Ordinary Time

Along with J.'s two sisters who live in the area, we have the hosting for the holidays divided up between us. Our holiday is Thanksgiving. Assuming my counting is correct, we will be 30 people for dinner on Thursday. In the Big Ugly House, this would have been nothing given the size of the rooms and the size of the kitchen. Here, it is doable, it just takes a little more creativity and planning.  So tomorrow begins the preparations and everyone will be on call for working. G. has already baked six dozen rolls, and tomorrow another three dozen are on the docket. We'll also be making some of the dishes that can be made ahead and reheated to make room in the kitchen and oven for other things on Thursday. And other people are bringing things, so we're not cooking the entire meal ourselves. But really what I'll be spending much of my day on is moving furniture around and figuring out how to make the seating work. In my head it all works fine, but experience tells me that som...

This morning I turned in my inventory sheet for the holiday market. This means I have everything made which I'm going to sell. Note that made is very different from finished. I have ironing to do on the guest towels; hemming, washing, and ironing to do on the dinner napkins; and I need to wash and do a final weigh and measure on much of the handspun. But this is still a much better place than I was a week ago.  On Saturday I realized that I was quickly running out of time for one of the ideas I had in my head. I had a bunch of merino handspun mini-skeins that I thought would be fun to dye different colors with natural dyes. In theory it sounded good, but some of the dye stuff I had never used before, so it was a toss up if it was going to turn out to be something I could sell. And since the inventory lists were due today, it didn't give me a whole lot of time to get it all done. And nevermind that starting today the kitchen was going to be consumed with Thanksgiving preparation...

One of the great joys of having adult children is getting to go to their homes for dinner. I feel I need to mention this because I see a lot of writing about parents grieving that their children are growing up, but I see very little about some of the positives of having adult children.  Tonight J. and I got to have dinner with TM and his partner at their apartment. It was lovely and the food was delicious. (And for long time readers, Aster, the husky,  is doing well.) It was just a very enjoyable evening.  I've often said that as much as I would like to turn back time to when everyone was little again, I wouldn't want to turn it back permanently. I love who all my adult children are and even though I have moments of missing the very small versions of them, I would miss the adult versions more and would have to turn time back to the present. Your parenting life doesn't end because your children have grown, it becomes different. 

All this semester L. has been participating in Fermilab's Saturday morning physics program for high school students. (D. did this as well, but he took it in the winter of 2020 so never got to finish it because the world had shut down. He might still be a little bitter about it.) Each week they had a lecture and then a tour of part of Fermilab. They also had off site classes at University of Chicago, the Museum of Science and Industry, and Northwestern University.  Today was the graduation ceremony for the participants.  Wilson Hall at Fermilab  L. really enjoyed the whole program. She would have also received a perfect attendance certificate, but had opted to take one Saturday off to go to the protest. Priorities, you know. 

Things are fine here, but since all I'm currently doing is working in my studio and figuring out Thanksgiving, there really isn't too much to write about outside of those two things. All that to say, if I'm absent here for the next few days, know that things are fine.  In the meantime, enjoy these pictures that K. took. 

As I was moving laundry around today I noticed something on one of the sheets in the dryer. I took a closer look to see why the nearly white sheet was purple. Here's what I found.  This is the bottom sheet of a much loved and used set of Pokemon sheets. We all know that children's sheets are made out of less than stellar fiber woven at a low thread count. They were not designed to last, especially bottom sheets.  It seems at some point a child wanted to use the sheets, discovered a tear in one, and proceeded to mend it. This filled my heart with a little joy today both because it wasn't thrown away, and a solution was thought of all without involving me.  Looking a little closer at the sheet, I think I may have to do a bit more significant repair work to keep it from shredding completely. But I do love the fact I'm only now discovering it. 

I finished weaving the dinner napkins and tool them off the loom today.  I cannot tell you what a relief this is. I am now pretty sure I'll have everything done by the end of the month. I'm also very much ready for a completely new project.  This probably explains why I decided to completely reorganize my collection of buttons. Yes, this is a project that has absolutely nothing to do with anything that actually needs to be finished. My brain just needed a break.  This is my grandmother's sewing box that she kept buttons in and where I kept buttons.  As you can see, it is not an efficient button storage system.  And usually all these cards were piled on top of the loose buttons.  I kind of dreaded having to sift through it all to find what I needed. So today I took the glass jars I had leftover from an art exhibit I had done and emptied out the yarn and weights for kumihimo braiding and sorted the buttons into the jars by color. I'll still have to dump and d...