A shadow of my former self

The daughter is moved back into her dorm. As is the non-daughter of the same name, only she has no room key, so we could not take her stuff up to the third floor. Alas.
I estimate that I made between 15 and eighteen trips up and down the precipitous steps with the drizzle and the moss from the truck to the apartment.
And the truck, ah yes. When I moved them into the apt I drove Doug's car (slightly larger than mine) something like six and a half times back and forth from NoHo to Amherst; this time I drove only a couple of times. The truck was a 17-foot U-Haul and had no pickup, such that I had to floor it before it would edge away from the stoplight. I was terrified I would suddenly accelerate and take out two or three passenger cars. The only time there was any danger of that was when I was backing. I try not to back. It took me 25 minutes to get out of the driveway of the apt because the ditzes downstairs didn't realize when I asked them to move their cars, I meant OUT of the way. They thought five feet was out of the way. I should have squashed them. And it was a very noisy diesel, such that all three gears sounded like the engine was about to explode.

I have been supported through this by Grace and Dahlia, absolute bricks whom the daughter cannot understand why they speak to us. Dahlia went and got Daughter a rug because she wanted an excuse to go shopping (rug had mildewed in storage considerably). Daughter has not done badly herself, and is responsible for the failure to explode of the gas station where I refilled the tank. And she and the non-daughter worked themselves into the ground moving stuff. Good character was shown by all. I am shot to hell and will return to my home in the morning, going straight to work.

But the female chick is moved back to the correct incubator. I hope the male chick has a gentle reentry to academic life.

Home

Well, I have been home for almost two weeks. First there was the back to the Real World lethargy, and the need to sleep all the time; then the visit from Lisa F (she is in good form and still RC) that involved LESS sleep and MORE wine than digging; the very nice birthday dinner last Saturday, mine; I have made a half-century and I only feel like it sometimes, go me; the juried crafts fair full of ceramic goodness on Sunday; and the computer hijinks. My iMac/Firefox has decided it can't read pictures at Yahoo, Amazon, or Blogger (at least not my Blogger) Works okay on the blogs of others, I think. This did not speed up my posting the rest of the dig, which I finally have, at scrapdig.blogspot.com (q. you should v.). Or setting up the photogallery at YahooPhotos.

At work, my boss installed XP Pro on my machine (formerly XP Home, but we wanted More). this has not been a smooth transition. Ha very ha.

I will try to be around more. Knitting an uninspired sock. Two skeins. Different Dyelots. And one has three cables across the instep and one has five. I have been BUSY, you know. I must have been. The house is a mess.

On the road again!

So after a week of a larger bed, the loving attentions of my cats and chickens, and two days of Access training classes, I am back to the North country later this afternoon. They have been finding things since I was there; apparently they finally got close enough to the hotspot.

If you haven't visited the dig blog at scrapdig.blogspot.com, I hope you will.

Home again, for awhile

I am back from my two weeks at field school. There are pictures and a diary on the New Hampshire Underground blog. I am still groggy and itch from the blackfly bites, but I had a wonderful time. The chickens have grown; Doug has spent time getting more of them to accept affection and being picked up. Asterix,delighted to have me home brought me a large, dead vole in the wee hours of this morning... I hope I stop waking up before dawn soon.

More as I come back in real-life focus.

Augghh

I love going places, but I hate leaving home. I want to pack _everything_. So I try to avoid packing anything. It's humid. My car is hideous. We are going to meet Dawn at the lab in two hours. As usual I cannot find my plumb bob. I will probably be home next weekend. Or I might stay up there. In any case, two (of two) waterlilies are blooming it looks like tomorrow. Otherwise, it looks like everything will keep. Doug is feeding the cats and the chickens and watering everything, since it seems to have stopped raining for who knows how long?

I will try to keep in touch, but if I don't, look at the weather in far Northern New Hampshire and hope for not too much rain and not too high temperatures.

Only natural

There is very little point to this entry, I warn you, except that I love my house (not that it wouldn't be nicer with $50K massaged into the kitchen with a toothbrush and boiled linseed oil).

Nature. Not a pretty thing, but it has its moments. On the Fourth, Doug and I found two sets of moose tracks in the driveway. Great big ones like a sandwich plate (a saucer at least) and little demitasse-saucer sized. Moose and mosling. We never see them but they're here, like Fair Folk.

Yesterday I surprised a hen turkey and about seven little tiny chicks in the same part of the driveway. They proceeded into the brush with dignity.

The chickens now come and check out the courtyard garden as soon as Doug lets them out in the morning, and if you come home from work and sit there and say "Hey chickens," very softly, Auk and Buffy and Spike and Faith rush up and ask to be given sunflower seeds out of your hand, followed more discreetly by the others. Today I grabbed Spike and put her on my lap. "Help, murder! " she screeched. "Oh. Food." And ate out of my hand.
A couple days ago Asterix got so jealous he tried to eat sunflower seeds, but they just weren't his thing. He's still jealous. Today, as I had Spike on my lap, Buffy (who also gets jealous; chickens do have expressions) fluttered onto my lap to crowd Spike. And then Joyce got crazy and flew up onto my lap, too, only there wasn't room, so she veered onto the firepit and knocked over the can of sunflower seeds. A very popular move.

I love the chickens. I also love the baby greenfrogs, about the size to sit on a fifty-cent piece (a little bigger than a dollar coin for you youths out there). There are four or five or six living in the courtyard Rubbermaid pond, and maybe thirty in the back puddle. Only there's one less than there used to be somewhere, because Cordelia was playing with a stiff little froggy corpse and eventually ate it. I guess you gotta be fast. And I guess it's good the frogs lay a lot of eggs.

Rather faint from horror after this, I went and sat in the hottub as it got darker. The hummingbird is usually around sitting on the TV antenna of an evening. No hummingbird. I did see many bright yellow goldfinches, the redwings from across the road, the rosebreasted grosbeak couple, the purple finches, the song sparrows -- and I would HEAR the hummingbird, but he wasn't in any of his usual spots. I heard him pass seven times and glimpsed him drinking from the feeder once. I found out that since there were canaille like the damn huge sparrows on his aerial, he was sitting on the porch swing about eight feet away, watching me. He was very calm about the whole thing, actually as hunkered down and relaxed as I have ever seen him, occasionally streching his wings or going for a quick trip around the house. We watched each other comfortably till the finches and the sparrows left and the cardinal couple flew in, and then the aerial was empty and the hummingbird could go sit there, as was only proper.

Chickens

I think of the chickens as being quite grown up now, though Doug and Sarah assure me that they will get even taller. They live in the former toolshed at the bottom of the slope, on top of which the courtyard garden sits, so one can have tea and a pleasing chicken vista.

The other day I fed them and then staggered up the hill to the bench (I have a head cold and staggering was about all I could do last weekend). Asterix had followed me to the chicken shed and slowly followed me up the hill. The chickens had been watching him with interest -- they like to chase Mena -- and they followed him, clucking about it, up the hill. He gave them a Look and slinked under the porch. Spike and Buffy stood next to the porch for a good five minutes, looking under it (they are much too sensible to go into the dark themselves) and clucking and wondering if he would come out again.



After seeing my aunt last week and having a grand convocation of Jeffersons (all the ones extant in my family, meaning my aunt, parents, self and daughter, plus ex) last weekend, I was happy to have a glimpse of the other scion of my chromosomes, who is usually in Maryland. I was supposed to pick Sam up and meet my parents and his father in Boston, but as I was having trouble staying awake for more than two hours at a stretch they all came here, and Sam tried out my atl-latl (I tried to link to a video here, but no luck). It refrained from raining for at least 48 hours and and we had a sedate good time. The chickens are a great crowd pleaser; Buffy allowed Sam to hold her for a bit, and she ate sunflower seeds out of our hands.


After they left I took a nap.

On Sunday Sarah (I would link to her, but she needs to update. Poor dear is starting six weeks of day camp leadership today. We are hoping one week fails to have enough registrants so she can catch a break) came to visit. It still wasn't raining and I was still feeble (I mean more than usual. I am better but I think I am going to be spending most of Independence Day napping, which is okay as it is supposed to thunder) so we had a very pleasant time knitting and spinning.

While we were sitting admiring the view, Auk came up the slope to visit us, and after some indecision allowed us to give her a few sunflower hearts. In fact she liked them a lot, and seemed to wish there were more. She went back down the slope and returned with Buffy a few minutes later. Buffy was happy to eat more sunflower seeds out of our hands, and Auk decided maybe it was safe after all. They left after finishing the handful. About ten minutes later, Buffy and Auk and Faith and Spike came up the slope. Auk gave me the look I have seen in the eyes of a dog who knows I am eating Oreos. I went and got more seeds.

Spike thought this was dreadful. She may be a rooster; she spends too much of her time trying to keep the other birds in line. Buffy and Auk continued to get a bigger share eating out of my hand (the pecking hurts only when they pinch. Buffy in particular is very gentle, like a cat doing velvet paws), and then Faith tried it and nothing bad happened, and then Spike said that she, personally, had always eaten out of people's hands and any sensible chicken would. It will be interesting to see if they bring the rest of the flock with them the next time we are sitting out there.


I finished my Meilenweit socks and the '"why are you wearing a cooking-pot on your head?" "I can't hear you, I have a cooking pot on my head"'hat in the short intervals of consciousness on Friday and Saturday. Today I made great strides into a pair of fingerless gloves I am making out of a rare yarn that looks better knitted than in the skein. I finished spinning the lovely sagey green Icelandic lamb Juno gave me some of, and the packet of bright green Romney from Fantom Farm I bought at MA Sheep and Wool, and then the little package of Merino in sort of rosebush tones from year before this past one's NH Seep and Wool form the lamented, vanished Copper Moth. Then I plied these together and made a nice enough heavy worsted, which I have no idea what I will do. Socks, maybe, if there's enough.

I hope the rest of my brain and energy come back by the end of this week, as I must pack and get the last few plants on the porch planted before I go to archaeology field school for the coming two weeks.

Not much, you?

Once in a great while, I like the weather. The rest of the time I complain about the heat or the humidity. Just insert whines at random.

Last night a scarlet tanager flew through the yard; I am hoping it has a wife and they linger. It is one the first birds I can remember seeing (I think I was about six), and I do like bright red birds. One of my best birding days ever was in the Fossil Rim Wildlife park and seeing two red life birds in one day, summer tanager and a vermilion flycatcher. I must go back there sometime.

But in just under two weeks I will go to lovely Colebrook, NH, and dig, and that will be good. The database fairy is supposed to come to my job and give us a new, logical Access database, constructed by someone who understands them. And we are probably getting a new copy machine which will do both sides without my having to take the copy-on-one-side and put it (the right way up) in the paper hopper, saving hours of tedious labor, which I will spend filling up the new database. Since we keep spend a LOT of money on "Address Service," which means the Post Office lets us know when an address is dead, and then I take the name out of the list, the database is getting smaller every week.

Digging square holes will be a change for the better, believe me.

We had a family trip to lovely Northampton! to celebrate the daughteral birthday and take my aunt from Dallas around. It rained, because it rains in Northampton and Amherst. I took my parents to the garden center (they bought a daylily)and behaved badly myself(30% off peonies, I mean who wouldn't?). I went home Saturday night and the relatives appeared here on Sunday. Fortunately, it didn't rain till Sunday evening, so we had a gracious cup of tea and then I got a lot of things planted.

We are replete with young greenfrogs. The three newts of the puddle showed themselves all at once. I am someday going to finish my Meilenweit socks. That's about it.

Chelonian rhapsody

I helped an old lady across the street today. At least, I think she was a lady and she was at least as old as my daughter. I saw her as I drove down the road; I had already been gulled by anamorphic perspective into braking for a really intense skid mark, so I was alert when I saw a huddled mass slow down and stop on the crest of the camber, where the sun lay warmest on the tarmac. She tucked her feet in and looked like my grandmother (neither of them were women to trifle with). "Lady," I said in my best cop voice, "you can't sit there." She ignored me for a minute and then took off, heading for under the car. Her shell was the size of a turkey platter. I picked her up. She kicked me, but was not annoyed enough to risk her dignity by trying to bite me. I put her in someone's yard, and she settled down remarking only that sand was not as warm as tarmac and that I was an interfering busybody flatlander really bad word.

i saw a jogger a bit further along. "There's really cool turtle a little way up the road." "Oooh, cool, " she said, proving the pleasantness of her face went all the way through. "A snapper?"

I had a good rest of the day, too. Work is boring, which is fine, although yesterday was the day the phone rang all day. A moderately famous NH older woman activist asked me if I knew any nice Republicans for her committee. I am sure there are nice Republicans (though my father tells me that's not how he raised me) but I don't know any for her committee.

When I got home it still wasn't raining, and I actually planted stuff, which was good because I glossed over a small trip to Hillsborough where I had intended to get groceries and bought annuals instead. Now the plants Norma gave me as hostess gifts (the pear-l jam is as tasty as it is beautiful, by the way) the weekend of NH Sheep and Turtle are happily settled and mulched, and I can hold up my head because Doug and I finally planted the poor tomatoes.

It wasn't raining

It was kind of strange yesterday; water was NOT coming out of the sky. Doug cut the lawn and built a raised-bed frame, and I ransacked the triangle flower bed, tearing out a lot of weeds I should have done more on the first time, edging it, and adding more petunias and mulch. I hope it all grows. This is the Hummingbird Garden from Audubon Nurseries, plus some other bits and pieces. I moved a very miserable azalea out of the swamp in the backyard, and a hosta from the chicken area, and it looks smashing. It took all day.

We have three newts and three frogs in the pond, but the tadpoles vanished very suddenly over the weekend I was in Northampton (the most recent one, last weekend that was. They were huge but legless when I left. It seems hard to believe they transformed so fast, and there are no signs of hundreds of baby frogs; but there are no bodies, either. Very weird.

In the meantime, before I get the pictures up, here is a fine cat story. Not sentimental.

On a happier note:

Wednesday, the day after, Ellie found an infant mouse wandering around in the basement. It was about the size of the one I had in my bra last year, but there was no cat involved. He appeared to have wandered out of his nest, as he could stumble and dash even with his eyes barely open. Mice are vermin but they are cute. When cats are chasing them I just tell the cat to take their toys ouside. This one was a BABY with a little tiny face and tiny ears... I knew we were not likely to succeed in bottle-raising him, so I fed him some banana and made a hot-water bottle (mug, full of hot water, with lid and wrapped in tea towel to prevent burns) and put an aquarium on its side with some hay in it and put the whole shebang back on the basement floor where the mouse came from. And he was not found dead the next day, or found at all, so we think his mom came back and got him.

If you even consider reading any book that has a talking dragon in it, which I am mildly suspicious of myself, definitely take a look at Naomi Novik’s His Majesty’s Dragon . It and the two sequels (I advise against reading the teaser in the back of the third one, as it will be a year before the book comes out) are really good. There are relatively few female characters (though they are strong and likeable), but the most important relationship is the guy and his dragon. Unlike Anne McCaffery (which I read devotedly for many years), both are well-rounded characters who grow and change because of their relationship and their mutual experience. It’s got MORAL development! It’s got fireworks and spare but lush descriptions (meaning the settings and some of the clothes are yummy, but she doesn’t go on and on). Sometimes it's funny (on purpose).

This is the best fantasy I have read in a long time, even though it’s set in the Napoleonic Era and I hate early modern.

I notice other people are having somewhat of a blog slow-down. I blame the weather.

I spent last weekend moving Eleanor and her roomie Eleanor into the apartment they are sharing (with three other people) for the summer. I am getting better at packing the car (or maybe it was just that Doug had lent me his, so I could carry more) and moving furniture it basically more useful than playing mailing list games. I was also able to go to a really good garden center in Hadley and bought a fancy honeysuckle and a half-barrel (why would anyone want a water feature? The whole WORLD is a water feature, we're having flood warnings for about the third time in four weeks)and various small things. Now if I can get them planted before they drown....

But back to Memorial Day Weekend (when it was, if you recall, raining less). Ellie and Matt brought home a stray cat on Saturday evening. He was orange, frighteningly thin, with nastiness coming out of both ears, and the vet was out on an emergency and said he sounded stable; just keep him isolated and we could come in on Tuesday. So we set him up in the loom room and fed him. He was crazy for olive oil (I was using it on a paper towel to clean his ears) but also cat food. Ellie contemplated calling him Popeye because he was so fond of Olive Oyl... but opted for a more dignified name for an orange orphaned kitty (I had to point out it had something to do with Dickens as well Disney), so he was Oliver.

We knew he was in awful shape. Doug thought he might have had a stroke, I thought he might have been sideswiped by a car, as one side didn't work too well. But even though he had trouble walking, he would come bouncing up and stagger onto one's lap when we came to visit him, and purr very loudly and fall asleep. He wasn't neutered, but he knew a lot about people, and he was a sweetie. I wondered if someone might have dumped him when he got ill, or if he had just wandered off one day when he was delirious. At least for a while he had been loved dearly, and we could give him some of that again.

I am old and pessimistic and I was worried. Ellie is not. Both of us hoped when we took him to the vet they would fill him up with antibiotics and he would be all right, but of course we asked for FIV and FeLV tests. They did tell us he was older. It took the vet a long time to come out of the back room and I could tell at once the news was not good; he had full-blown kitty AIDS.

(This was the day NPR atarted covering the 25th anniversary of the scientific description on human AIDS, and it was a little too pat. But at least there's a vaccine for cats.)

Ellie took it hard, as she had not expected this. I had sort of expected it, since most cats don't fall over when they walk, but I took it hard too. We have only had to have one pet put to sleep, and my then-husband handled it. I am all for sensible allocation of medical resources and not prolonging anyone's agony, but I am also acutely aware of the difference between 'killing' and 'letting die.' He was having trouble walking, but he could eat and poop and purr and rub his head on us. And as Ellie said, he trusted us.

But we had cats at home who did not need to risk exposure to FIV, even though they are vaccinated. I didn't think we could drug him into remission and at least one of his ears was full of pus, which had to hurt; he was not going to get better.

So we filled him up with kitty treats and they gave him a shot of something like curare. He got all rigid, but Ellie could feel his heartbeat speed way up when they shaved his foreleg and gave him an overdose of anaesthetic. It was not the'they give him a shot and he just went to sleep' kind of death and we were somewhat miffed.

And he was dead.

And we buried him (deep) in the front yard next to Obelix, who Ellie says will like him, and they can both watch the chickens.

I am still sad.

Life has been rich

And I have to locate my camera.

Last Saturday Doug and I went to a flax-spinning workshop. We got to use a brake, a scutching stand, and two sizes of hackle. Since the actual flax stalks had been retted by someone else, it seemed like a very fast fiber prep from straw to a hank of what looked like teenaged-girl scalp. The outer bits of the straw fly all over, and the brake clacks, and then you take your handful of ratty fiber to an upright and hit it with the wooden sword. Norman Kennedy had told the teacher (Gina Gerhardt (sp?)) "Lass, you have to make the noise," so she had us making lots of noise, and the bits of outer staw fall off. Then you drag it through something very like a multi-pitch woolcomb, and then through a finer gauge one, and half of your handful (or more, depending on how well it was retted, which is to say how loose the outer bits of stem are from the inner fibers)becomes tow, and suitable for carding, and the long fibers look exactly like a dirty blond ponytail, the line flax. The actual spinning of the line flax is strange, because the staple is over a foot long. it is very possible to do spining relatively few fibers and make a fine thread, although I am more aware than ever that 200 - 500 threads per inch fabric like the ancient Egyptians made regularly was the insane.

I do not think I am going to become a wild keen linen maker, but it was interesting and I enjoyed the noise. On the other hand, i an really happy to wear linen rather than wool now that the weather has turned sticky (to say nothing of cotton, but linen really is cooler, as Juno will tell you. (though not in this post. She made a really lovely linen sleep shirt, she thought, and found herself wearing it, the envy of all who saw her, all weekend). Juno's pictures and her explanation of the party at Cate's on Saturday sums up everything I could say. Cate has a lovely house, even when you can only see bits of it because it was filled with women (mostly) and spinning wheels (and I think I saw more spindles in action at once than I ever have at once before).

The segue behaved badly, because there should have been time to say that after the flax-spinning, Doug drove us to Northampton (where I picked up Ellie last weekend and where I will be dropping her off this weekend) to Cate's house. Where Juno was wearing her linen shirt, and there were more people I knew than I have seen since Rhinebeck. It was wonderful. I hope Cate will have a keg party again when the twins are old enough to appreciate it. But Cate's family's absence did allow for considerable overnighting, and breakfast was fun as more and more people kept appearing. I think she had them on hooks in the closet.

The festival itself -- the weather was sunny and quite hot enough, somewhat of a contrast from the New Hampshire Sheep and Wool: if you weren't careful, you could have had hypothermia at NH and suntroke in MA within 14 days. I managed not to buy a Hitch-hiker (I love my Joy. I DON'T need a wheel for spinning in the car, and anyway I ususally don't have anyone else to drive. Pity.) I picked one of my daughter's dorm-mates from the college (she is spending the summer there too) and enjoyed continuing her ruination by encouraging her to buy more roving. I did succumb to Foxfire and Fantom Farm myself, and Jaeger Icelandic yarn and a skein of a mottled green that Cassie said everyone else at the party had also bought the day before. It's a really nice mottle, with bits of blue, and the yarn is part camel. I apparently believe I will get cold again someday, although it seems unlikely.

By far most of the fiber I brought home was given me. I have a pound of Damn Camel from Cate (if you can spin it, you can have it), an ounce or more of the lovely sage green Icelandic from Juno, and a batt of lovely angora-mix from Helen; so even being really scrupulous about not buying for my stash would not have saved me. Though Etherknitter kindly spun some of the blackish autumnal I am working since NHSW, while we tried to tempt her to various wheels.

A wonderful weekend. It was so good to see all those people.

When You're a Jet You're a Jet

These are not just pushover chickies, no sir. They are TOUGH. Only, if you take them outside they don't go more than a few feet away. Which considering the hawks (and the foxes and coyotes, each of which I have only seen once here) is probably a good call. One or two of them is beginning to cluck, now, rather than cheep, and my suspicions about the palest chipmunk-colored one's maleness are not going away. They are reasonable company when one is weeding. Mascara can catch black flies in mid-air. So far they have been frightened of worms.

The woodfrog tadpoles are almost a centimeter long in the body, like oval BB's, and I am surprised at how large they are without having sprouted even back legs yet. I believe digestion gets iffy for awhile as one transforms, so maybe they are bulking up. I will certainly not lead the chickens to the backyard for a few weeks after the tadpoles leave the water, as I don't think they are as frightening as worms.

The frog, at least _a_ frog, has returned to living in the Rubbermaid in the courtyard garden. Some new-to-me kind of amphibian is singing in the woods and making a remarkable noise. Hummingbirds part our hair when we walk or sit outside. I think the sugar makes them edgy.

Ellie and I saw the bear again, at nine in the morning, walking across the driveway. I wanted to jump onto a chair and gather my skirts and shriek, but something told me this was the 'appropriate' reaction to a different animal. I am told that one of my friends kept her birdseed in a can on a screened-in porch, and a bear came and stuck its arms through the walls on one corner and tried to drag the birdseed out. Being Ann, she hit it with a broom and it ran off, accurately perceiving itself as outclassed.

I hope to see some of you at the Mass. Sheep and Wool festival on Sunday. The weather forecast is better than the one we had for NH. Tomorrow Doug and I are taking the Fiber Studio's flax workshop and then heading for MamaCate's. I am only going for the social, as I have not finished spinning anything I bought last week (two weeks).

And we are taking the smaller of our two cars. So we can't buy much.

No.

Well, maybe a little.

Links

The links are not working. What is interesting is that they did work on LiveJournal.

No, what is really interesting is that it's SUNNY!!!! outside and that Dick and Deb can flush their toilets again.

Try this.

Rain and rain and rain and rain

A story about the unusual kind of storm it is: Here

A link to photos:Here
Except that at the time I am posting, the captions are beshrewed. Not all of these are on manchester Road in Concord.
I am going to try to go to work now. I am happy nothing so dramatic is visible from my window.

Oh and

It is not to my hypothermiated credit that I forgot to mention the pre-soak festivities. Norma got to see her motherwort plant (affectionately referred to as 'your marijuana plant'by one of her friends last fall) happy in its new home; I hope the seedlings and lettuce she brought this spring will love long enough for the soil to dry out. MamaCate, contrary to everything she says, is not even somewhat fat. I had only seen her in winter clothes at Rhinebeck and read her moaning about sizing up Kepler (now I should make some kind of moon-crater in-joke about Copernicus, I suppose) and the fact is this mother of twins has a Girlish Figure. She and Norma and JoVe and Tigger took Doug and Cimsy (a blogless Vermonter) and me to dinner, where we ate. A lot. It was good. And since it was so friggin' cold the next day there is no doubt that Norma and I burned off our (flourless) Molten Chocolate Cakes.

You can't beat knitbloggers for a good time. Tigger got taught to spin by at least four people not her mother, and found that yes, she did like a nice wheel (I hope she and her mom will be able to apportion time on the Hitch-hiker peaceably).

I had not had a 9-year-old for a while and she made a good excuse to spend time browsing when I should have been helping Doug sell stuff. Kid has a good eye for nice roving. What she ended up persuading her mother she needed for her education as a spinner was small batts of yellow, orange, and two blues. Unfortunately for her mother, who is stuck having Tigger's best interests at heart, T was at our booth long enough to spend time with the second-to-last Diak spindle from my workshop, and it really did work better for her than the lovely walnut Maggie she had... I mean, two spindles is not very many for a third-generation fiber artist, is it? Tigger was also seen giving someone spinning lessons herself.

I taught about four more people to spin. We did have a few customers, but we also sat and talked about goats and toe-up knitting and how much we wanted a hot drink. My friend Pat of Roka Farm was vending with Doug and me. There I was stuck in an echoing barn with the roar of the rain ( sounding like harder rain than it really was, and it was quite hard enough) and an icy wind and a lot of cashmere. So I got a flyweight spindle from Carolina Homespun (which, mst unfortunately, was in the closet barn to ours) and I am really impressed with Pat's cashmere roving. She has been breeding for longer staple as well as fineness and it has really improved in the last few years.

Very, very wet

This past weekend was the New Hampshire Sheep and Wool Festival. We
think it should be Sheep and Mud, or maybe Sheep and Turtle. Last
year it drizzled on Saturday and was kind of cold, and there was a
small lake at one end of the sheep barn, and we wore our sweaters.

This year it POURED, and they had to evacuate the sheep barn as the
water went to 15" deep in some places. By the grace of God I wore my
rainpants on Saturday, which made me part of the warmest 10% of
people there, without necessarily being toasty.

Thinking of Ice Age people, I wrapped the feet and wrists of a nine-year-old in
wool roving because I was afraid she'd turn blue with hypothermia and die while we waited for her mother to come get her. It helped a lot, she said, and I wrapped my
wrists and a number of other people's (six or so) and it really made
a difference. Sunday a smaller number of people came (I could hardly
blame them) and they were much better dressed. Long underwear and waterproof boots are key.

It was the kind of thing where you sort of enjoyed being there but it
will be more fun to look back on. I behaved more sanely than usual
and only bought maybe a pound of roving, and a Weavette for my mommy.

Today I am home; I was concerned as to whether I could get out, since
it was dicey yesterday afternoon getting in. The Hillsboro end of my
road was flooded, as was the riverside part of Henniker. The other
road they have been in the process of repaving for at least six weeks
(which is to say they tore up the pavement and have graded it a
couple times but left it. If I were living on that street I would
have sued the town even before this) and it looked like it had been
mined. There was a Jeep Wagoneer ahead of me picking its way and we
took about ten minutes to go 100 yards though the potholes.

But Doug has managed to get to 93; he said they had graded that area and the
part of the Henniker end of my road that had been in the process of
washing out when he got home (after I did). Today he refused to go
to work but his ex-wife's basement is flooding so he went there to pump it
out. He does have a fine sense of loyalty. He says the Merrimack
River area looks worse than it did in October.

We are lucky; one of my friends says his septic field has saturated
and they can't flush the toilets or shower.

And many people various places have been taken to shelters.

Last weekend

I am sadly behind. Avoiding tidying the house and avoiding getting ready for NHSheep&Wool is a full-time job. You will be happy to know my bedroom is as vile as ever. But today I unwrapped my new Dolores muscle-shirt and cleaned the kitchen.

And started a glass of wine, which is why this is taking so long to write. The chickens are well and into adolescent ugliness. The pictures below show them last weekend, May 7.

Auk and Blackie, feather-footed. I was a little sleepy.

Doug, Mascara, and Brownish

Auk, the light chipmuck who may be a rooster, and Blackie

It is now May 11 and they are taller and halfway through the Moult into real feathers. They look like the ultimate bad hair day. The pin feathers, the falling down, the awkwardness... I must take more pictures. We are going through the Murray McMurray catalogue trying to figure out what breed they may be. Auk is probably a Blue Cochin. or a Dark Brahma? Really very little idea. I am quite taken with Mascara, a relatively small one of the ones in roughly 'chipmunk' coloring, with dramatic eyepaint. She is determined to fly onto the edge of the box at every opportunity, and like to sit on my shoulder. This can be messy. They talk a lot. Or 'squawk' might be more accurate, as well as a frequent low peeping.

Meanwhile last weekend, as well as playing with the chickens, we cleaned up the 'burn-pile' of the former owner; some of it we may burn, but not the painted, glued, or pressure-treated stuff. The landfill charged us $20, which it was probably worth to rid ourselves of the eyesore, and I must thank the patron saint of avoiding pustules (St. Roc?) that we seem to have escaped poison ivy unscathed.

And we also started a batch of dandelion wine, which is more labor-intensive than you might think. Ten minutes to pick the blossoms, and three hours to trim the green stuff off. It is much easier to trim them before they close up, as they will within an hour. We are making a double batch, as it turns out that Doug remembers really liking it. I think he must have had some of the 2000 vintage, and distance lends enchantment. Not enough to forget how much trouble it is to clean them, though. It smelled like a wet dog today in its bucket. We decanted it off the lees (in this case, some raisins and what was originally 12 cups of yellow fluff) and it's in a carboy in the back room fermenting like mad, very satisfactory.

I think this is the happiest I have ever had primroses look.

Cassie-envy; or Another Shot in the Culture Wars

Cassie makes socks. they zoom from her needles. This is because a) she is cool and b) along with SockBug and Norma and thousands of others, she works hard and often and knits when some of us are having a little Meg Cabot festival* or are zoned-out on red wine beyond anything but garter stitch**.

NONETHELESS, I thought, hey, you _have_ Knitting on the Road, you also could make a pair of Conwy socks.

Well, yes, but I only make toe-up socks. Nancy Bush writes cuff-down patterns.

But in America we have choices. And you have in the past made cuff-down socks. You could again.

So after several years of playing happily in the garden of figure-8 cast-ons, I decided to make a cuff-down sock, or one hopes two, and I am on the second go of the first cuff and I really hate it. First, you cast on, okay, then 'join, being careful not to twist.' I didn't twist. But I managed to make the yarn be coming to the new row in a fancy spiral, affording it all kinds of chances to hang up. With a repeat of K, P, K2, p, K, P2, I messed up which is not unusual enough even to be irritating, but it was more inevitable because I was juggling this tiny strand of loops and trying to make sure I was not inadvertantly knitting into the wrong thing and not pulling on the join and... .

After about 13 rows, I was annoyed by the fudging and concerned by the prospect of more and ripped it out. This time I remembered one trick I had used: cast on and knit the first row of ribbing and then join the sucker, which at two rows has much more character. It's less likely to fall apart and much easier not to twist, and incidentally much easier to set up a patern and count it, which was why I had only one TINY fudging to make it come out perfectly and I am now knitting with hope. Perhaps in a few inches I'll get to 'with abandon.'

But why go through all that when you could just cast on some number of toe-stitches and increase and go through the difficult time when you may have to pull it out with FAR fewer stitches (and which are all knits, no counting and cursing?)? When you can establish a pattern and rhythm peacefully with a nice solid toe that you know will fit over your own tootsie (or that of your target, if you can get them to hold still)? When you have a stretch of foot where you can decide whether this number pattern-stitches is going to work or not, and several places to adjust the numbers when you go over the ankles to make sure the entire pattern-around counts out?

Maybe I'll make the second sock toe up, once I'm familiar with the pattern. But I would never suggest that a novice knitter start with a cuff-down sock. I know lots of you have done it and done well. The starting part gives me hives.




*I really like The Princess Diaries, particularly the earlier volumes; they are nothing like the films, of which the heroine makes fun in the books. Cabot's other YA series are fun, too.

** one lousy glass and my counting gets even more abstract than usual.