Ordinary Time

I'll dive right in. It is finally starting to actually feel like autumn and the leaves are turning. In one of G.'s classes recently, they had to take a survey on their technology usage growing up. I'm more than a little proud that G. scored as an unusual combination of 90's child and Internet child.  The path that J. built last weekend used up nearly all the bricks that we had. We still have need of more pavers, though. That's why I jumped on a freecycle offering of a significant amount of them. We collected them today; it took a couple of trips. We had a fence builder out to give an estimate on the additional fencing we need. I'm a little nervous about how much it's going to be. Ducks are funny. They like to stay out late floating in the pond, long after the chickens put themselves to bed. The trouble is that once it's dark, they can't find the pen door and we need to go out and shine a flashlight on it so they can go to bed. Tonight, while J. and I...

One of the things I absolutely love about living here that wasn't a part of life in the Big Ugly House is being aware of the migrating birds. Last week I paused my barn cleaning to stand for a good ten minutes just watching the absolute river of dark eyed junkos fly overhead. Even when I stopped watching to go back to work, there were still hundreds of birds flying overhead. It's an amazing sight and I might have waved goodbye to them.  Then yesterday, the starlings passed through. Our property seems to be a brief stopping point for them as twice a year we are inundated. Most stay in the trees, with a lot of constant shifting from place to place. Others, though definitely a minority, land on the grass. Pretty much all the grass, including the pastures, has starlings on it. It is nearly impossible to take a picture that shows the full scope. But what is even more remarkable is the noise. They are very noisy birds, especially in large numbers. Turn the sound up on the video to he...

Since I am currently binge reading Live Laugh Love: the secret history of white Christian women and the world they made by Kristin Kobes Du Mez, you don't get much tonight. (Ms. Du Mez also wrote Jesus and John Wayne.) I may write about the book after I've had time to process it, but I don't know if I will yet. I first have to deal with some personal anger over feeling a bit of a victim of a bait-and-switch first. To clarify, that would be anger at people I thought were better than they were and not at the book. If you've read it, I'd love your thoughts.  Here's what you do get. First, the ever awe-inspiring photo of canning jars out of the canner. That would be six quarts of beef stock that I pressure canned today. We had beef and barley soup that I made with some beef bones over the weekend. This also meant that I made quite a bit of stock. Today was the day where I had enough time to babysit the canner. Pressure canning isn't difficult, but it is a bit ti...

I don't really have anything to show you today. I'll start weaving the red towels tomorrow, I turned up the hems of the green towels so I can start hemming, and I need to put a third warp for a wool scarf on my rigid heddle loom. It's all holiday market making all the time here. It's also not terribly interesting blog content.  So you get a brief story instead. I stopped at Michael's today to pick up a couple of things I needed. The pins were easy. I also wanted some more wool yarn because of like to have quite a few wool scarves to sell. I looked and looked and finally found three (out of two aisles of yarn) that was 100% wool. I didn't think I'd have a huge selection, but I thought I'd have more options than white, brown, and grey. Everything else has acrylic in it. There was actually so much plastic yarn that I worried some small county's petroleum reserves must have been stolen by cheap yarn manufacturers.  And it wasn't even that cheap. I do...

There are some things about the property that we talk about improving, but time or money (or both) make it so our plans are difficult to carry out. We had a free day today (well aside from our chauffeuring duties) and the weather was beautiful, so J. decided to lay a brick path where we had long planned on putting one.  It runs alongside the chicken coop in an area that has been pretty much an ignored wasteland. Well, except for the hydrangeas we planted in it a few years ago thinking they would line the brick path we imagined and just ended up looking as though someone had dropped them at random. The path will help the hydrangeas make sense. We also had the bricks already. We picked them up for free from someone right after we moved and have been living in a pile by the parking area ever since. Now that pile is nearly gone as well. J. only needed a few supplies, making it a fairly low cost endeavor.  Here's the nearly final project. (J. still needs to figure what he's going t...

Mucking stalls everyday provides a lot of time to think. Well, it provides a lot of time to think when I'm not listening to a podcast. Sometimes I just need to have some quiet; as if my brain is full and it needs some time to process. All of this is the prelude for what I'm going to write about. I would really like someone to do a study on women's perception of body image correlates to the shift away from custom made clothing to ready-to-wear. I have a hypothesis that perception of body image becomes increasingly negative as less and less clothing is custom made from individual measurements. This is all due to my own experiences learning to draft patterns from scratch. Before industrialization, all clothing was created with a specific person in mind. Either these clothes were made in the home, or tailers and dressmakers were hired to create a wardrobe. Some dressmakers would live with a family for a period of time, taking measurements, doing fittings, and creating clothes a...

Recently, I think of things I could write about pop into my head throughout the day, Then, when I sit down to write after dinner... Nothing. I can think about the laundry I've done, the bills I've paid, the dishes I've washed, but none of those things are terribly interesting and everyone does them. I'm pretty sure no one really wants to read about those things, either. I'm beginning to wonder if I need to start keeping a running list of possible blog topics. Today I do have something to write about because we did something a typical. It was H. and Y.'s annual neurology appointment. It still feels so fantastic to be back home within an hour of the appointment start time. Today that was even with a blood draw added in. This is so much better than when we were driving an hour and a half one way and had to stop for lunch on our way home.  The appointment was quick and easy and we don't need to go back for a year. After needing to go every three to six months th...

Here is one of the more fascinating photos you are going to see on the blog.  Clearly you should read that previous sentence with a sarcastic tone because this looks like just a piece of fabric. Which it is, sort of. It's also my latest addition to my personal sample book that I'm slowly constructing.  I've learned that when you draft your own patterns one of the most challenging aspects is that there are no construction directions. It's great to say I want to put side seam pockets into something, but what would those pattern pieces look like and how do you put them together? This is where a sample book comes in. It contains directions and samples for various parts of garment construction, such as fly front zippers or ratios for Father's or side seam pockets.  I'm very pleased with how it came out and I am pretty sure that I can replicate it in an actual garment. But it also took me a ridiculous amount of time to figure the whole thing out and then actually doin...

J. took four children camping this weekend (H., R., L., and G.). Y. stayed home to work and I stayed home to see clients, take care of animals, and drive Y. The camping group met B. and HC at Apple Canyon State Park in NW Illinois. They had a great time, though Friday night, with its freeze advisory, was a bit chilly. Here are some photos various people took. 

I've just finished reading, With Her Own Hands: Women Weaving Their Stories by Nicole Nehrig. I highly recommend it. It takes you on a journey around the world and through time looking at the relationship between textiles and the woman who make them. I found it fascinating.  Some of the book addresses the idea that the textile crafts and hobbies of women are not seen as 'real', whether that is 'real' work, 'real' art, or of 'real' value. I realized as I read that my negative reaction to the words 'craft' and 'hobby' stems from this tacit second class dismissal that comes along with these terms. "... beyond taking public actions, these feminists endeavored to shift the mindset about what textile work means for women as an expression of our value and influence. Writer and maker Betsy Greer, ... , says, 'It's about making your own creativity a force to be reckoned with. The moment you start thinking about your creative produ...

Our fourth apple tree on the far side of the pasture seems to ripen later than the others. There still seemed to be some apples on it, so J. asked H. and R. to go pick what they could. This explains why my kitchen island suddenly looked like this.  They were taking up a lot of space and I couldn't quite bring myself to ignite them and eventually feed them to the chickens, so it seemed as though I was going to canning applesauce after all. Today I didn't need to drive anyone anywhere and I had no clients during the day. If applesauce was going to happen today was the day. H. pitched in to help and by dinner  I had canned 9 quarts of applesauce with another 2/3 quart in the refrigerator. Don't you think it sounds more impressive to say 2 - 1/2 gallons, though? Why is that? I would make an announcement that I am really and truly done with apples, but I think there are still more on that tree. 

Today is H.'s 24th birthday if you can believe it. She chose a dumpling stir fry for dinner and chocolate mayonnaise cake for dessert.  Grammy sent her a pink sweater and a graphic novel from one of her favorite series.  I am having a little difficulty with the idea of H. being 24 if I'm honest. 

I am continuing to enjoy the podcast, The Rest is History, very, very much. I have finished the first half of the French Revolution and have decided that I am just going to listen to whatever episode comes next because it all ends up being interesting. J. has started listening to it as well, but he has been pretty focused on Elizabethan history.  I thought I'd offer a little history trivia quiz here based on some of my current listening. Answers will be at the end.  1. The number of times Louis XVI had left Versailles in his entire life before being captured by the revolutionaries and taken to Paris.    A. Too many to count, he was always heading to Paris.    B. 1, and only to be crowned king.    C. 6, when he toured other countries and met with foreign rulers.  2. When Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette decided to try to escape Paris and flee to safety, the first step in their plan was:    A. Send money on ahead to help ease their esca...

I am nearly halfway through weaving the warp on my floor loom, so that's positive. It takes me just about an hour to weave one guest towel assuming I don't have to stop and wind more bobbins. I also have all the yarn I need to finish this warp and to do a second red one. I don't really have a picture to show you because fabric on a loom all looks pretty much the same. You'll have to wait until I take the fabric off to start hemming the guest towels.  I did finish another wool scarf over this past week. Here it is My goal is to weave at least four, but I'd really like to try to get six made. The nice thing about the woolen scarves is they require very little work to be completely finished after they come off the loom. I can't say the thing about the guest towels. 

K. has been spending some time at W.'s and MC's house. Since they have a lot of fish, K. has been taking a lot of fish pictures. I think he has taken some really good pictures. Want to see?

An advertising pitch to gain a milk account goes awry. "'It is a waste,' said Daniel in a quantifiable shout, wrenching his arm away from Alan. 'Ours is the most wasteful culture to ever foul the planet! And advertising's to blame! ...'" - Alan Opts Out by Courtney Maum, p. 76 Alan, an advertising executive, having lost the account then proceeds to lose his mind a little bit, moving into the playhouse in the backyard, giving up purchasing anything, choosing only to walk, etc. His family thinks he's mad, all the while his wife is desperately trying to join the very exclusive women's club in their neighborhood and his children are desperately trying to not fit in with that neighborhood's culture.  This is very much over the top satire, but not to the point you despise the main characters. The author gives them too much humanity for that to happen. But it is a cautionary tale about consumerism, worrying about what other people think, and missing w...

Cue music: dum-dum-dumdum... Your mission should you choose to accept it (as if we had a choice): Figure out a driving schedule which delivers three teens to and from work while accommodating parents' work, appointments, and other schedules. There is also a teen's volunteer commitment and H.'s Friday morning activity. Places of work and volunteering are not close to each other, varying from 8 minutes from home to 30 minutes from home.  The second half of dinner was spent figuring out who was going to take whom to work when. There were so many moving parts we needed to keep notes. (This is the quickly scrawled version and the author did not know I was going to post it on the blog.) It will get rewritten so we can understand it because no one can keep all this in their head.  Weekends are not currently terribly relaxing.  And one other thing to share that is only related to the above by it dealing with dinner, have you seen this new cookbook? I checked it out on a whim last...

Does anyone else collect careers they think they might have enjoyed if only they had known about them when such decisions need to be made? I have a running list that I keep adding to, with my most recent addition of experimental archeologist. This was because I was listening to a podcast where Sally Pointer was being interviewed. I've been aware of Ms. Pointer for a while, but this was the first interview I had listened to.  One of her areas of interest and experimentation is bast fibers, of which the flax plant is one. Linen comes from the inside fibers of the flax plant and it is quite an involved process to go from the plant to a spinnable fiber. (Thank you to everyone who sent me the link to the YouTube channel about the woman documenting her journey of growing flax with the end goal of sewing a linen dress.) The fiber from the flax plant is the long and strong fibers found inside the stem. The process involves getting (really controlled rotting) the outside vegetable matter, ...

I didn't care for or enjoy East of Eden, but I can't seem to get away from it. Evidently there is going to be some television version coming out soon, and I seem to be seeing all of the articles discussing the book and production. I truly don't understand why everyone is so gaga over it. Reading a couple of the articles helped me understand why I had so many issues with the book, though. In my first post about the book (linked above), I had mentioned that I didn't buy Steinbeck's assertion that some people are just born evil nor did I enjoy his tacit mysogony. Even as I wrote that post I knew I wasn't really getting at the crux of the problem.  Here's what I think ultimately disturbed me the most. Cathy, the truly evil character in the book, is almost a caricature because she is just so evil without any redeeming characteristics. There are also a couple of male characters who are able to "see through" Cathy because they have evil impulses within t...

I came across an article about an international study a few days ago that I wanted to talk about. It was a study looking at key childhood experiences that predicted emotional well being in adulthood. For the well being piece, the researchers looked at health, happiness, anxiety, life satisfaction with social relationships, and a general trust in others.  There were three experiences in childhood which correlated with positive measures of these components. Just three. They were: Responsive care from parents (or caregiver), ample amounts of free play, and positive emotional climate at home.  It's actually pretty straightforward. You probably guessed that it was the free play item that caught my eye and was the reason I decided to share it.  Before I start making people unhappy, let's do a quick review of what free play is and why it's so important. Free play is child directed activity that is enjoyable for the child. This is not play or activities that are directed by adult...

When J. goes to work he takes whichever children have classes that day with him. They go to class, do homework, roam the school until their father is done for the day and then they all come home. It's a great system with no extra driving needed. It's a great system that is until J. needs to be at a meeting off campus two hours away all day.  While there is a shuttle bus that goes between the end of the Metra line in our little town and the NIU campus in DeKalb, there is no additional transportation from NIU to the community college in a small town three miles further west from DeKalb. (For selfish reasons, I really think there should be a regular shuttle between NIU and the community college.)  This meant I found myself driving children too and from school today. It was a lot of driving especially since I added in a bunch of errands on each return trip... Getting gas, Costco, farm store, equine vet (to pick up prescriptions, and the library all told. The library was the last s...