Where have you been?

It's Sunday morning. I'm doing laundry. There are two machines in our laundry room, and generally I am using one and Sandy the other. But this morning EMS took Sandy to the clinic. I teased Maddie, the other machine is free this morning. Old folks humor.

I did eat breakfast with Maddie in the atrium, after she watered the plants. This is the other atrium, the one I pass every morning, going to breakfast. The Japanese dogwood is in full bloom. The other atrium is surrounded with plants that Maddie and our activities director, Joan, take care of. 

That atrium is like working in my old gardens, except I can't, anymore. I did decide this morning I can carry the watering can on my walker tray and take care of the plants in pots, so I'll do that. I asked Laura to bring me a shovel full of pinks from the old garden.

In other family news, my oldest daughter is in Ireland, on a hiking trip around the Dingle peninsula. I'm sort of jealous, but not so much. I can't do that kind of walking any more.

The first is the Dingle Bay. The second an historical library somewhere in southern Ireland, or a train ride away from their base lodging. Perhaps another time she'll head for Omagh or Armagh, where our Presbyterian ancestors originated.

And my other daughter bought a house. Not the first but hopefully the last. This house is half a mile from her sister. Isn't it amazing, how siblings can fight like cats the first twenty years and be friends ever after.

I'm weaving red rosepath. I'm weaving the paths as well as the roses. I like the look of it and can't wait to get it fulled. That will be next week, earliest.

It's been some time since an update on our two year old construction project. It has devolved into mud. In addition, I wonder how attractive apartments renting for thousands per month will be with a view either into someone's window or the street with traffic; cars, trucks, ambulances! Anyway, here are some views:

The top picture is right out my window, across the trash strewn parking area. These apartments are several feet below grade, as you can see. There is no water retention area; they are the retention area. Aurora seems to have no master water plan in effect.

The second picture is the concrete poured between these apartments and my building. Excuse me, but wtf? Just one more nail in the flood plane problem. What about those second floor balconies! They could at least have installed beige railings!

Moving along, the third picture is the sidewalk to nowhere and a view across the parking area, stacked with excess siding, so the dump trucks bringing in dirt from who knows where have an awful time getting it dumped. The sidewalk to nowhere ends just under Kitty's window. I need to get down there and figure it out.

And finally, see that chunk of red in the last picture? That's just another piece of trash they didn't bother to pick up; all that concrete is poured over any piece of siding, pipe, drink bottle or 2x4 in the way. 

Every one I explained these problems to just rolled eyes way back and said "Not in charge!" Well, my second floor apartment won't flood, come the big storm. 

I'll take pictures when the landscaping is done. Probably next summer.

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.