Today

After much ado, I finally got my Megado electronic dobby 

 working, but not before I bought a new Windows laptop.

Apparently, my Mac laptop was "too new" and had some security measures on it, 

that would not allow my software program, Fiberworks, to operate the loom.

So I ordered one from Staples on their Black Friday online sale.

Anything to avoid going to the store on that horrific day of consumer 

madness.

With the new computer, I was able to get it up and running in no time.

This makes it all worth it though.   I do love this draft.

I thought I might need to buy something to put the laptop on, so I could see

it well, but then I had the brain storm to us this stool, with the bed risers under

the legs to get it up to the right height.

Easy fix, no $ spent.

Which turned out to be a very good thing, after my surprise today.

I went to my local auto garage, to get my oil changed in my Subaru Forester.

I thought I would be out of there in no time, and it would be no big deal.

But unfortunately, that's not how it happened.   

I needed new brakes, all around.

Groan.

Then " I'm sorry, but you need tires all around, as well, you could wait until spring, but we don't recommend it".

So I called my ex son in law, who I trust in these matters.  Told him how much tread I had left, and he said. since winter is here, and the roads often suck, I needed to do it now.

They very kindly gave me a rid home, so I didn't have to sit there all day, and then I called a neighbor to take me back to pick it up.

So after  a $15,000 summer....new furnace, roof repair, dog fence repair, I am now out $2400

more.

Why not, eh???  End the year in the way it's been going.

So I came home and sat down to weave.

Probably not wise at that moment.

I was so distracted that I totally screwed it up, and ended up

"unweaving" several inches.

Horrors.

So I took a little coffee break, and had a little talk with myself.

Yes, it did hurt my pocketbook, a lot.

But truth?   I have SO MUCH to be grateful for.

I sit here warm and comfortable with my dogs, watching it snow outside.

I have my studio that nurtures my soul every day.

I have family that loves me.

I have friends that care about me.

I have gotten through a lot worse situations than this, and I will be fine.

So once again, gratitude is the attitude today.  I am ok.  It's all ok.  

And, I have a safe, reliable  Subaru in the driveway.

Working on it

I told you I was trying to be better about blogging, so here I am, again.

Even though the show was a huge success, I am relieved that it is over.  I worked 

very hard to get everything finished for it, and then the weekend itself was long.

It was exciting to get back to the studio and the things I wanted to do.

Here is the AVL warping wheel.  After getting a demo from a fellow weaver a few weeks ago, and watching the AVL video about three times, I started putting a warp on.

Of course, I couldn't put a 'short' warp on........what is it they say?  Go big or go home?

So I put 30 yards of Pima cotton on the Megado.

It was organized, and slick, and I loved it.

Warping the usual back to front, or front to back can occasionally be chaotic, to say the least.

It can be uneventful, but you never know.  It can be a royal pain.

This. however, is LOVELY.

I am seriously considering getting sectional rakes to put on the David.

Upstairs, I am busy winding cones.  That is a learning experience, too.  Most of the time, they look pretty good, then you get one that looks like a 10 year old did it.

Yes, that would be me.

They are pretty though, aren't they???

Hand dyed banana pearl. 

I recently suggested a movie to a very close friend, on Amazon prime, for only $3.59.

When she started watching it, she texted me, and said, "Are you sure about this movie?".

I told her to stick with it.

When she had finished the movie,

She sent me a long line of HEARTS.

It's a true story, and it's lovely.

I highly recommend it.....if you watch it, let me know what you think.  I'm about ready to watch it again.

So I started weaving on the Megado.  I am having some computer issues with it, that I have not yet figured out.  Some days, it recognizes the commands, and other days, I believe it is thumbing its virtual nose at me.

But when it works.....it's amazing.

That's what keeps me going.

I do love circles.

All my friends have heard me BITCHING about walking two dogs at the same time.

One pulling ahead, because he is younger, and faster.  The other stopping behind me to smell

every single blade of grass that there is.

Today they made a liar of me.....and showed me just how pleasant they can 

make our walks, if they want to.

So the week ahead looks like a quiet one, except for pie making on Wednesday,

and turkey day on Thursday.

Otherwise, I'll be weaving and walking, and waiting for cold weather, that seems

to have vanished entirely.

Later.......

The Show

Once a year, my guild, the Hudson Mohawk Weavers Guild, has a show.  This 

year was the 46th year. 

The show lasts 3 days, and we get more successful every year.

We had 900 towels in this show.  At the end there was less than 200 left.

This photo was before the doors opened on Friday.  The real devoted shoppers

are waiting in line outside!!!  We were mobbed all day Friday, and Saturday, and

shockingly busy on Sunday too

This is the only show I do these days.   Not having my husband, or Lois, to help me, I have given up the show circuit.  It's just too hard.

I sell things on my FB page,  Crazy as a Loom Weaving, and I'm having a SALE on towels over there now.

Very soon, I will put the clothes on SALE that I have left over from the show.......there are only NINE pieces this year, so they should go quickly.

I like to clear everything out, and start over fresh for the new year.

This is my new AVL warping wheel, and probably, hopefully, my last expenditure for 

a while.

I bought it to be able to warp the Megado, and put more yardage on it at a time.

Hopefully, take off is this week!!!

I loved hearing all your responses to my rants........I have thought a lot about it, and I remembered a book I read years and years ago. 

It was one of those pivotal moments, when something, or someone, makes an impact on your thinking.

In this case, it was a book called "The Control Theory, by Dr William Glasser.

I wanted to read it again, but when I looked it up on Amazon, it was $30 for the paperback.  But you can buy it used for $6, and I did.

 It helped me once, in a big way, so I think it will help me with dealing with our new reality, and the fear of the future that will 

bring.

But once more, I am taken back to my Al Anon  days.

And that quote.......that I have come back to time and time again.

Acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing or situation—some fact of my life—unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment. Nothing, absolutely nothing, happens in God’s world by mistake.

So accepting is what I'm working on.......because inside I feel that I have not accepted it because it is so despicable to me.

And I can't move on, until I  do.

 I think it's the only way I can find a way to maintain my serenity, and live my life without letting it make me unhappy.

It ain't easy.

And again.

I am trying to be calm, after seeing the headline that Matt Gaetz is going to be the new 

Attorney General.

This is hard.

So hard.

Horrible people with their own agendas, put in positions of power.

What are we doing America?????

OK, I will try to be good.

Another "egg towel" warp on the loom.   

Twenty new egg towels coming up.

My friend made me a blue jean rug, for next to my bed.  I really love it.

Naya loves to lay on my bed and look out the window.

She is a princess, isn't she???

When I first bought this house 20 years ago, I took note of this beautiful door in the basement.  It separated the old part of the house, 1790, from the newer part, 1820.  But then the duct work for the furnace was put through the door way, since the alternative was to break out a stone wall.....

And suddenly the door had no purpose.

I loved it, and planned that one day I would get it out of the cellar.

Well, that day came.

Here it is coming out into the sunshine.

The door is 54" wide, and 75" tall.

I couldn't sell it.  It belongs here.

So..............

It has a brand new life inside my back door, where everyone comes

into the house.

A place for coats, and shoes, and everything else that would normally get thrown in the corner.

I just love it.

Here's what it looks like in the dining room.  It may not be for everyone, and it may not fit

into everyone's house, 

but it's perfect in this old house.

While trying to concentrate on this post, I heard the local news say that the House and the Senate are now in total control of the Republicans.....so the Congress and the White House are in cahoots........nothing to stop them, nothing at all.

I fear this is gong to be a very painful lesson for this country.

I wish I didn't have to think about it at all.

I feel that the world has gone mad all around me.  Every day I have to keep looking for 

sanity, and serenity.  I wonder if this feeling of panic will ever subside.   

What's happening.

I don't like to post political stuff, and in fact I rarely do.

But I would be remiss if I didn't at least tell you that I am grieving what I see as

a huge loss of character for this United States of America.  

We have chosen a misogynistic, racist, crude, really evil man, when we could have

chosen a sane, reasonable woman.

But, ah, there's the rub. 

A woman.

And a black woman at that.

I knew from the moment she announced that she was running, that she was doomed.

My friends tried to reassure me.......she had a good chance.

But no, she never had a chance, not even the slightest little bit of one.

This is America.  Women are still second class citizens, fighting for rights that men

take for granted.

So this is it, we have a president who mimics giving oral sex to a microphone, who openly

talks about shooting a woman in the face, who can now "pardon" himself in all the criminal activity he has been involved in.

And millions of people are waiting with high hopes for all the "good" that he is going to 

bring into their lives.

I can't laugh.  It's far too sad, and it's also very, very scary.

So that's enough of a rant.  Whether you agree or not, we can choose to disagree.

I don't try to convince anyone of anything.  

As Mark Twain said, " A man who carries a cat by the tail, learns something that he can learn in no other way."

I am staying in my own lane, so to speak.   Plenty to do, and I love doing it.  I have looms, and lots of other "toys" in my studio.

I have. a LOT of undyed yarn, and it needs to get a life, with me, or with someone else, and that means it needs to be dyed.

So first, I wind it into skeins.

Then I dye the skeins.

Then I wind the skeins back on to cones!!!

It's a bit tedious, but the results are very satisfactory.

I have over 100 cones, so this should keep me kind of busy all winter.

To be honest,  I want to hide in my little corner of the world.  I am going to

be "news free" as much as I can be.  No more evening news, no more WAMC

Round Table every morning, only a skim of the top headlines of my daily morning 

digital NY Times, and very quickly onto the puzzles.

I will try not to be entirely ignorant of what's going on, but I am NOT 

going to let it rent space in my head.

I did that for years with an alcoholic ex husband, I am surely not going to do 

it with this demented person.

I have started walking the dogs alone, because there is no one right now that 

can manage it.  I understand that, but they do not.

So every day, we go to our favorite dirt road just 3 miles from home, and we 

sniff everything that has roamed around there the night before.

Well, they sniff.

I don't sniff, but I am on the lookout for any sign of anything crossing the road.

A rabbit, a deer, a squirrel, anything that would have them charging off together and putting me in the ditch.

If I see it first, I can be ready.

Years ago I read a book that I have never forgotten.  It took place in the northeast, in the 

Revolutionary War.  Times were hard, and the future looked bleak.

The name of the book was "The Day Must Dawn"

No matter how horrible the future appeared, they knew that the sun

would come up the next day.

We can only hope that remains true for us.

Lois

Is Lois unhappy? Does she know??  

Those are very good questions, and ones that I have asked myself a hundred times.

For a long time, she was upset, because as she said to me several times,  "I think I'm losing my mind".  I first noticed that something was wrong, when she couldn't thread the loom without massive mistakes.  Then she couldn't treadle anything but two treadles, because she lost her place every few seconds.  That was so totally unlike her.

Then last year, she began to be very erratic in her driving, and she began scaring me.......she didn't at all take it seriously that she was losing her ability to drive.  In fact, she laughed about it.

She also would take off after dark, to "go get ice cream, or go to the grocery store", and come back with nothing.  Her partner tried to intervene, but at that point she was oppositional to everything anyone tried to tell her.

Then she began telling me that she needed to 'be somewhere else, live somewhere else'......

I believe that she knew by then that she needed supervision, that she needed to be "managed".

That's when her sister and I got her into assisted living.  Lois was all for it, but after two nights there she walked out (in February) with no coat and ended up quite a long ways away at a liquor store that was just closing at 11:30 at night. 

She didn't know why she was there, and was so confused that the owner called the sheriff, who took her to the ER.....luckily she had the. Alzheimer's bracelet on, and they called her sister.

The next morning we took her back, and she went to Memory Care in another part of the facility that day.

It's a closed unit, and she actually only grumbled a little about it.

Her sister takes her out several times a week for a couple hours at a time.  She brings her here to visit, and that is so much nicer than visiting her there.

She knows me, I think, by sight, but already I doubt that she knows my name all the time.  Another of our friends, that she saw several times a week, is a stranger to her, and she does not know who she is.

Her disease has progressed rapidly over the last year.  

She shuffles now.  She can't read, but will hold a book like she is reading.  I think it's a comfort to her, as she was a serial reader all her life.

She still has her phone, and sometimes she can figure it out, and most times it is by chance.  She calls someone only because she clicks on their name in her contacts.  She will call me and then ask who I am, when I tell her she says, "oh no, I didn't want to call you, I wanted  my sister"........I do call her, and the conversation is mostly me, guessing what it is she is trying to tell me.  Occasionally, she gets something out that makes sense, but it is rare these days.

She gave me this card, the first Christmas she was here.  It speaks volumes about who she was.

This is a photo of me on the left, my friend Alice in the middle, and

Lois on the right, having lunch, when she first came to the studio.

And here she is waiting for that trailer truck full of sock seconds and loopers to back into my driveway so we could unload them into the barn.

I am so grateful for the 13 years we had.  She was a fantastic apprentice, and a huge help, and a great friend.  

There is no one on the planet with a bigger heart, which makes her present situation that much harder to wrap my brain around.

It's a cruel, cruel way to end a life.

The link below is to a blog post I wrote years ago, about Lois "deciding" that she wanted to be my apprentice.

Wow, do I miss her.

Lois comes to CAAL.

What? Back so soon?

I told you I was going to try harder!!!

A couple of months ago, I started two avocado plants, thinking that I would be lucky if they grew.  It took weeks and weeks, and I was about ready to give up.   When I was beginning to lose faith, I decided to google "how to start avocado plants", and found out that I had the pit upside down in the water.

So I turned them over, and waited again.

 I was surprised when they both started to root!!  So I gave one away, and kept one.   

I probably won't live long enough to see an avocado from it, but it's fun anyway.

I really didn't need another plant.  I have to move them around when winter comes.  My huge elephant plant has to be moved from its favorite window, because it is right next to the gas stove in the living room.   When it's very cold, I use the stove in the evenings, and sometimes over morning tea, and the plant just doesn't like the heat.

Other plants, upstairs, have to come downstairs for the winter, as there is no heat upstairs in this 230 year old house.   

So no, I did not need another plant.

That's why I gave this Mandeville to one of my daughters, instead of 

trying to winter it in my house.

The garden is gone by, everything needs to be trimmed up and put to bed for the winter.

But for some reason, these morning glories are not ready to give it up.

I don't think I've ever seen them with leaves this big.

One of you asked about Lois.   It's a difficult subject, and one that 

I really struggle with.

She went to assisted living back in January, lasted there only a 

few days, and moved to memory care where she has been since.

Her sister takes her out a few times a week, and often 

brings her over to see me and the dogs, who love her dearly.

She knows me, but if I asked her what my name was, I think she might struggle with that on some days.   A dear friend of both of us, is a stranger to her now.  She simply does not remember who she is.

It's painful to see her, as awful as that sounds, because she looks like

Lois, and she sounds like Lois, but the Lois that I spent every day for 13 years with is not there.

If anything makes you grateful for whatever life you have, no matter how difficult, it should be dementia/Alzheimers.

She is safe where she is, but in truth, her life is over, while she still breathes.

I hate every bit of it.  

We had a great run, Lois and I, weaving here at Crazy as a Loom.

I am grateful for it all.

Time to plant the garlic this week, finish whatever needs doing outside, and wrap up the yard for winter.

A few weeks ago, I picked up all these black walnuts over by the 

labyrinth.   I have a black walnut tree that is very productive, and 

probably what keeps all the squirrels so fat and healthy.

I have never tried to open one, but I did, and now I know 

why they are used as a natural dye.  My finger nails were a lovely

shade of black.  This photo is AFTER I scrubbed them and even used bleach on them.   

Live and learn.  

The squirrels are welcome to them.

I had an old bench that has been out in the yard for years...it's actually a glider.   I loved it, but it became covered with lichen, and looked

like it was ready to call it a day.

But I called this local guy who restores antiques, and he took it 

home with him, took all the bolts out of it, removed all the mahogany

slats, put new bolts in it, and oiled all the wood, and put it all back

together.   It reall turned out to be a beautiful bench after all.

Sitting on it, under the linden tree, (also called a basswood tree)

here's my view of the house.

Below is a screen shot of the rug in my living room.  It was

pretty, but thin, and every time Willie came in the kitchen door, 

he raced through the kitchen and into the living room,

and the rug reacted in a way that left ripples in it.

So every day, I pulled and pulled on it to flatten it out,

and the rug refused to stay flat.

So the other night, my daughter and I took a trip to Ollie's, 

a store that definitely has everything.  To be honest, it's a bit

scary.

But I found a rug, actually, my daughter picked it out, I was not at all

sure.

But for $149,  I thought it was an improvement.  It's much thicker, 

and it certainly does POP.

The dogs loved it, they rolled around on it, and 

gave their approval.

What do you think???