Three months and counting

Oh the joy of paid unemployment! I'm having the best summer in five years, even though the weather has been too humid for me to get outdoors much, or move more than my knitting needles some days. Summer is a great time to knit socks, preferably with an oscillating fan nearby slowly moving air across my person. I don't even have to be upright to knit socks--bonus!

There is a bit of work being done of course. Not enough, but some. We'll ramp that up in the next few weeks and get the book draft done. I also have a web site draft and a couple of workshops in draft.  Stay tuned for that!

Wednesday I had an energy audit done on the house by a guy from Sustainable Housing. I knew I had a lovely wind tunnel effect going and that air leakage was so pronounced I did wonder if there were actual walls behind the wallpaper in winter.  Now I have proof!  Apparently I have all the energy efficiency of a tarpaper shack with paper windows.

So this perhaps explains why I spin wool and knit sweaters, shawls and socks at the rate I do--I need them to keep something approaching warm for at least 8 months of the year.  That said, I'd not be happy in a warmer climate as I do enjoy wearing wool sweaters and socks.  My biggest complaint about the air leakage and lack of any insulation is that it costs so much money to pretend to be heating the house.  I don't mind the thermostat set at 16C, but I'd prefer not to pay (or require help to pay) a king's ransom for heating oil to achieve that stupendous amount of warmth.  And the costs are rising at phenomenal rates: in 2000 I paid 54¢ a litre for heating oil; now it is in the $1.10 range (I'm afraid to call and ask for the official cost, and the tank is near empty).

Now I do have a wood stove, a very pretty and efficient blue Pacific Energy, and without it I'd be really cold.  This heating source works best when I'm home during the day so I can keep it going and I sit in the room where the stove is located.

My mind is on winter heating as a result of the energy audit, but today we've got a pleasant summer day, big fluffy clouds, a bit of a breeze and about 25C.  Too bad there was no way to store up summer heat for winter use.  

And just in case you thought that cobwebs had no earthly use (except for spiders of course) I can report that they do show air movement rather well as pointed out by the energy audit guy. That made me chuckle.  Good thing he wasn't looking at dust bunny drift, that might have been embarrassing.

Five day weekend to veg

The Easter Bunny didn't come to my house, yet again. I don't know why exactly, lots of its friends live here, the dust bunnies you know. Perhaps they aren't on speaking terms for some reason. Some ancient family feud no doubt, wherein the EB looks down on the DB side of the family as a bit less than what they might be. The DB clan doesn't amount to much most of the time and no chocolate is involved, talk about your distaff side of the family.

Not to worry though, I still have chocolate left over from Xmas so I'm not in any distress.

I've spent four days of my five day weekend hibernating on my sofa--I've had a few phone conversations, no visitors or visiting. I was/am in need of quiet time to be by myself. Today I turned the heel on the second sock of the blueish pair and dyed a couple of skeins of yarn in a lavender shade that fades to some blues and soft fuschia--not on purpose, that's the way the dye struck the skeins. I'm calling it a design, because I doubt I'd be able to over-dye this and get much better in the way of results. Probably this is the fault of the bad vibes between the EB and the DB clan, creating havoc in my kitchen.

On another, um note, I've reloaded about 50 albums into my iPod so today I could listen to one of my favourite Hildegarde von Bingen albums by Sequentia--Canticles of Ecstacy via the Bose dock. Glorious, glorious sound.

Tomorrow, oh blessed day, I think I'll be able to hang laundry on the line. It's been such a long wet winter that I can't remember when I last got to hang out laundry so I'm really looking forward to this as some kind of major life event this weekend. Since I've been hibernating, it doesn't take much at all to create a major event in my world.

I did some spinning this afternoon. Working on spinning up the qiviut roving that came back from the mill earlier this month, I'm nearly through the first 'bump' and have about half a bobbin. I'm not impressed with the de-hairing as I still have to continuously pick out guard hair which makes the spinning a very stop and start process and takes some of the pleasure out of it.

No pictures of anything yet as I still haven't set up a photo shoot area that will handle the relevant tasks--nor have I begun organizing or cleaning my house, it's just been a long weekend to rest and try to find my way back to myself. I get rather lost in work related stuff and then feel so disconnected from my personal reality that it takes serious sitting still to find my way back. Thankfully I listened and sat still because i am feeling significantly better than I was Thursday when my weekend began.

Time to wander off to bed to read for a while--I'm reading Sir Walter Scott's Bride of Lammermoor and enjoying it very much.  It's been some time since I've read anything with a decent vocabulary, I mean beyond the 600 words we're apparently down to in most interaction, communication and writing.  When was the last time a tv or radio program used the word gaunt, and used it correctly.  I love the really chewy sentences and long detailed descriptive paragraphs of writers like Scott, Dickens, Austen, Gaskell, Trollope and Eliot and read them for relief after reading some of the weird contemporary fiction I also sometimes enjoy.  But more of that another time.  And so to bed...