Getting my groove.

I have been thinking a lot lately about what is important. Family has always been high on the list, seems these are the people that you would die for. They can annoy you, make you crazy, push you to the limit, but you would be first in line to give them your kidney, or anything else they needed.
Family.
My father and I sparred for years. He wanted me to comply. Be a good girl. Listen to his advice. Seek only his counsel. But alas, I was, and still am, so much like him. Always marching to my own music, much to his dismay.
Now sometimes to DH's dismay.

A friend of mine recently said that I should read The Glass Castle, about a woman who was raised by two very dysfunctional parents, she thought I would identify with the fact that the writer grew up thinking her family was the norm.
My parents weren't dysfunctional, I never went hungry, or for that matter, went without much of anything. I was the only child, but not a spoiled only child. I mostly didn't ask for a lot, but when I did, it was always considered.

My father may have been the junk man in town, but we were the first people on the street to have a TV. I was the kid riding the new bike, and eventually the bartered for horse. So I had a good childhood.
That being said, my father was so eccentric, and my mother was from another country with her own rigid ideas about how things should go. Still is.
So I did grow up in a family that was quite a ways off the grid. And I never knew.
I thought it was perfectly normal to have your father add on another 8 ft to the back of your house every year. Walls coming down, being put up, windows appearing where they had never been before.
The furnace in the kitchen, which finally got a wall built around it after my mother kept complaining. The furnace had its own window, by the way, which made the kitchen somewhat strange. But not any stranger than having the furnace next to the range. Then when my father couldn't get to it, because he built the walls so close to the furnace, that he had to make a door from inside my closet, so he could access the furnace from that direction.
I never asked why there was no window in the bathroom, and the hot water heater stood there proudly next to the tub, or why there was a hatch door in the floor to get to the pipes.
The couch pushed across the front door so you couldn't get out that way never moved me. The 'building' that was attached to the house, that grew and grew and grew, full of furniture and antiques and junk, full to the rafters, no, that never appeared odd to me.
My mother never worked, because my father would not let her work. He was the MAN. He worked, and worked and worked.
I never questioned being his right hand kid, hauling stuff from all over the countryside. I didn't wonder why I was the only kid in my class to have 20 dresses all hand made by my mother.
The first time that I realized that something was different at my house, was at the Congregational Church youth fellowship. I have told you, I think, how my mother dragged me from church to church, trying to find the ONE she liked in this country so different from England. By the time I was 12, we were in the Congregational church.....not for long......but anyway, one night all the 'teens and pre teens' were treated to tuna salad sandwiches. I can still see them, cut in triangles, with bits of celery.
It was the first time in my life that I had seen, or tasted, a tuna anything.
I was smitten. And I went right home, barged in the door, and asked my mother WHY I had never had tuna sandwiches before in my whole life.
She said, "Tuna?"

You get the drift.
Still, I am grateful to them both.
From him, I got a work ethic and an energy level that serves me quite well, thank you very much.
From her, a love for fabric and fiber and working with my hands.
Not bad.

Since I am orderless for a bit, which I am strangely thankful for, I have time to weave and think.
So I am weaving my favorite things.....rugs from whatever.

I went up in the attic and brought down a tote full of random fabric. I cut the strips thin, and wind two together.
I made 6 rugs.



I like most of them. Some better than others.
And I never know what they will look like until I take them off the loom.

Which is your favorite??

That's OK, I'm gonna make more tomorrow!

I am working on the photo thing...thanks for all your suggestions.
Tonight I used Flickr.
I wanted to use Picasa, but for the life of me, I couldn't find the "tools" option.
I did buy the book for the MacPro, the "Missing Manual". So I am pretty hopeful.
Actually, when I flipped through it, the thought that came to mind was, "Are you nuts?"
Well, maybe just a little crazy.