The Weekly Busy

What's keeping us busy this week?

[theweeklybusy]

...this life will hit you, hard, in the face...

wait for you to get back up so it can kick you in the stomach. But getting the wind knocked out of you is the only way to remind your lungs how much they like the taste of air."

Excerpt from "B (If I should Have a Daughter)" by Sarah Kay

Well shit. I was planning on doing a summary of last week, then the weekend, then see how this week was panning out and decide if I would do dailies or wrap-ups. But then the pharmacy couldn't fill my Rx for anti-depressants. And then I couldn't get in touch with my psychiatrist. Every avenue of reaching him that I tried was met with silence. No replies. Not even crickets.

I take 90mg of Duloxetine each day for my depression, anxiety, and chronic pain. At least I did, because I haven't had any since Thursday 7/7. In case anyone wasn't already aware, withdrawal sucks. Needing an over the counter chemical to be a baseline human sucks. Being ghosted by a medical professional sucks.

So here's just a bunch of pictures since the 4th and we'll call that a blog.

[theweeklybusy]

Holiday of questionable importance

Yesterday lots of people celebrated the 4th of July as Independence day in America. Andrew and I don't care about that holiday in the slightest, especially since we've had a much better thing to celebrate on this day for the last 5 years.

Yup, like very smart people we increased an already stressful day for adopted animals and transported Finn to his new home on an also very stressful and noisy holiday. Finn is our first pet as adults and as a couple and he's pretty much been in our lives as long as we've been married. He was estimated about 4 years old when we got him so we combined his gotcha day with his estimated age and decided the 4th of July was his birthday. So as of yesterday he is (un)officially 9 years old.

I feel so lucky to have this boy in my life. He is smart, cuddly, and pretty chill (unless meal time is involved, then he is a taskmaster). I remember for the first few weeks he was still so shy he hardly came out, so I would often forget how big he was! Then I had to get used to how his head looked normal sized but the rest of him was huge. Now...he's normal and all other cats are tiny!

We spent yesterday feeding him slices of salmon at random intervals as a way to celebrate his continued and adorable living. He loved that of course, and since he couldn't eat the whole thing in one day, the morsels have continued into Tuesday with demands for more each time we enter the kitchen.

Here's to another many years with this sweet boy!

[theweeklybusy]

The week in review

Monday the 27th my aunt and uncle were still here, so it was kind of a work day and kind of a host day. Luckily I was working from home and a handful of higher-ups were out at conferences or on vacation, so few people noticed that I was slow in answering my emails.

I realized that night that the pattern I had been fiddling with started with the wrong measurements. So I painfully unraveled it all back to the foundation row, re-balled the yarn barf, and sadly started over. At this point, if I run into another mistake, I may just have to roll with it because I do not want to un-do this project a second time!

Tuesday 28th was Tiabeanie's final class of level 3 obedience training. We've had her for about 9 months now, and she has really blossomed from the dog that the shelter knew, that the fosters knew, and that we knew when we first got her. She is sweet and smart and sassy, loving and cuddly, and also unfortunately still pretty anxious about being away from me. Having training together has really helped our bond and trust for me to be able to move into things like cutting her nails and giving her baths with less fear and fuss (she still doesn't like them though) and I just know that the next big hurdle will be addressing her separation anxiety.

For now though, I love the training place and am excited to move onto the more fun stuff!

Wednesday the 29 was a full and flexible day! Started with a 2 mile walk around the lake with a friend who is babysitting a greyhound! I wish we had a properly fenced place for her to run because I would love to see her dash about and play with Tiabeanie, but most dog parks don't have the 10 foot high fences recommended for speedsters and leapers like sighthounds. Then home for laundry and chores and after the fur babies had lunch Andrew and I set out to check out the county fair...only to learn at the entrance that no pets were allowed. So with Tiabeanie in the back seat we pivoted to Main Street and just people watched while eating pizza.

When we got home from lunch the power was out (father-in-law is working on the wiring as he preps for re-insulating our attic) so I busied myself with a project that didn't need power - a carding board. Not to be confused with cardboard, this style of fiber prep was the predecessor to todays blending board. I nailed a patch of carding cloth to the underside of my fiber picker to have a more all-in-one multi-use tool, then wrapped some carding cloth around a pair of handles I had connected at the ends for a (very ugly) type of comb to pull over the board. Then I finished carding some of the llama fluff I had washed and picked and now it's ready for spinning. I'm really glad to be done with this project as it is a tool that can help me move forward with so many other projects!

Thursday the 30th was apparently uneventful enough that I took no pictures or really noted what I did during the day. Mostly just remoted in to work and caught up on emails while folks were away.

Friday July 1st however was a big deal. For starters, I forgot it was Friday and missed my therapy call! I had stuff to talk about too so I'll have to make some notes to remember it through to the next appointment. I also was able to log off early from work and pack up some clothes, crafts, and my rig to head over to a friends house for a holiday weekend LAN party!

My rig is much older than everyone else's and programmed for much different tasks. While folks set up their PCs and gaming laptops, I took a select corner of the folding tables in the living room to set up a restored Singer featherweight. Through the whole weekend I listened to people game while sewing a yukata, spinning yarn, and making progress on two crochet projects. I spent two nights at the LAN before burning out hard on all the noise, shuffling around, and children, so I packed up Sunday afternoon, collapsed on the spare bed at home for a nap, then stress ate 2/3 of a pack of Oreos for dinner. Not the best way to end the weekend, but all in all it was pretty fun and it was nice to see so many people and also make a lot of progress on my projects.

[theweeklybusy]

Weekend Roundup

Friday was another hot day, but at least had no fire evacuations. I had some time after work to get Tiabeanie to the dog park. She missed it on Thursday due to...well the fire alerts. This however is the park that was only a street over from that evac route, and most people seemed to still be avoiding it (or the heat) so there were no other dogs there during a time when there usually would have been. She mostly spent her pent up energy enjoying different patches of shade.

Saturday morning felt like a full day all on its own considering the amount of laundry and food prep I did to get the house ready for a visit from my aunt and uncle. After a nap and their arrival, the rest of the day was much more relaxed.

Plus! Andrew got the mail and in it was some pins I had kickstarted from @foxloft I LOVE these and I'm so excited to now have a female kestrel pin to match the male from the previous set <3

Sunday was a baby shower (and the reason relatives were in town)! Got to see a lot of folks I haven't seen in years and made the mother-to-be cry with my gift to her (yay?); an illustrated copy of Sara Kay's poem "B" about mothers and daughters. I'm glad it was outside, and also that outside wasn't terribly hot, because I was able to bring Tiabeanie and she had a good time getting attention from humans and giving probably too much attention to the ground squirrels at the park.

All in all, a great weekend of visits all around, with great food too! The homemade pizzas and sliders on fresh baked rolls made having guests in the tiny house a little bit easier to handle honestly.

[theweeklybusy]

Fire in the sky

This afternoon we got an alert that neighborhoods near us were getting evacuation warnings due to a fire. And of course neighborhoods near those ones had full evacuation orders. We didn't get the alert until mid-afternoon, but it feels like it took up the whole day since it became such a big mental load. I had half a dozen tabs open following many different maps and feeds keeping track of warnings and orders in case we got included in the warning zone.

The added stress may have had something to do with the fact that I was up late finishing a book. Vanishing Fleece: Adventures in American Wool by Clara Parkes. It is nicely written and flows through an adventure in what it looks like to move through the wool industry from sheep to dyed yarn. I went to my shelf and immediately picked out the next book to read and picked out Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle by Clare Hunter. I'm hoping I'll come away with some inspiration to get into more sewing projects since the wool one got me really inspired to work on fiber craft.

Speaking of inspiration in fiber craft...I twisted more iris cordage today and I think this second session already shows so much progress in technique and I feel so good working on it. I hope to save some leaves to teach my aunt this technique when she visits this weekend.

And another way to...unwind? after a stressful day, I spun some of the llama fluff I've been processing and it felt really good to get progress on it that wasn't just a short yard sample. Too many projects, so even if I can focus on them for an hour or so at a time, at least I'm making progress on them!

[theweeklybusy]

Dog days

Today was spa day for Tiabeanie and her dog cousin Gifft. This was much needed after taking both dogs camping for 5 days. The groomers said she was signed up for ear cleaning, teeth cleaning, and nail clipping along with washing, but I still found gunk in her ears and her nails looked like they had been only briefly introduced to a nail file. May not take her back to that one again.

While waiting for those dogs, I did some spinning and caught the attention of the other house dog Vir, an Australian Shepherd. I think the smell of sheep's wool triggered some herding instincts in him, because he was very interested in the bit of fluff I gave him, and was licking it a bunch. In addition to being a breed that could herd sheep, Vir is practically a sheep on his own, he has so much fluff on him! His humans indulge me in my "I bet I could spin that" attitude by saving his fur, as well as Gifft's corgi fur, and the fur from their two cats. Trust me, if a fiber is long enough, I will try to spin it into yarn.

Once I got Tiabeanie home, Andrew and I ate dinner outside despite the bugs because the house was still more warm than the backyard at that point. I stayed outside to twist iris leaves into cordage for about another hour. Did I mention I have a strong "I bet I could spin this" attitude? I had originally found a tutorial that showed how to braid iris leaves for basket weaving, and on my first try of that I took some remnant leaves and fiddled with them until I had a short length of rough two-ply cordage. Only after that proof of concept did it occur to me that I could look up more info. So after watching some YouTube tutorial I decided to use the rest of the iris leaves for cordage rather than braids, though I'll probably still use both to make a basket. This technique went faster and yielded a more even twist than my first un-informed attempt, and for me it was much more rewarding and satisfying than braiding the leaves. Looking forward to how it looks once it's dry and the spare ends have been snipped off.

[theweeklybusy]

First Day of Summer

It's the summer solstice here in the northern hemisphere and we are kicking it off with a heat wave of course. Three digit temps today and the breeze off the canyon seems to have abandoned me. Out of everyone in the house I think I handle heat the best, but that doesn't mean it's my favorite thing in the world. Today was mostly work, meetings, and naps. Tiabeanie got introduced to the AC wall unit after she started panting inside the house and couldn't seem to find a comfortable place to be. Today is officially nine months of having this rescue pup in my life, I remember her adoption day because it was the autumnal equinox 2021. Beyond that and an evening walk after the pavement had cooled I really didn't do anything else, so today feels like a bit of a bust. Still plenty of ideas and projects. I'm just not working on them in this heat and still working to stick to a decent bedtime. Though as we move more into summer becoming nocturnal is looking much more tempting.

[theweeklybusy]

Ok, so it's Monday...

And last night I decided to start a blog. This is where I hope to share things that keep me busy throughout the week. Stuff like the dog, the cat, the DIY and tinkering, the yarn spinning, the crochet, sewing, quilting, news, health, food attempts, etc. Whatever gets me rolling I guess. Here's how I stay busy, how about you?

[theweeklybusy]