Sort of a continuation of the last post. I woke up this morning thinking Another Groundhog Day.
I came back from Gainesville 851 days ago (no, I don't keep track. You can just ask Google how many days it's been from a date).
So that's 851 mornings in a row that I've gotten up, washed my face, brushed my teeth and hair, made the bed. Fed the cats, fed the chickens, fed anything else that needs feeding (these days an opossum), put food out for the peacock (and Miss Sassy the Raccoon), had my breakfast. Read Facebook and (for the last almost 200 days) played Wordle.
Clean the litterboxes, run a vacuum over the hairier parts of the carpeting, tidy the kitchen. Two days a week I go to the museum. I usually have a "things to do list" and I do some of them.
In the evenings, I feed the cats, feed the squirrels, lock the chickens in the coop.
And that's sort of my life. If nature abhors a vacuum, then there should be a great whooshing happening in my direction.
I'm in the doldrums. For one thing, it's July. Still July. I have never liked July. Years (decades) ago I declared that I would not fight July. I would do enough to get by, do the things that had to be done, and otherwise just try to tolerate it. To me, July just epitomizes everything I dislike about summer.
It didn't improve my attitude towards July that it was the month that Bob got diagnosed. But on the other hand - why ruin any other time of the year when I already had July set aside to dislike?
It doesn't help that it's hot, buggy, the yard had gotten completely out of control and I haven't even dared to look at the garden in the last month except to peek over the Virginia Creeper that has taken over the fence again to notice the waist-high weeds. And one of the reasons that the weeds are so happy is that for at least the last two weeks or more we've had pop-up thunderstorms several times a day and everything is just so soggy and falling apart and the mushrooms are growing mushrooms.
Covid numbers are still going up.
Other doldrum inducers: I'm having the post-reading depression that one gets after finishing a good book. In this case a trilogy - so some 1300 pages. Shadow and Bone. In the fantasy genre, but really well written. Good plot and characters I could get involved with. I'm always a little sad when a good book is finished (and I know I'm not alone in this - it's a common phenomena)
Post-project depression. Same thing. This one started 2-3 years ago (likely late 2019). It was my spin-while-walking project. That's the spinning I do for no other reason than enjoying the feel of fiber slipping through my fingers while taking my daily walk (which is also adding to my doldrums because I haven't done that for a month - walking in rain while simultaneously sweating and being chewed by mosquitoes isn't particularly meditative). I had gotten a lovely dark-brown Corriedale fleece which I've been combing and spinning. It was a pretty good-sized fleece so it took awhile.
As I was finishing it up, and thinking of what to do with some other fleeces that I have, and thinking of weaving a ruana (sort of a poncho) and deciding which wool to use for that, I had the great DUH moment because I was simultaneously wondering what I was going to do with this some 3,000 yards of brown wool I had spun.
Personally, I like brown, but it can be terribly, well, brown. So I overdyed some of it (dark wool is gorgeous and rich when it's dyed), wrestled it onto the loom, wove it off, and will likely finish the ruana today. (The problem with weaving, particularly with handspun, is that the spinning takes forever, I'm not that good at setting up the loom so that takes quite awhile, and then the weaving goes fast and you're done).
So post-book depression and post-project depression during a hot rainy buggy July. Time for another book (well, at the moment I have four going - H is for Hawk on audiobook for when I'm using the rowing machine, the very slow read of Dracula, the equally slow read of Women and Folklore in the Dark Ages (interesting subject but not well written so it's a slog) and a very strange book on the use of human elements (bone, mummies, blood, urine, fat - whatever a body can produce) in historic medicine. And Ebaida wants to co-read Good Omens so we'll start that in a few days.
Ending with some pictures of the ruana project.
A sample of the yarn and the spindle I used to spin it. (Yes, I'm intrigued that I spun 3,000 yards of 2-ply yarn (so 6,000 yards) on a little stick I twirled with my fingers)
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