A Couple of Updates

The canton (local group of the Society for Creative Anachronism) meeting Friday went pretty well. We put both tables in our front room for food, and all the chairs in the geodesic dome for the potluck and the meeting. It was a bit crowded, but unlike the last meeting at our house, everyone did not bring pie!

(Not that there's anything wrong with a dessert potluck -- it was just unplanned. And in the past, we have had a lot of meetings where everyone brought almost all the same thing: all chips and various dips, all chicken dishes, etc. It's actually kind of funny, when it's not weird, how on-the-same-wavelength we are.)

Saturday, as I've already gloated mentioned, we went to that estate sale. I also got outside with my hand shears and worked a little on trimming the grass close around some of my lilies and other plants. I mow most of the grass with the push mower, then I snip right up to the stems of my perennials by hand.

When my hand got too sore to keep snipping, I came in and finished knitting the edge of the Pi bag. The two-foot long piece of green yarn by the ruler is all that is left of the wool thrums after casting off.

That is to say, the latest Pi bag is done!

I can't show it to you right now, because it's in the washing machine, undergoing its first session of thermal shock, agitation, and alkalinity. Since I've been told more than once that "You can't felt in a front-loading washing machine," I'll point out again that I have a front-loader. (And anyway, how would the knitting know? It can't tell what kind of washing machine it's in.)

The keys to shrinking and felting are thermal shock (meaning sharp change from hot to cold and back again), change in pH (from alkaline, say baking soda, to acid, but only as acid as vinegar, not battery acid), and agitation. Oh, and moisture!

The big difference about felting in a front-loader is that it's harder to stop the machine and check the progress of what you're felting. (Mine unlocks, when I stop the cycle, after two minutes of impatient waiting. It's amazing how LONG two minutes are.)

Sunday (Mother's Day in the US) I was woken up at 6:11 am by our son making me toast in the kitchen, and laying a trail of presents for me to follow from the bedroom to the kitchen. I love being a mom!

This morning, on the other hand, I was woken up at 5:11 am by my husband, who said, "The power went off and on in the night, and we have no water pressure."

sleepy groan from me

This meant getting up, putting on jeans, glasses, a coat, and my boots, taking a nail file, a flashlight and my husband (for upper-body strength), walking down the driveway in the dark to the well pit, lifting the very heavy well pit cover, unplugging the pump, and cleaning out this year's first well-pit beetle out of the pump controller contact.

The dead, flat beetle was in the same contact as every single dead, flat, well-pit beetle before! Once it was cleaned out, like magic, the pump started right up. Hooray, water pressure, coffee, and flushing toilets.

And I went back to bed until time to get our son up for school.