Hi Ho, Hi Ho

No pictures today, although this weekend I should finish the first taquetea towel. I'm not super happy with it, but at least I'm making progress. (I'll share a picture here when I've cut off and washed that first towel.)

But that's not really the news I'm sharing in this post, as you can probably tell from the title.

In my past life, I was a programmer for many years. Ever since the last layoff and the dot com bust, I've been sort of adrift. I've had occasional contracts and have done some freelance web work, but nothing big and nothing continuous. A few years ago, I got a dream job - working full-time from home. Loved the work, too, but unfortunately, the client stopped paying me. Took them to court for the money they owed me for the final six weeks of work. Won the settlement, although it is unlikely I will ever see a penny.

A year and a half ago, I was on the short list for what I considered to be my dream job. Went through several rounds of interviews, and really thought I had it, only to learn otherwise. That was a very sad day.

So recently, I had a great interview - good people, good work (and java, my preferred programming language.) I tried to prepare myself equally for acceptance or rejection. After all, the benefit of my current lifestyle is an abundance of TIME, and the joy of living without the restrictions of clocks or calendars. And I truly do LOVE that aspect of my life. However, it is balanced by a serious lack of money. Plus, I end up not letting myself do "fun stuff" during the day (like weaving or reading) because I "should" be working or looking for work or something serious like that.

So although I do seriously envy friends who are my age or younger and have been able to retire, that's not my story. Folks with pensions can draw on them as soon as they retire, and so be unemployed with income. Those of us with IRAs or 401Ks can retire, but with no income until 65 without serious penalties. I'm so deeply grateful for this opportunity to jump back into the working world and be gainfully employed again. I'm more than a little amazed.

And here's my secret hope - maybe now that I will be "pulling my weight", so to speak, I'll actually get more spinning and weaving and writing and reading done, because now my non-work time will be all mine, and not hampered by amorphous guilt.

So I'll give a little whistle, take a deep breath, and walk boldly into this next phase of life.

Flower Fields

Today is my youngest son's 19th birthday - Happy Birthday, Sam!

He, of course, is spending the day with his friends, so Eldy and I drove up to Carlsbad to see the famous flower fields up there. There are acres and acres of beautiful ranunculus blooms - every color you can imagine, and the rows seem to go forever. It's one of the spectacular sites to see in springtime in San Diego. (How's that for abundant alliteration?)

Here's a view looking back over the fields towards the ocean. You can just barely see the windmill in between.

This is looking down the "orange" rows - they seem to go on forever.
And here's the red, yellow and pink.
Here's one of me - enjoying the sunshine by the mauve and white rows:
And here's my husband Eldy, who was gracious enough to go with me, though didn't much want to linger. :-)

Amazing what all that color does for your soul!

They're Back!!!

Yes, the hummingbirds are back, BIG TIME!

A week ago, as I walked out to my car, one humbuzzed me - it orbited my head a few times, then hovered in front of me for a bit. I love hummingbirds - did you know they are considered a symbol of joy! That seems quite appropriate to me.

Well, a few days ago, as Eldy was getting ready to leave for work, he called me to come to the front door, then walked out. Near the end of our sidewalk, in a canopy of vines (cape honeysuckle), there was a tiny hummingbird nest, with Momma sitting there, so very still!

Sorry the focus isn't very good - I tried to get as close as I could, and used the macro focus setting. Wish I had a newer or better camera, but I'll keep experimenting till I can get some good pictures. I'm hoping to set up a mirror so we can get a shot of the eggs next time Mama is out feeding. (Last year, we got a whole sequence of pictures of baby hummingbirds, from when they were tiny, til when they flew, but I never got a shot of the 2 little eggs.)

On a different note, but still speaking of Joy - you may know my beloved standard poodle is named Joy. Well, she's 14 now, and starting to show her age. Her back left leg gives her trouble and she stumbles from time to time. Last Monday, I was playing piano and practicing my singing, and heard her nails clicking on the pergo flooring in the family room, fast and loud. I figured she had gotten stuck or tangled in something and ran in there to help her. What I found was terrifying - she was having a seizure. It lasted a couple of minutes, and I comforted her and got her cleaned up. She walked around restlessly for about 20 minutes - couldn't get her to sit or lie down - she would come over and lean against me for a few seconds for petting, then would wander away. By the time that was over, she was her normal, cheerful happy self, as if nothing had happened. Interestingly, she wasn't stumbling as much, either.

Since then, I've discovered it's not a rare thing for an aging dog to have a seizure. When it happened, I was so frightened and worried that she was dying. I don't know how you make peace with this difficult phase of a pet relationship, so I just keep an eye on her, and cherish every day.

Cotton Pickin Spinning

Back in the 90's, Joan Ruane came to San Diego to teach cotton and flax spinning. She's a great teacher and a wonderful woman. (My youngest son was in 2nd grade at the time, and adored Joan. He thought she was actually another grandmother that we had just forgotten to tell him about.) Hopefully, Joan will send me a copy of the picture I took with her camera of her and Sam,who is now almost 19 years old and 6'6". :-)


The guild brought Joan back to San Diego in February for a program on cotton - an afternoon workshop on spinning cotton with a tahkli spindle, and then a one day workshop on preparing cotton and spinning it on a wheel. I didn't sign up for the full day workshop, since I had taken that when she was here before, but I really enjoy her and did take the tahkli workshop as a refresher. I had a marvelous time, and even bought one of her spindles. I already had a tahkli at home, but hers are so incredibly well balanced that I couldn't resist adding one to my collection.
The picture above shows some of the other participants in the class, and that's Joan standing (black top and white scarf) helping someone.

This picture shows what I've spun so far (natural green organic cotton), and next to the spindle is my little support gizmo. For those of us with unlevel laps, these are handy. You sit with it between your legs, which gives you a support bowl for the spindle that won't fall off your lap.


The timing was auspicious, too. I ended up coming down with another deep chest cold, darned it all. Not good, but... I did get some nice spinning time in.

In the meantime, I had a grocery sack of cotton that was homegrown by my friend Jan Frazee. Another activity while I watched the Olympics and coughed was picking seeds out of the cotton. In my hand is the cotton from a boll, you can see a seed exposed that I'm about to pick out. To the left is a nice pile of fluff and above is a little pile of seeds. This is definitely the slow way to do the task, but does work well as a tv watching activity.


In other news, I'm finally ready to start weaving again. The loom has been warped for a while, but I needed a few things in place and finally got myself to start moving on it. I found the brackets I used to hang weights off the back for live weight tension and got it all set up. Found another shuttle to use for a lighter weft for hems, and most importantly of all, reviewed my notes so I could refresh my mind on what I was planning to do, oh so long ago. Better late than never, eh?!

Waterworld

We've had drought conditions for so long, and water restrictions that got tighter and tighter, so this abundance of water has been astonishing!

Here's what our backyard looked like yesterday.

This is looking through the French doors next to my desk. Thankfully - we didn't have any trees fall. (Thought the green belt that runs by our house on the other side of the wall is littered with branches, as is the eucalyptus aroma.) No major leaks, either, although the rug under my desk was damp near the door, so some moisture blew in. We'll have to fix that. Much of the water has finally drained away, though we do still have a standing pool. It's probably time to have roots cleared out of the drain pipes, I suppose.

Sandra visiting SDCWG

Here's a photo of Sandra before her presentation to San Diego Creative Weavers Guild.

Lynn is on her left and Taryl is on her right. The table is covered with Sandra's scarves - from her wood series and water series and fire series. They are just exquisite and it was amazing how the patterns seemed to change depending on light and viewing angle and proximity.

Sandra's topic was The Magic of Interleaved Threadings and it was truly fascinating! You can check out her blog at http://sandrarude.blogspot.com/ or her web site at http://www.3springshandworks.com/Textiles.htm to see more of her beautiful work.

Challenging Assumptions and Limitations

I had hoped to post next about the delight of having Sandra Rude visit San Diego and give our guild a marvelous program called The Magic of Interleaved Threadings. It was absolutely fascinating, and augmented with a table full of gorgeous scarves. She topped it off with handouts including colored images of drafts! I was especially taken with her description of the inspiration for some of her work - a teacher had told her to find an element of nature that inspired her, and find a way to weave it. Now, this tickled me in particular because the very first weaving class I took, when it was time to plan our first project, I was asked by the teacher what I wanted to weave. "I want to weave water!" I replied. She gave me a funny look and suggested I think about it a while longer and let her know when I had picked my yarns and draft. :-)

The bad news is that apparently the batteries for my camera have reached the limits of their age, and they don't recharge properly anymore. So.... I wasn't able to get any pictures. Sandra let me take a picture with her camera, which she is going to email to me. With her permission, I'll post that here when I get it.

In the meantime, I want to talk about all this new year's stuff. I'm not making resolutions this year - not even the "in action" kind that I made last year (which apparently didn't take.) It's no secret that I've been stalled again, and for quite a while. Of course, not weaving doesn't mean I'm not doing a lot of other things, but it still bothers me greatly that I'm not getting any weaving done.

So... I've been thinking about my situation, and something occurred to me. I have some built-in limitations that I have not challenged in the past. Perhaps I could win some newly inspired activity just by challenging those unquestioned assumptions about my own limitations. Here are the two main ones that come to mind.

• I am a person who does not enjoy wet-messy processes.

Okay, in the past, this has been true. I'm not much for painting, or for dyeing, or for cooking, for that matter. These are what I categorize as "wet-messy processes", and so I've tended to avoid them - justifying it by saying to myself that it is just the way I am. But why is that? And why can't that change? I don't know if I'll do anything about this, but I've put myself on notice that there may be some wet-messy adventures ahead of me!

• I need large blocks of time to do anything creative - no 15 minutes here and 15 minutes there for me!

I have friends who will do all kinds of things in tiny bits of available time. I even have one friend who keeps her knitting handy and knits at red lights and in traffic jams! Me - I've always thought in the past that it was too hard to switch gears to do bits of things - that I need at least an hour of available time before I'll jump into something. But is that really true? And doesn't it reflect more a lack of preparation rather than a proclivity? What if I were to have some projects (a variety of them, because ironically, I *am* a magpie) already setup, with everything already at hand to begin work, maybe even with a post-it note telling me the exact next step to take. That would avoid the mental context switch that seems so cumbersome that I avoid having to make it.

I'm not promising anything, but I wonder what could happen if I became a person who can change focus at will and is oblivious to drippy messes? It's actually sounding rather fun and intriguing to discover the answer to that question!

And on a good note - at the Unity Center I attend, we start every year with a White Stone meditation. In ancient times, prisoners were given a white stone with their "new name", signifying that they had paid their dues and were now free to begin a new life. During the meditation, we're guided to find our own personal white stone word for the coming year - a quality, an aspect - something we want to manifest more in our lives. Each year, I go to that service with an idea already in mind for what I think my white stone word will be. This year, I thought it was going to be "acceptance" (a positive way to say non-judgment.) But, nope, something else came through in the meditation, and my white stone word for 2010 is HeartSong. And I love it. So although I'm making no specific resolutions - my goal for this year is to find and follow what makes my heart sing. I like that.