oatmeal

7:15 am

                Up a bit early and I hope to have time to do a bit of carding before I have to leave at 8:15. First I must drink my lovely psillium and eat my lovely oatmeal (pretty much the last of any breakfast cereal in the house, time to go shopping) so I might as well write. I went last night to a talk by Frances Moore Lappe who wrote Diet for a Small Planet in the 70’s. Her organization is http://www.smallplanet.org/about It was a pretty good talk, and I worked on the mitten I am knitting for my niece so that was ok, though it went late, and then I  had to take the bus home and it was *SNOWING*! So that was exciting and I got home late and then had to make a fire (something K seems incapable of doing) and feed the buns.

                Good news, I heard back from the woman from the Hartsbrook school and I can have a booth at their fair. Now I must decide if I want to go for an inside one (and risk having problems again with mothball scent, though I have been trying hard to air things out) or have an outside one. Inside are $125, outside are $50 (seems like they all used to be $50, I guess they realized they were asking too little). I would say it is worth the extra money to be inside instead of out in the middle of November, it is just that I don’t want to worry the whole time that I am annoying anyone with the smell.

                Not sure I’m going to get in any carding, and besides that, it is freezing (literally) out there, so carding will hardly be a cheery thing to do. I guess I really must bring the carder inside, down to the basement I suppose. I kind of hate being down there, but if I set up my cd player and a nice table that I can spread out on, it won’t be half bad.

                This oatmeal is kind of hard to get down, the bread I made yesterday is like a brick…. And I need to find something to bring for lunch – boil eggs! That’s always a good solution. At least we don’t have to do much for lab conference, so I should be able to leave early (come home to a cold house and card!). Man I sound cheerful this morning. maybe I should just read the Balzac I was reading last night.

                No more delay – time to get out there and feed buns!

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blah blah blah

7:30 am

                Yesterday was a really long and busy day, so today I feel justified in lazing about a bit. That said, I REALLY want to be sure that the whole day is not taken up with MUST DO’s. I want to be sure I get some time to do good stuff, creative stuff. Specifically I want to do some carding. The spinning I have happening now is just fawn angora which is fine, but not especially creative.

                Yesterday I had to take care of the exams before lecture, then finish getting things ready for the lab. And finish grading last week’s assignments. I spent a really long time making up some sheets showing cat muscles to have on lab benches for reference. We’ll see how useful they are.

                Also today I must get into town for a haircut at 10. And I arranged tentatively to do a quick trip to Black Sheep before with a friend. We’ll see if she is actually there by 9:30. She is ALWAYS late, so I may have to be prepared to just have my tea on my own, which would be fine. I was thinking I might bike in to town, but it looks like it is rainy, so maybe not.

                At some point today (tonight) I need to grade the Wed assignments, tomorrow I won’t have time as I will be meeting with a student in the morning. In fact, it might mean that there is no time to run tomorrow, but I guess I can leave at 8:15, have time to run and still get to the meeting at 10. Just means that I must get all the grading done tonight. I guess thurs morning and Fri I will have to work on future labs. Really the only biggies to work on now are the jumping ones – human and toad. Not too bad.

                I am kind of rambling here. Maybe later today I will also take a few more skein photos and post them…. And I want to make a sweet potato soufflé for supper. It is certainly sweet potato season at the farm right now. I will have to search out recipes that do not involve marshmallows.

                I wonder if I could gird myself to write a Seasonal Letter this year. I used to enjoy it so much, it just turned into something not very nice with the way K reacted. It kind of soured it for me. Hard to be amusing when I don’t feel that way so much any more. If I wrote one it might be really just totally boring. And who do I send them to? – lots of family which is completely stupid since I don’t think a lot of them care so much. And it seems kind of egotistical. And so now K writes his version and sends it out to his connections. Very much a typical kind of aren’t I great kind of thing. Which I guess mine were too – at least the egotistical part. Who the hell cares about random details of my life? Who wants to hear my ramblings (certainly if the number of “hits” to this blog are any indication……. Not too many!)? Well I guess part of the impetus is to reconnect to some of the folks I have been so bad about staying connected to. So many folks do all that through facebook, which is really not my thing at all. Can’t see wasting my time with it. I’ll have to think about it, or meditate on it, or cogitate over it, or consider it over the next bit of time.

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Very Short Post

8 am

Having trouble getting started today. I woke up at 6:30 but it being dark and all, I just lay there for a while thinking about my odd dreams. Finally got up and, though I gave gobbers to do, I have been reading Madonnas of Leningrad for book club instead. I got it out of the library at work, but it has now been recalled so I only have until next Friday. I think I will manage to finish. I think. Considering all I really need to do, maybe not. Mainly it is the test I am worried about. And the fact that there won’t be much time this weekend, what with Family Thanksgiving and all. Meaning that I had better get going on it today. I have only done 2 questions thus far, I must do the third on the first page, then I have that whole mess of definitions on the next page, plus the T/F which are easy. Then there are the labs to be graded before lab next week. As I said I’d better get a move on instead of reading Madonnas and writing this stuff…….

The day at Rhinebeck turned out surprisingly pleasant. I have discovered the secret which is to go ALONE! And I focused on paying attention to how people display yarn. Wrote tons of ideas down, even make sketches. And I did the wine and cheese tasting which is always good. Well I sure as hell better get going here……

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Daughter and TG

7:30 am

                It is already 7:30 so I guess I should get a move on. The truly Big News of the day: G is coming home tonight!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WOOOOOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!! Kent is picking her up at the airport around 6, she’ll get here around 7, and we’ll go straight to Panda East. Mainly she has said that she wants to go out to eat a lot. ok by me. I am just really looking forward to having her here. Hearing noises upstairs, having her coming and going, all that. I think she is hoping to spend a lot of the time working at the NBO farm. I think I’ll check the weather forecast: well it looks like it is going to be cold, rainy and windy for the first half of the week. Not much fun for working at a farm. And it will feel really cold to her, coming from NC. Well, she is young and flexible I hope….

                I guess I defacto skipped stretching this morning, since I am really hungry and so about to eat some cereal, and after that I won’t want to do stretches. And I don’t suppose I will run today as it is supposed to rain all day. Lazy bum I guess, but I have been doing well with getting to the gym at work. I think I will try to spend the day spinning the fawn angora that I started the other evening, and continuing to work on the photos. I did more last night and some came out ok, some not so good.

And another thing that is annoying/concerning me is that, though I laid all the skeins out in the sun the other day, and all smelled pretty good, now that I brought them in and laid them on the bed to choose ones to photograph I am getting a return of the mothball smell. Well, I guess it just means they need more airing out. In the sun is best, but that won’t be an option for a few days. I think the knit stuff is better, I bet some of the trouble with the skeins is that many are wound up tight and probably hold the smell longer. Maybe I will untwist them all.

                Next weekend is our family Thanksgiving, which is going to be kind of manic. What we usually do in several days will all be done in one. I already made 2 apple pies, which I left there, sometime this week we need to make a peach and a blueberry pie. Fri I need to get to Millers Falls to pick up the turkey. I guess we can do that on the way up to the farm. Then Saturday I’ll cook it, everything else will get cooked, we’ll eat, and everything will have to get packed up to leave pretty early Sunday (to get Gback for her flight).

                Somehow thinking about all that is making me feel anxious and is bringing up all the other stuff that I need to do and haven’t yet gotten to: like calling the accountant, contacting people for the fair (met with cochair on Sunday and have not yet done anything I said I would do). Here’s another anxious thing: met with the prof yesterday for lab conference and spent most of the time listening to him go on about the bad stuff coming down the pike for the college. Big bad choices needing to be made. And what will happen to lab instructors in all that I do not know. For years I’ve had to listen to K vent about how he might lose his job, I try not to obsess, but of course it leads to underlying anxiety. Now I have this additional anxiety that in fact my job may disappear. They seriously might have to cut back on staff in the bio dept. I guess several are below me on the totem pole but that’s about it. Everyone else has either been there longer, is senior in terms of what they do, or really both. Well, I will keep doing the best job I can and be as flexible as I can.

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photos

ok I will post a few of these photos i have taken. Not sure how i feel about them and it sure is a lot of work...... The hardest part of course is getting colors right.

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Winter and Dark Are Coming!

6:30 am

                Up early. I decided to get myself up and write in spite of the dark so that I could get down my thoughts on the day ahead. And speaking of which (the dark) I am NOT ready for winter! Cold. Dark. I am NOT ready. Oh well, not much I can do, as here it comes! It is nearly 6:45 and dark as anything out there. Makes it hard to get up.

                Today. Feed buns, get dressed……. Eat breakfast….. well besides all that, I must teach lab at 1, but I want to be there by 12 so that I can get over to the library and get those computers turned on and the videos loaded. That took forever with the cart computers last week. We are in a different room today, so I hope it is not so bad. I also want to get to the gym and since I need to at least be available after lab for a study session if anyone comes, I should do that before. So get there by 11, meaning leave here by 10:15. That gives me plenty of time between now and then. Very nice. And I don’t even have to take a shower since I’ll do that after I run.

                I finished up the second blue skein yesterday. I have more, but I think I will wait to spin it to see how the mittens start to spin up, I think I’ll have enough with what is already spun. So I also measured out some fawn angora to start spinning. I have 4 ounces measured out to make 1 ounce skeins. So I think this morning I’ll get started on that. It feels like it is warm out, so I can spin in the sun room for a while. I also found the camera guide, so I’ve been reading through it and am getting some ideas about how to use it more effectively. So another thing to start working on is taking photos. Maybe after I feed buns I’ll get a few more things from the sun room and take them downstairs where I have the light tent set up. I really need to put it on a bigger table, or use 2 small tables.

                I fixed two of the bunny cages over fall break. The second one especially took forever as I had not used the crimping tool when I made it, but instead folded the wires over and it took forever to unfold them all. It pretty much took all morning Tuesday, but is now done. Now I need to look into fixing the wooden hutches. They need wire for the bottoms of the inside parts, which right now, with wooden bottoms, just accumulate tons of droppings. Now if the bunnies would learn to go elsewhere and not inside…. But don’t suppose I can train them. Amber is not bad about it, but the others are. So I just want to redo all those cages and that will be a big chore. 

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moth issues

8 am

                Still Fall Break! Woo Hooo! Meaning I do not have to go in to work today. Tomorrow I must go in for lecture, but no lab. Thurs I do have lab since we missed last week for Mountain Day. Then Fri things are back to normal, in that we will have lecture and lab conference. I think I will really need to stay on Wednesday to get things ready for lab next week. And for the weeks after, though I don’t think most of those will be too bad.

                Yesterday went pretty well. I wrote myself out a huge ToDo list and of course only got through a few of the items, but what can you do? I did manage to spin up one strand of the next skein of the blue stuff, so that is getting close to finished. I’ve been knitting up a nice sample with double knitting (angora inside). In two weeks I’ll be able to really check on sizes of niece and nephew’s hands and start the actual mittens. I’m feeling like I should also knit up a tiny angora hat for other niece’s baby. And one for OTHER niece, too.

                Seems like a huge chunk of yesterday went to “errands.” Isn’t that they way it goes? Well, we also stopped in town for lunch. Miss Saigon was closed, so we went to the Souper Bowl and it was pretty unexciting. Won’t go there again. But I managed to get a bunch of stuff returned, which is always satisfying, and I got a bunch of ingredients for herbal moth repellant which I will mix up today. I also put all my finished stuff out on the porch in the sun to air out. Once I add the herbal stuff, I imagine everything will smell pretty good. I should check other places in the sun room because I know there are mothballs in other boxes. I didn’t really air out the angora since it is all in plastic bags and I don’t want to put those in the sun as they will get condensed water in them. I could empty each one, air out the angora and then store them again. That would be tedious.

                What about today? Anything good? I will spin more blue, maybe I will even get to start some angora. Maybe… and this would be fun, I could do some carding/blending. I’ve been wanting to card up some sort of fiber blanket thing of really wacky stuff. I was thinking it would be fun to have something like that for the Hartsbrook fair, but I don’t know if I’ll be at that. I guess I should think positive and hope that even if I can’t be inside, they’ll let me have an outdoor space.

Oh, can’t remember if I wrote about this yesterday, who cares, I played with M’s ipad at the farm and I really liked it, and just think – I could get one of those for about $500 instead of $2000 for the Mac…… It seems like it really would do more or less what I need a computer to do. One can get an application for the mac writing program. Seems like the trickiest part is printing. But things can get emailed to another computer and printed that way easily enough. Oh dear. Kent needs to use the computer……

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