a couple of weeks... we hope that goes well for her, as she stresses over these thing a lot.

So there you have it a little bit of an update on life here on the funny farm. Last night we took our annual family portrait in front of the Christmas tree. After taking lots of pictures with one camera and then the other when the battery went dead on the first, and this one's hair being slightly askew, and that one's smile not being right, and Hubby not making it back to the seat before the timer went off on the camera,and my nose looking like Rudolph's, we all agreed that this was our favorite.


Ahhh! Now you all know why we call this the funny farm!

Twelfth Night

Epiphany is over. Christmas season blew through our house so fast that we are still wondering what has actually happened.

We have a tradition in our house of honouring the old Christian traditions of Twelfth Night and Epiphany celebrations. Most people around this neck of the woods don't even know what Twelfth Night is let alone Epiphany. Hubby and I have always taken down our decorations on Epiphany. It is also known as Old Christmas Day home in good old Newfoundland. Epiphany is the day in the Greek Orthodox church that is set aside to celebrate the coming of the wise men to the stable where Baby Jesus was born. It marks the end of the Christmas season and the beginning of the work of Jesus as the Messiah.

As a child growing up my parents never took down the tree until January 6th, but even then the Christmas and New year celebration continued on well into January. Every weekend Mom and Dad would invite people in for dinner on the weekends or would go out to someone's home for dinner because you didn't stop until you had celebrated with ALL your friends. It was exhausting but it also was so much fun. Every weekend there was something to look forward to. It made January pass in a blur of activity. You didn't have time for the mid winter blues!

When I moved away from Newfoundland, all of that came to a resounding halt. Here people put their trees up the first of December and go till Boxing Day and suddenly there is hardly any sign of Christmas at all. But Hubby and I maintain our old tradition of taking down the tree on Jan 6th. However, we do make seldom exceptions.

Our lives are greatly affected by school schedules since Hubby is a teacher. Some years Christmas break fluctuates one way or another so that Christmas break starts a few days before Christmas itself and ending directly after New Year's. Some years it goes the other way and there are no days before Christmas and a few days after New Year's. This year was the former, which means that Twelfth Night and Epiphany are hard to celebrate on the actual day since it falls in the middle of the week and school and homework, tests and other obligations make any celebration virtually impossible.

Hubby and the girls finish school for the Christmas break on the 17th of December (which I loved as it gave me three extra pairs of hands at home preparing for the Big Event) and went till the 4th of January. With Hubby and the girls in school on Epiphany, we have decided to wait till Friday to have our Twelfth Night celebrations and Epiphany dinner. Friday night we will sing carols and watch Christmas specials and hang our Old Christmas Day stockings up before going to bed. Then the next morning we will get up and open our stockings and have a Epiphany mid day dinner and then the afternoon will be spent taking down the decorations and putting them away for another year. We didn't always celebrate that way but when the Daughters got too old to believe in Santa anymore Christmas seemed to drift off into the January blues and it seemed more depressing than anything. Now we have another celebration to look forward to and hanging stocking is always fun.

A couple of years ago I got it into my head to do something nice and so I bought from a local craft lady stockings that were specially made with Old Christmas Day in mind. We now have two sets of stockings for our Christmas celebrations. We have the set we use on December 25th, and a set that are rather Victorian in design for our Old Christmas Day celebrations.

This one belongs to Daughter #2

This one belongs to Daughter #1

This one belongs to Hubby

And this one belongs to moi!

I've also heard an old wife's tale that once long ago on Twelfth Night, farm animals would bow down at 12 midnight in obeisance to the New Born King. I remember as a child being told that it would happen again the same way when Christ came again. I dearly wanted to live on a farm so that I could watch to see if this would be the year that the animals would bow down again in the barn. And so you see there is a little bit of Christmas magic that lingers until Twelfth Night... and so we celebrate.

I hope you had a wonderful Twelfth Night and a lovely Epiphany Day and if you haven't celebrated it, it's not too late....

Plug Away

The other day I mentioned that I would have to work till my hands bled in order to get my work done on my Jacket Commission and I pretty much did that yesterday. I flicked and carded fibre well into the evening last night. When I finished for the night, I had pricked my finger with the teeth on the cards so many times that it was quite sore. I have a bunch of rolags prepared for spinning today. I'm sure that the spinning will go much quicker than the carding did and I will probably blow through my stash of rolags pretty fast. That's the worst fault with carding.... unless you are using a drum carder it goes REALLY slow. I have a drum carder but I want to have a more hands-on control of the fibre processing so that I get a more refined finish.

I finished a question the night before last, on my level 3 homework! I'm ecstatic! I was looking for my lost dpns in my studio room that night, when I happened upon my support spindle samples from back in the fall which were hanging there, not mounted in my book. So I took the best of the three skeins and got down to it. I did the write up first, checked the skein for balance and did a little fiddling with it, then I tied off the skein and labeled it, printed off the write up and got it in my book, and I was still in bed by 11:30 p.m. It is good to see my work going into my binder. I always feel so accomplished. : )

Even though I have to work on the jacket commission... I am going to plug away at my level 3 in the evenings I think, that way I won't feel like I'm cheating on anything. I might even take one day a week to work on it so that I am making some progress. And as for knitting,... there's alway knit night... and my gloves...

It's a good thing to be able to plug away at my work.

Logic = Needles

Aristotle came up with a theory of logic which has survived since antiquity. His Syllogistic logic is in essence a theory of inference.

Basically the gist is this... if you give a major premise and then a minor premise, then some conclusion must follow.

But there are faults in his logic. For example.. we could say that All sheep are stupid.
From this we might be able to say that some stupid things are sheep... (follow me so far??).
We should be able to conclude from the first statement, being a major premise, in conjunction with the second statement, being a minor premise, that not all stupid things are sheep. However, this is quite a wide open statement.... we could also infer that sheep are not all stupid things. So for logic to be of any use it needs to be simpler.

I much prefer to use if/then statements which we use regularly in computer language (HTML) every day. We also use it when disciplining our children.

For example: I tell Daughter #1 that: she can only horseback ride after school when there are no tests. (this is the major premise).
then she tells me that: she has a test on Thursday. (this is the minor premise).
We can conclude from these two statements that: She will not be horseback riding till after Thursday. (the conclusion).

It is giving her an understanding that there are consequences for all her actions regarding horseback riding and tests. (this is a good thing)!

The most basic of logic statements as I can figure is the basis for geometrical theory. If A = B, and B = C, then A must also = C. You can add on to this forever if you want. If A = B, and B = C, and C = D, and D = E, then.... well, you get my drift.

I applied this theory to my lost knitting needles.
Statement #1: I put my knitting needles in some container on Christmas day after admiring them.
Statement #2: There were only three possible containers... my stocking, my box and my bag.
Statement #3: Having checked two of the three and not finding my knitting needles meant that the needles must be in the last container.... (follow me so far?)
Conclusion: The final container was the bag with all of my socks... however, I had upended the bag on the 27th into my sock drawer.

Eureka!!!!! My knitting needles were in my sock drawer!!!!!

I love logic.... (I apologize to all logicians who read this and especially to Aristotle who I have the greatest respect for!)

Clear as mud?..... go here for help on logic.

Creepy Crawlies

There once was a lady.... (yeah I know I did this a few days ago.... get over it, I'm doing it again!!) The lady always wanted an ensuite bathroom. She waited many years to get an ensuite bathroom. One day her hubby and she decided to do a bunch of renovations on their house which included building an ensuite bathroom. The end result was wonderful for a while. She loved her new ensuite bathroom. She did not have to go downstairs in the middle of the night anymore. Her new ensuite bathroom was fulfilling all her dreams.

One day she noticed a large spider in the corner of the bathroom where the ceiling met the wall. She wanted to kill it but kept thinking about it being a living thing and that she should leave it be because it wasn't doing any harm.... and it was eating moths and little wee flies. Good little spider, she thought. She decided to name it Gertrude. Every day when she went to the bathroom she would talk to Gertrude. One day Gertrude started to come down off her web and the lady got nervous. She didn't like spiders ever since her Hubby had been bitten by a Brown Recluse and underwent months of a weird creeping skin rash that would creep along his arm. (Aloe from the plant rubbed twice a day on the affected area will get rid of it.) The lady didn't like spiders when they were near her, but she was o.k. if they stayed up on the ceiling. The lady began to talk to Gertrude about her fear and how she would have to kill her if she came down any further. After a short while Gertrude returned to her web and the lady was satisfied that Gertrude would stay there. One day Gertrude disappeared and the lady was not really sorry.

Months passed. Then one day the lady noticed a small spider that looked like a miniature version of Gertrude. Once again she wanted to kill it but again she felt that it was a living thing and since it spun webs and the lady was a spinner too she felt that she shouldn't really kill it. The next day she noticed another spider in another corner of the bathroom. Soon she was noticing spiders in the corner of her bedroom and hanging from the light fixture. "Thanks Gertrude," she thought, "you've had babies."

The lady decided that enough was enough. She started killing the spiders and after a while she thought she had them. Over the next week she noticed a spider every now and again and so she would get her broom and with much squealing, she would knock the spider down and kill it.

One night she stayed up late doing work on her level 3 and finally went to bed quite a bit later than normal. She went into her prided ensuite bathroom and began to brush her teeth. As she was doing so she happened to glance in the mirror and noticed a spider descending on its web and about to land on her shoulder. "Ack!" she said, and promptly jumped to the right. She grabbed some toilet paper and squished that spider in short order, flushing it down the toilet so that it would never bother her again. She went back to the sink to finish brushing her teeth and bent over to spit and when she stood up, she glanced into the mirror just in time to notice another spider descending on its spider web and about to land on her shoulder again. This time she said more than Ack! (We won't discuss what she said though, because she has to say a few prayers of forgiveness today!) She squished that spider too, but that is the last straw! She is seriously po'd with Gertrude.

The moral of the story is.... do not become friendly with spiders in your new ensuite bathroom. They are double crossing blighters and might crawl in your mouth when you are asleep.... causing you to have nightmares rather than fulfilling your dreams of ensuite bliss.

I am not a freak!

Searching

Searching for needles...
Searching for time....
Searching for sanity....

Hmmm....

Hubby is searching.... he's looking high and low in an effort to preserve my sanity.... he gave me two great sets of knitting needles for Christmas.... they were in the box with my new cotton cards... I opened them up and was charmed with their neat compactness. One set was 4" dpns for knitting fingers on gloves and the other set was 5" rosewood dpns which are just lovely for knitting gloves, sox, and wristlets.... all of which I have been knitting a lot of lately.... problem.... I went to get them out and they are no where to be seen. I know I put them back in something on Christmas day after we had opened all of our gifts but I can't find them.... we've searched high and low. I've moved furniture, I've put my hand down inside the couch, (man is there ever a pile dirt down there and the couch is only a couple of weeks old) I've checked under the Christmas tree and in my stocking and in the box and for that matter in all the boxes.... no flippin' needles.

I spent the day searching for time.... there's never enough of it you know! Today began with me heading off to town to take Hubby and the Daughters to school. And from there the day plummeted.... between responding to correspondence, appointments that were late, and various unforeseen things I never got one finger knitted or one rolag carded, or one level 3 question done. Argh!

With no needles and no time the sanity is on the verge of departing and the sad thing is, I might not have enough left to look for it.

Wish me luck in my search....