Ordinary Time

I am most definitely not watching the State of the Union address. It would not be healthy for me in any way. I'll write this and move on to knitting and reading a book.  I'm thinking there may be others of you who also cannot bear to watch, so I thought it would be interesting to have a discussion. Or I'll just blather on and you can all read silently. I'm good with either. The topic for the evening is:  What weird coping strategies do you have when dealing with existential threat? This was a result of a text conversation between a couple of good friends and myself.  Here's my answer, but probably nothing here will be surprising if you've been reading for any length of time. I have three main activities. 1. Stock the pantry. I admit to engaging in mild food hoarding when stressed. This is usually all about long storage staples, which is why bringing home fifty pounds each of wheat berries and oats gave me such satisfaction. If it were summer, I would also probab...

I'm now to the most time consuming part of weaving: the threading. Every piece of yarn on a floor loom needs to be threaded through an individual heddle. (Heddles are on the shafts and they determine when a piece of yarn is raised or lowered.) The blanket I'm weaving for B. and HC's wedding gift has something like 960 ends (or individual pieces of yarn) and is forty inches wide. This is not something I'll be able to finish in a couple of afternoons. It's actually already been a couple of afternoons and I'm four inches shy of the halfway mark.  Here is what the 16 inches that are threaded look like.  And here is what is left to do.  You can see all the yarn that is tied off behind the heddles. Pretty much all that empty space will be filled by the time I'm finished with the threading. It's always a relief to be able to start actually weaving, but because this piece is so wide, I'm anticipating the weaving portion having it's own challenges. This w...

There are lots of little odds and ends I want to share, so I guess it's time for a (not so) weekly update.  Why can't horses need vets during the day on a weekday? Is it really too much to ask? Clearly it is. While I like my vets, I've seen just a little too much of them recently. Tonight at dinner time, it was Buddy I was calling the off-hours emergency number about. He was acting odd and looked uncomfortable. After our bout of impaction colic in January, I decided it wasn't worth waiting for the morning. I was glad I did because this is impaction colic number two for the year. Because we caught it early, I'm hoping that he won't require anymore mineral oil treatments. I may never get ahead on my vet bill.  I am finishing the last Sheep and Fiber class on Tuesday. These have been really well received. We visit the sheep and learn a bit about them, and then we have a whirlwind fiber tour and I teach everyone how to spin on a spindle. If I get a group of three, I...

I haven't written much about the conference I attended last week, but I found something in my notes that I wanted to share with you. The keynote speaker for the conference was Dr. Steve Peters , a neuroscientist who specializes in both humans and horses. He is a very good speaker and being able to discuss both human and horse brains covers some of my favorite topics.  The quote I wrote down was this: [Felt safety and connection] create gluco-corticoid receptors [in the brain] which neutralize gluco-corticoids [also known as cortisol].  So maybe it's not a word for word quote based on the number of brackets I needed to use, but the meaning is the same. While Dr. Peters didn't use the words 'felt safety and connection,' he did use terminology to mean the same thing. A person... or horse... needs to experience safety as well as feeling close to others. That would be other people for people and other horses for horses.  What happens is there are receptors in out brains ...

Well, I don't know about you, but after sitting through today's news, I have very little bandwidth left. I'm very much over the living-in-a-dumpster-fire feeling, but I don't see it getting better any time soon. So instead of taxing you further with more words, I'll show you the picture I took as I headed out to the barn yesterday evening.  I'm going to go do some knitting and then read a book. I suggest that each of you pause and do something to fulfill and soothe you. This is a marathon and not a sprint; we all need to conserve our energy and preserve our mental health in order to go the distance.  And just in case there was any question at all about my views:

Last week I finished reading, Life in Three Dimensions: How Curiosity, Exploration, and Experience Make a Fuller, Better Life by Shigehiro Oishi. It had many interesting parts in it, though it did continue to be in essence a list of various psychological studies. I had mentioned this when I introduced the book previously, but since the studies moved into ones I hadn't heard of, that was okay. (There are some psychological studies that I will be thrilled if I never have to read another synopsis of ever again.) In fact, some of them were so interesting, I marked them as something I might want to share with you, my readers. Then I realized that maybe a full week's worth of posts dealing with studies found in this book isn't really what people want to read, so I have chosen just one of them. This particular excerpt made the cut because it also touches on another favorite topic of mine which is reading good books out loud to your children.  I'll dive in. "While at the U...