Good morning

The morning inbox was awash with Boye steel hooks of every size. Thank you; I am so grateful, especially to know their original owners may have left off using them, but they still are in the collections of new owners, and probably will be attracted to another at the proper time. The Boye size 0 is on its way from California, View from my Window in Tehachapi.

I must add a probably long remark about what I do when I knit. I watch television. I am not sure how this works. I have a 17" television, to the sheer dismay of most who have seen it. I think it simply keeps things in perspective. 

The service is called Roku. It's like cable, without local news, which I miss. The amount of money required for television "entertainment" is staggering. But that's not where I was headed.

Of everything available on Roku, I use Netflix the most, and have enjoyed watching so many shows that have been recommended. For a time I was watching Last Tango in Halifax. I know it ends somewhere, but I haven't checked that out. I had to quit watching; every episode was a new disaster, and even reducing it to 17" was no good. Every show another fight, another death, another relative.

I quit Last Tango for Outlander. I watched a couple of episodes prepared to scoff at all the mistakes in presenting the lives of 18th century rural peasants. But what I do know about dress, about the history of clans, which the British treated rather like Americans treated Native People, was ringing true. 

Every episode of Outlander is a new adventure, and most are fairly rough. It was a rough time. I was in for the long haul when I saw the tax collecting episode. Claire, the female protagonist is commandeered into the tax collecting group for her skill as a nurse. Claire wanders into a group of woman in one village and is fit into the group "waulkin" the wool. 

A length of woven woolen fabric is being fulled by waulking. The length is rolled or scrunched its length on a long table and the women on either side pick it up in unison, slap it on the table, pick it up again further down its length, slap it on the table and so on, in time to a waulkin song, like a sea shanty.

I have omitted so far, the rest of the fulling process, which is moisture and heat. The wool has been saturated in warm urine. And so we have the three components of fulling, heat, moisture and agitation. Claire even has a pee into the communal pot of new heat and moisture. And this is how waulking occurs, to my knowledge.

The show goes intensely into the infliction of pain between two warring cultures, and there came a time when one show's action kept me awake far too long. And then I realized Outlander had become as predictable as Last Tango. Each new episode was another murder, kidnapping, extreme loss.

I had to know where it ends. I took to friend google and wound up on my other friend, Wikipedia, which has a one line synopsis of each episode. I read and read and read to catch up to where I am, and then read ahead a bit, then scrolled to the end. Yes, there are hundreds of episodes. 

For the present, I'm off Outlander, too. Picture from Google.