On the road again

 A remarkably short trip this time. Last Tuesday I had a dental appointment, followed by a picnic supper at my sister's house. The dentist was not so good; more than one cavity and the same old hygienist turned surly. I do not like the modern method of tooth cleaning by water pick. As I've told her time and again, if you can't keep the water from blasting down my throat, please do the job the old fashioned way.

Dinner with Jan and Tom and Laura was fun. Standing in Jan's new kitchen and chatting was fun. And knowing that in my absence a box of new weaving thread was scheduled for delivery to my door was even more fun. Jan and I arranged that the very next day, Wednesday, she would come in the afternoon to be the official thread changer, putting on a new spool of thread when an old one ran out.

When it was on and we were clearing away the tools of the beam dressing trade, Jan said she was very pleased; the entire warp was beamed without a single knot. She used to put on rug warps that way, but wondered if we had ever managed another in our long career. I don't know.

It is lovely. The warp is also two inches wider than previous towels, twenty four inches, not twenty two. It's weaving at twenty two inches, a bit more than ten percent take up. That's good.

But to continue with the boring bit. I spent Thursday, Friday and Saturday threading heddles. This is the part that can put me to sleep, it's so mesmerizing. I'd realize suddenly I'd threaded 4-3-2-1 instead of 1-2-3-4, and that would be it for the day. There still was one threading error to straighten out this morning.

Today I started weaving Rosepath. It is lovely. So far I'm only weaving the roses, not including the path. I'll try a bit of that before I begin weaving towels for sale. The current batch are rose thread, to free up all the bobbins I wound. This time the long float, that is so good at soaking up wet, is horizontal, not vertical.

One more thing about this pattern, and then I'll leave off and go weave some more. When I used to devour old weaving patterns in interesting sources like Dover reprints or Foxfire or Whole Earth, I loved the weaving notation "tromp as writ." It's from the days when intelligence was shared on scraps of paper, and the sharer, having used a precious scrap of paper to transcribe the threading, condensed the remainder of the weaving by noting to treadle exactly as threaded. This pattern is a true tromp as writ.

A couple of weeks in review!

 I suppose it's to be expected in an old folk's home, but it's still taking me by surprise. There are some really old people here. Audra turned one hundred last week. A fellow named Merle will be one hundred in December.

In addition to that, we celebrated the seventieth wedding anniversary of a couple, Faye and Fred. Neither of them is ninety yet! There is only one other married couple here, but one is in this building and one is in assisted living. They are Bert and Gert.

As someone who is terrible with names, I am fascinated by all the help from the names themselves. There are three Mary's here. I only fastened on Jean's name after I realized there was a Gene and a Jean, not related. Gene has gone to another facility, but I got Jean down in time.

It seems most everyone has a name not currently popular. My particular friends are named Maddie (Madelaine), Marcia (my great grandmother's name), Rose and Betty. The last is a version of Elizabeth, my daughter's name.

I bought a couple of crooks for hanging plants in one of the outdoor atriums, and asked Maddie to buy mandevillas to hang there. She called from the nursery to tell me all the mandevillas were already trained on hoops. I hadn't considered that old problem. Laura and I always deconstructed them and repotted into my metal hanging containers.

But ever resourceful Maddie had a solution, dipladenias. Best yet, buy one, get one. She came back with two of them, red, and her son and dil helped her plant everything she brought. I didn't think to take a picture this morning, so here is one I stole from the internet.

And last, but not least, the thread I ordered is scheduled for delivery Tuesday, next. I hope to be started loading the new warp soon after. Tuesday I have a dental appointment (cleaning) and then a picnic at my sister's, with some of the grands. Hamilton, Blake and Laura. Maybe Bek.

So, I'll get serious after that. I've decided first to weave off the few spools of thread left, and then to weave with red, yellow, blue and green to start. The new pattern will be rosepath.

Mysteries

Today was cleaning day. Any day is "cleaning day" if I see something that needs done and I can do it. A while back I grabbed the Swiffer and dusted all the chair rungs. It was a mental throwback to an early job when I was at the bosses' home, having "tea" with his wife and some others. We were sitting on the floor, around a lovely low table. Suddenly she looked under the table, took her napkin and began dusting the table legs and rugs. "A place the cleaning lady never looks," she said.

Such I always thought about the cleaning staff, and what the hell. They have a lot of rooms, and people with differing habits and wants, and then the whole huge building. I can dust my chair rungs every so often. And Diana was just leaving my bedroom when I grabbed my Swiffer to clean the chair rungs. She asked what I was up to, and I told her. I blamed it on the construction dust from outside.

"Not so," she said. "It's all from your humidifier."

You probably cannot see, but against the lamp standard rising in the back is a faint cloud of steam from my little humidifier. It is a cold air unit, or as my father used to say, it flash fries water and spits it out. I bought it the winter before last, and it ended my bloody noses at once. But according to Diana, it is responsible for this:

All the white, powdery stuff that settles on everything in the apartment. I don't know. I'll keep running my humidifier and dusting the furniture rungs.

I've also emptied my loom and am ready to embark on a new project. I think it will be towels. But I need a new treadling. The Shaker towel I've woven for years is a little workhorse of weaves, dense but not heavy. It sops up water.

There are other interesting weaves that I'm sure would work. One is a pattern I first found in a Dover reprint of an nineteenth century weavers manual. I wish I could remember its name. It was a list and description of what a journeyman weaver should be able to produce. Sort of the thing Benjamin Franklin might have set and printed in his brother's shop.

The pattern is a variation of herringbone twill and was called Irish Fancy. I threaded it up more for the name than the pattern, but it turned into a staple of our weaving studio. We wove all the fabrics for our heavier garments in the twill. One popular garment was an over shirt with a Henly throat, a thick, soft cotton in that twill.

My daughter and her boyfriend way back then each had one. After a camping trip Rich told me the shirt was incredible. Dried him off after a swim and he sleep in it at night. All around versatile. I bet it will dry dishes well, too. 

The other possibility is Rosepath. It's another twill weave, but one I've never tried. In my opinion, it needs to be expanded as an overshot weave, and that is very time consuming. But I found a Rosepath treading that expands the little flowers with a bit of plain weave between the rows of flowers. Interesting.

So, I'll thread up each and see which I'll choose. Then I'll have to order more thread, fix my web site again, etcetcetc. Several price increases of thread later, I'll have to recalculate cost. I wonder if I'll be shocked.

Things happening this week

I glanced out Kitty's window this morning and saw men unloading scaffolding from their trucks. Great, I thought, they will start putting the roof on the new building.  Wrong. I left Kitty eating her breakfast and went to eat mine.

I came back from breakfast to see the scaffolding set up right outside of Kitty's window, and then for the next couple of hours the loud noise of cutting the mortor from between rows of bricks. Two hours of incredible noise. The man handling the grinder has ear protection! Here is some of the work. I wonder if it's to point up the bricks.

Laura visited a week ago, and borrowed my wheelchair. Her friend's mother needed a chair to go with them to a concert. Laura left behind a norovirus that left me incapacitated much of last week. It's awful to be out of commission.

One afternoon I decided to be a recliner vegetable and settled in to watch Netflix. I bought a Roku stick for my fairly old television about eight years ago. The Roku controller is probably that old, and has fresh batteries, I knew, because I replaced them quite recently and had to buy them first.

Nevertheless, my controller, henceforth known as The Clicker, didn't work. I could not get it past Hulu. Eventually I quit its game and asked Beth to come have a go. She did and eventually announced the Down button did not work. She could still navigate with the Up button, but nothing down.

All the replacement clickers on Amazon said for Roku television, not for Roku stick. I got on the Roku web site. No phone number, but a chat site, with a robot. It didn't know what I wanted, and offered to connect me to a technician. First it wanted credit card info to handle a one dollar charge.

My bank objected and asked me to authorize a charge for fifty five dollars (apparently refundable to one dollar). I did not, and that was the end of Roku. Back to the search. I may have found an old bit of OEM clicker. It should be delivered today. If not, I'll just click backwards. 

Odds and ends

Bear with me on this first odd. I've gained ten pounds. It could be the mocha or the ice cream or the thyroid, or all three, or one or two. I was pretty scrawny a year ago, after the pacemaker episode and the hole in my lung and the norovirus. The pacemaker doctor asked me to get back to 120, and I did all that by last April or so, and then paid no further attention.

Until this past week, when I realized it's getting warmer outside and soon I will ditch my elastic waist corduroys for jeans. I have not worn elastic waist trousers since childhood, and they may have seen the last winter! I put on a pair of jeans this week and faced zipping up like a teenager, flat on the bed and stomach sucked in. I got it done

But I see that heart doctor in a month or so, for the annual check up, and it would behoove me to present better. In short, a diet that does not include mocha and ice cream, for starters. It could also revert to my sister's lovely oatmeal muffins for lunch. Somehow we lost track of them this past year.

My sister just got a new kitchen. She and Tom bought a little house three or four years ago. It all worked for her except the kitchen, which had that crazy, post World War II housing type of little kitchen. She's pretty good at laying out kitchens, having done it twice at the old house. She knows what she wants, and she got it!

Small kitchen, lots of function. And more important, a new stove with oven to make oatmeal muffins.

One day last week Jan stopped to deliver a batch of muffins and catch up on gossip. And get her kitchen warming present.

I had some left overs to finish up for lunch, so it was today before I got to the new oatmeal muffins. And, oh dear, they were dryer than a bone. I manfully worked through the one I took, thinking "How can I tell her her new oven really needs calibrated. Or fixed!" I called her this afternoon, and tactfully, I hope, broached the subject.

And when I got done, Jan said "Well, that explains why I still have buttermilk left in the fridge! I forgot to add it." So, I need to lose ten pounds and hope I have a start on it.

I have been remiss about weaving this week. Each day was less productive than the previous, to the point of my doing exactly nothing yesterday. Nada. Zero. Zilch. I did get out of bed this morning feeling remorseful as well as guilty.

Fortunately, I encountered Betty and Margaret at breakfast. They are pleasant women. Betty is my table mate who I helped with her new hearing aids. And both are Tea Party, proving strange table mates can come to a truce and get along. The best part of seeing Betty so early was needing a scarf model and there she was, again.

We posed in front of the pool, in the atrium. Several women were in the pool, in the midst of their weekly exercise lesson. For the first time I am strongly tempted to join them. Eighty degree salt water sounds very tempting. I'd even buy a bathing suit.