Ordinary Time

I'm wiped out tonight and can't really say why. I'm going to go with it's the effort involved in going outside every few hours to take care of the horses. Normally this isn't a big deal, but it has been in either the negatives or single digits all day today which makes things more challenging. It takes a lot more effort and time to put on the appropriate outer wear. It takes more time and effort to fill and carry water to the barn. And then it takes more time and effort to undo all the layers that were put on in the first place. I've gotten my outerwear system to a point where I'm comfortable outside even when it is stupidly cold, so I don't dread going outside, but it's just the sheer time and effort involved. I was going to look through my seed collection today to do some planning for spring, but I forgot to bring it in on one of my forays outside and couldn't bring myself to put on even just enough to run out and get the box. So instead of any...

Sometimes when you are learning something (or even after you have learned something) not everything you try actually works out. That was certainly the story of me and my loom this week. I had mentioned that I wanted to weave some napkins. I was first going to use cotton, but remembered that I had picked up some linen that was super discounted and decided to use that instead. I didn't bother to test the fiber to see if it would make a decent warp. I was so enamored of my plan that I was sure it would work out. In my head the napkins were going to be so pretty. One thing I did do correctly was to opt to do a sample before committing to a full warp which was yards long. My sample warp was just a couple yards long and give inches wide. While it took a few hours to get it measured, threaded, and wound on, that was nothing compared to how long it would have taken for the full warp.  This afternoon I sat down at the loom to begin weaving my sample. I was excited because I was going to be ...

Normally January doesn't feel as though it flies by, but this year it certainly did. I could kind of use another week of January, which is a statement I never thought I would ever utter... or write. G. and L. are at a middle school lock-in at our church. I was a little surprised that they both wanted to go as socializing with people they don't know extremely well isn't always their thing. I hope they have a good time. We will probably have a day of grouchy children tomorrow as a result. J. and I took some grief from P. when she discovered they were going to the whole event. I am somewhat aware of this, but it seems we never let any of the older children attend a lock-in for the whole night. The grouchy children the next day was our excuse. Once again, it seems our standards have fallen significantly, at least in the eyes of our older children. It turns out that one of the litter mates of A.'s cat, Juniper, had a placement fall through and he needed a home. A. now has tw...

It seems I own this business, but based on the last two months you wouldn't know it. I just seem to have some very large hay burners in the backyard. I think it is time to begin to be a little more proactive. Before the nightmare that was December hit, I had been working with a couple of different people to create a leadership development program based on equine facilitated learning principles that I could share with corporations for training purposes. During December, I had some homework to begin writing the text for a more corporate based website that would explain what horses could offer. Well, that didn't happen. It also didn't happen in January because my mental equilibrium was still recovering. It's now nearly February, I and think I need to get that website going. To do that, I will need text to hand off to my IT guy (aka MC, my son-in-law.) Not being one to let a good blog post go to waste, I will kill two birds with one stone and begin the process here. In the ...

  This was my view from the pasture when I went out to get the hay nets this morning. Beautiful, isn't it? It snowed lightly most of the day, but the temperature was hovering around freezing, so it wasn't actually that cold. It's kind of the perfect winter day in my book. No snow day for anyone, though. J. went to work and we did school. Afterwards quite a few people headed outside to enjoy it. K. and Y. built a wall of what was going to be a snow fort. The snow was pretty heavy and by the time they had rolled two (enormous) snowballs, they realized they couldn't stack them. I'll try to remember to get a picture of it tomorrow. We are heading into our last few days of January, which means we are heading into the last few days of my completely cleared calendar. I think everyone else but me is ready to go out and do things again. I would be more than happy to continue to have lots of free time to fill. I'm good at filling my free time. But, I guess I will begin to...

One of the reasons that I didn't have much to show yesterday was that I spent most of my free time reading a book I had become engrossed in. Having spent most of last year in somewhat of a reading slump, this was a pleasant change of pace.  What was the book? The City & The City by China Miéville. On my library copy it is listed as science fiction, but that seems a stretch to me. There is also a murder mystery as part of the story, but that was not the part I found most interesting. It was the setting of the boom that I find myself thinking about long after I finished the book.  The book is set in the current time period and the rest of the world is not any different from our real one. But the specific city (cities?) where the story happens is what makes it interesting. It is a city, or cities, which occupy the same geographical space, but part of them belong to one and part of them belong to the other. It's just divided in half like post war Be Berlin was, but the borders...

I've done quite a bit of reading this week, but not a whole lot of other things. I did finish weaving the trial warp I put on my new loom. I did end up finding a yarn to use as weft that I ended up liking. Here it is. Other than take it off the loom I haven't done a thing with it. I still need to hem the ends, wash it, then trim the threads that are sticking out. I think I will use it as a table runner. I have been trying to decide what project to weave next. I want it to be somewhat familiar so I can use it to continue to get used to the loom. But one of the things I like about weaving is that the end product is useful. To that end I think I'm going to weave some napkins that will match this runner. I know I don't have anything which will remotely coordinate, so that's what I'm in the planning stages for. I also worked a little on combing some of that wool I spent the fall during. It's not going to comb itself, that's for sure! I'm about halfway thr...

Since we celebrate both Tet and Chinese New Year here, we have both the Year of the Cat and the Year of the Rabbit. The Vietnamese zodiac has two animals that don't match the Chinese zodiac and this is one of those years. We celebrate mainly by eating food. As I mentioned, Y. spent all day yesterday making homemade baozi (steamed buns) starting with homemade dough. She made a lot. She made so many that everyone ate their fill and we have over a dozen left. (I'm quite sure they won't last through the day tomorrow.) We also had a steak and broccoli stir fry that uses a black bean sauce served over long noodles (because long noodles at new years symbolizes longevity.) The Tet celebration always involves fresh fruit, so I splurged on dragon fruit. Dessert was sugary preserved fruit and candy. Well, it was wrapped like candy. There was some disappointment when we discovered that it was merely preserved plums wrapped in candy wrappers. Not really what everyone was expecting or ho...

"Funerals, in fact, are one of the most powerful examples of collective pain. They feature in a surprising finding from my [Brené Brown] research on trust. When I asked participants to identify three to five specific behaviors that their friends, family, and colleagues do that raise their level of trust with them, funerals always emerged in the top three responses. Funerals matter. Showing up to them matters. And funerals matter not just to the people grieving, but to everyone who is there. The collective pain (and sometimes joy) we experience when gathering in any way to celebrate the end of a life is perhaps one of the most powerful experiences of inextricable connection. Death, loss, and grief are the great equalizers."  -- from Braving the Wilderness by Brené Brown, pp. 132 - 133 I said good-bye to a good friend today. It hurt.

This month seems to be speeding by, doesn't it? Well, speeding except for the give the horse antibiotics twice a day and wrap the horse's leg once a day. I've never looked forward to February so much in my life. Bristol does seem to be doing okay and her leg is not looking infected, so that makes it all worth it. Tet and Chinese New Year are this Sunday, so preparations have started. The decorations have been put up.   Y. has decided that she is making homemade baozi (banh bao in Vietnam, steamed buns in English) tomorrow to add to dinner on Sunday. Helping to make these was a part of her life before us and she really wanted that to be part of her celebration. No one in the house will turn down bao. I started the crock pot tonight so the char sui pork will be ready for her in the morning. I also realized today that other than Y.'s bao, I had done nothing else to add to the holiday's dinner. So I headed off to the not-so-local Chinese market. It wasn't as busy as...

[After I wrote this post, I realized it became tetchier and tetchier. You've been warned. I also feel the need to point out that this is dealing entirely with homeschooling and is not a jibe at traditional school. I hope I don't need to say that. Homeschooling and traditional school are very different from each other and what works for one would not work well for the other. Apples and oranges and all that. Think of this little rant as an internal homeschooling issue.]  I've been homeschooling a long time, 26-1/2 years to be exact. There have been a lot of changes over those 26 years. When I first began, it had just been a few years since homeschooling had become legal in all 50 states. This was also pre-internet. Yes, it is possible to homeschool successfully without the internet or online classes or schools or curricula; an entire generation of children attest to that. Homeschooling was not a market. Nothing was aimed at us. We were only a vaguely known fringe group and th...

One of my Christmas gifts was the book, The Ponies at the Edge of the World: A story of hope and belonging in Shetland by Catherine Munro. I finished it a couple of days ago. It was as much about Shetland sheep as Shetland ponies, so it was kind of a win all the way around. What I found most interesting were the authors thoughts about the confluence of the idea of home and the purpose of animals. As I'm keenly interested in both those things, I've been chewing on it ever since. I'll share some with you and you can ponder it as well. "As I wrote my thesis, I noticed the theme of stories recurring throughout the chapters. I particularly loved these lines written by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing: Over the past few decades, many kinds of scholars have shown that allowing only human protagonists into our stories is not just ordinary human bias; it is a cultural agenda tied to dreams of progress through modernization. There are other ways of making worlds. Anthropologists have becom...

Today was our first real appointment with the new neurologist. I'm happy to report I liked him just as much today as I did in the hospital. Rarely have I had a doctor listen so well, take me so seriously, and then have some sort of plan. Usually it is one or two of these things at a time, but very rarely all three. Having a plan is awesome. While he was outlining some different scenarios and what he plans to do about them I could feel huge amounts of tension leave my body.  We have a plan to help R., people! A plan that involves medication for an actual physical issue. Words cannot even describe how that feels after seven plus years of living with a child in distress and no one having any idea how to help or even what was wrong. The plan was always to send us to another doctor who would then send us to another doctor. Here we go 'round the mulberry bush.  I mentioned that sleeping was still a bit difficult and the consistent awaking between 3 and 4 am. He asked some questions,...

There's not a whole lot to show today. This is because most of my free time has been spent working to get my new floor loom functional. All weekend I spent getting cords made and put on so that I could attach the warp to the loom. For example, See all those white cords attached to the warp beam? I measured, tied, and attached each and every one of them. There were over one hundred. It was not terribly fun, but was one of those tasks I will probably never need to do again. The front beam also needed cords, just not quite so many. After that was done it was ready to put a warp on. As you can see from the photo up there, I did get a warp on! It actually went on very easily. It is yarn that I probably will never use for a warp again because I don't like it, but it was good to use for a trial run that might not work. But it is working! Look!! Because it is working, I now have a warp that I want to figure out something that might be useful. I've now tried several difficult wefts ...

The weekend began with A. bringing home a new kitten. Meet Juniper. Is she not the cutest kitten? Olive seems to like her, too, though Juniper is no bigger than Olive's head. Then today W. and MC added a puppy to their collection of animals. Meet Mambo. MC and Mambo Magpie is very curious about the new puppy. Magpie We stopped by because we had to pick people up from youth group which meant we were over halfway there anyway... Well, wouldn't you stop by? So lots of extremely cute fluffy animals. I love other people's puppies and kittens.