We Four

Hapi in the pond

Yesterday four of us got together on a patio for a glass of wine. We are four women who have known each other for a few years.

One is in her 60s, two in our 70s and one in her 80s.

One is married, two are divorced and one is widowed.

Two are anglophone, two are francophone, and we all understand each other (mostly!) when speaking our mother tongues.

Three of us have grandchildren, one has no children.

Three of us have dogs, one has a cat.

We were born in three different provinces, none of us is originally from Nova Scotia.

Between us, we have probably travelled the entire world.

And we all had lots of stories to tell.

It was supposed to be a hot sultry day but instead it was cloudy and a bit showery, we tried to stay dry under the patio umbrella. A rivulet of water ran off the umbrella onto the back of my chair, my backside got a little wet.

Two female hummingbirds darted around us, occasionally clashing with each other. They can be quite fierce. Our host's dog made the rounds of the four laps available to her, she can be quite fierce too.

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I've had to stop taking Hapi to the Reservoir, her love of the pond has made a mess of her undercoat, to the point that she was chewing holes in it and she had matts the size of golf balls. I looked on the internet for how to deal with that, the solution that seems most effective (and cheap!) is rubbing cornstarch into her coat and then brushing against the grain with a slicker brush. I had both on hand so it doesn't cost me anything.

She loves the cornstarch massage but hates the slicker brush, however the matts are considerably reduced in size now and further from her skin, so I can cut the smaller ones out.

I miss seeing my dog buddies at the Reservoir, I feel at loose ends the rest of the day. So when We Four met yesterday it was a welcome diversion.

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Starting on Friday, masks will be mandatory in all public indoor spaces. We have no Covid-19 cases at the moment, it has been ten days since the last new case was announced. A few people hate the idea of having to wear a mask, but many of us are relieved. If one person wears a mask it makes hardly any difference at all, but if everyone is wearing one, then we are all protecting each other. In September all the students from away will be back, so we have a month to get comfortable with masking up.

There are some pretty masks out there, I think it will be like wearing glasses: a necessity turned into an accessory.

At the special care home

The picture today is of the garden in front of our local post office. Those three balls look to me like the coronavirus, every time I see them that's what I think of. They are past their prime now, they used to be purple, but they still look like giant virus particles to me. They are called Ambassador Alliums.

I went to see B today, first time in over four months. The special care home she now lives in is about a half hour drive away. Her son called me last night to say that I could come with him and his sister for their scheduled visit, I think because B insisted. It is really hard to get a visit there, it can take up to a month just to get an appointment, and the visit time is just half an hour in the gardens surrounding the home.

It was certainly a lovely day for it, the gardens are at their peak of beauty. I didn't get to see all of it because the property is quite extensive. A PSW meets you at the parking lot and takes your temperature and asks a bunch of health and travel questions. B's son and daughter did not want to wear masks and I had forgotten mine, but the PSW offered me one and I took it. Then he escorted us to the pavilion where we would meet B. We saw another PSW pushing her wheelchair from the building to the pavilion and we waved.

I could not bring Hapi but B thought that later they might start allowing dogs to visit. She talked a mile a minute, as if she'd had fifteen cups of coffee before we arrived. She is so happy there. She says the staff are all very nice and her roommate is just the nicest person one could imagine. They laugh a lot and B says they torment the staff. The PSW pushing her chair stayed for the visit; she is a high school student who is looking forward to getting back to school in the fall. She's had enough of home schooling.

Later the supervisor came by to make sure we were all comfortable. He said it was okay to hug B as long as we had masks on and used the hand sanitizer sitting on the little table. I don't know what the home is like inside but B says it's very nice. I am so glad she is happy there, she seemed far better than she has been in the past year. With her oxygen tank and her wheel chair she is quite happy and she has taken up knitting again.

Her roommate is 91 years old and loves Christmas and angels. When B was still in quarantine the PSWs were telling her all about who her roommate would be and when they described her passion for Christmas and angels, B said, "She's not a religious nut, is she?" Well, she's not, she just loves the stuff that goes with it. B is very impressed with the angels.

When the time was up the PSW who took our temperatures came by to tell us. Another resident was lined up for her family visit in the little pavilion. It was a nice visit, I look forward to doing it again.

Eating from my garden

The main vegetable garden

Today I had a small tomato and a handful of blueberries from my garden. I watched a small sparrow also enjoying my blueberries. It just takes a bite out of a berry and leaves the rest; the berry dries out and eating it is like eating a raisin.

Last night my neighbour told me the raspberries are ripe now, there's a small patch on a strip of no-man's-land adjacent to his back yard. His wife doesn't like them so he and I gather and eat them. We take turns, he goes into the patch one day and I go the next. I got half a pint today.

I pulled up all my snow pea plants. I got an amazing crop this year, so many that I am debating whether to plant again or not. Usually I can get two crops a year but I really already have enough. My green beans are just starting to produce, I got about a pint today. I grow French green beans which are long and narrow, I really like them. Also the plants produce beans twice in a season, if I leave the plants alone then after a few weeks of nothing a second round of beans appears.

I planted a bunch of different kinds of tomatoes in different places. The tomato I ate today was from a patch of patio tomatoes in my front yard. The plants are tiny, less than ten inches high, but full of tomatoes. In my back yard I have tomato plants that are now six feet tall. I've never seen tomato plants so tall! I have a feeling that they devoted so much energy to growing tall that they are not really going to produce a lot of fruit. We'll see.

The snow peas were blocking the light to one of my onion patches so now they are getting much more sunshine. I hope that means they will catch up with the other onion patch. My winter squashes all died, the zucchini is surviving and I've already eaten two of them. The cucumber plants also died, although I got three little cucumbers from the last one. I have replanted, we'll see how they do.

I don't know how the garlic is doing but I suspect not well. I harvested the scapes last week and called another neighbour to let him know I had some for him. He used to be a great gardener but hip problems put paid to that. He likes the scapes and he gives me gardening advice. I have not actually talked to him since before the pandemic, although we have occasionally waved to each other. He's a great chatter, a conversation with him usually lasts an hour and we cover all sorts of topics. We talked today about the local controversy over turning Main Street into a one-way street. Nobody is neutral on that, everyone is either very much pro or very much con. He thinks it's great, me not so much.

And lastly my potato patch is in full bloom. I think the flowers are quite lovely, I would happily grow potatoes just for the flowers.

Loose warp

I spent a couple of hours this morning researching the loom problem. I think I have figured out exactly what is going on and a potential work-around. When the shed is open (the shed is where the weft goes through the warp, it is opened by pressing one of the treadles) the threads on top are the correct tension but the threads on the bottom are loose. Doesn't matter which treadle is pressed.

The warp is supposed to be level from the breast beam to the back beam but it is not, it goes up from the breast beam to the heddle eyes and then back down again to the back beam. When I try to make it level by raising or lowering the shaft frames holding the heddles it no longer passes through the middle of the reed, which it is also supposed to do. What I have to do is somehow get the warp to be level and also passing through the middle of the reed. I can't adjust the reed height and adjusting the frame height creates other problems. However, if the back beam were higher it could work. I think I can do that by adjusting the metal rods that hold it in place, but that adjustment interferes with the free movement of the beater holding the reed.

A Leclerc counterbalance loom

So looking closely at pictures of an equivalent Leclerc loom, I can see that they put the metal rods on the inside of the vertical loom posts and on my loom they are on the outside. Inside the loom posts they wouldn't affect the beater. I think if I just drill through the existing bolt holes to the other side of the vertical posts of the castle and back beam and move the bolts from the outside to the inside, that would do it. My only hesitation in doing that is that it would shorten the distance between the frames and the back beam and I don't know if there is a downside to doing that. I'm just thinking out loud here, have to ask my old instructor.

A Leclerc jack loom, with the metal bars on the outside

Apparently my warp problem is fairly common on jack looms but none of the suggested solutions work on a counterbalance loom. Jack looms are more common in North America because they are cheaper to buy, by approximately a thousand bucks. I like the look of a jack frame loom but it comes with issues. My loom is a counterbalance loom which is considered a better type, but my loom is not a good example of the type.

I got an email from the instructor, she said it had not occurred to her to use those metal bars in the way I was proposing. She thought they were just for folding up the back beam but on looking more closely at them the extra slot in the middle just hadn't registered with her. So she suggested that it couldn't hurt to try it out, I could always go back to the way it was before.

Apocalypse

Feeling kind of apocalyptic tonight. It is hot out, 30C at 7.00pm, and I am indoors with the curtains drawn to keep the heat out. Hapi is in the basement where it is around 20C. Last night I started watching Battlestar Galactica: The Miniseries (2003) and I finished it tonight; maybe that is why I am feeling apocalyptic. The show—it's really a movie split into two parts—ages well, the actors are great (Edward James Olmos, Mary McDonnell, etc) and so is the writing. The special effects may be a little dated but they deliberately use old technology because they say (in the story) it is less susceptible to cyber-interference. And it is about AI—artificial intelligence—turning on humanity and seeking to destroy it.

At one point a female character tells her ex-boyfriend (or he may be the brother of her ex-boyfriend, not really sure) about some bad thing that she had done. He asks why she is telling him now and she replies, "Because it's the end of the world and I'm confessing my sins" and puts her helmet on and climbs into her fighter jet. Okay, maybe I'm not saying it right but it was impressive. In another scene Olmos wants to take his soldiers into war for one last stand against the robots and McDonnell is telling him the war is over, we lost, it's time to run away. Olmos is infuriated of course, but a few moments later he sees a young man and woman flirting with each other and says, "They should make babies," meaning that he was wrong and McDonnell was right. Once again, I'm not saying it right.

With all the crazy news from south of the border, it doesn't help; feels very apocalyptic.

Knitting in a heat wave

My Needlework group decided to try one more time to meet. This time Our Fearless Leader invited all of us who wanted to let her know and also if any of us could host a small group, say 5-6 needleworkers. She would draw names from a hat and tell us who was going where. Her email was screwed up so not everybody got all the correct information, all I knew was that I was going to a host who lives close by and there was at least one other group meeting somewhere else.

We met this afternoon when it was extremely hot—it was 30C all afternoon and into the evening—and it was supposed to be outdoors but we ended up going inside because of the heat. It was a large livingroom with well-spaced chairs and I guess we're all feeling a little more relaxed about the situation since there have been very few new cases in the province and none for a couple of months in our county. Or none that we know of. Our host said she didn't mind having us in her house this summer but was worried about the fall. She is treating the summer like a kind of vacation, in the fall the students will be back and the risk of infection much higher.

I think the smaller group works very well. At our peak before the pandemic we often had as many as a couple dozen people and you could only really talk to whoever you sat down next to. But in a group of 5-6 you can have a shared conversation and that was nice. Our host's cat also attended. I'm allergic to cats but as long as they don't try to sit in my lap I'm okay. This cat is fine, nice personality, not stand-offish but not overly friendly either.

I tried to get Hapi to go into the basement before I left but she was sleeping and didn't want to get up. I left her there, half in the shade half in the sun. I gave myself a mental deadline of being back by 3 to get her out of the sun, but didn't make it back till 4. She had already moved into the shade and was happy to go into the basement. Sometimes she can climb the basement stairs on her own, sometimes she can't. I let her try first and then move in with the towel sling.

Race to the finish

Chicory weed, one of my favourite summer flowers

Hapi can no longer climb the basement stairs on her own, she waits at the bottom while I go down and arrange a towel sling under her rear end. Sometimes we manage it smoothly, sometimes not. Those stairs are tricky, sometimes I lose my balance and fall on top of her, sometimes I move too fast and she stumbles. The new normal. A friend asked me if I could increase her pain meds but I don't think pain is the problem, it's muscle wasting.

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Big excitement at the Reservoir the other day, a few of us standing around the beach when three eagles appeared overhead. One eagle attacked another, they locked talons and grappled in mid-air amid much whistling, then all three flew away. Two returned to the tree they usually hang out in and whistled for quite a while after.

One of the people on the beach happened to be a naturalist who had a camera with a big telephoto lens; he tried to get a photo of the event but he says it's not very good, it all happened too quickly. However he did have a recent photo of the two baby owls at the Reservoir which he showed us. I had seen one of the babies a couple of weeks ago and then it disappeared and I feared the worst. Not so, he said, the two babies are now adult-sized and flying around a bit. It takes a lot of practice to fly through dense forest.

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We got a new member in our writing group and one person wrote that we should give her a copy of our "guidelines". Once again I voiced opposition to the idea—I really dislike that document, it doesn't reflect what we actually do and now that we are totally online it is kind of irrelevant. Nobody responded to my objections so I thought that meant that no one agreed with me, however one member did eventually write to say that she was in total agreement and was glad I had spoken up. I would like that document just to die of neglect, I am not really up for the turmoil of yet another revision process.

Fireweed: harbinger of fall, the higher the flowers on the stalk the closer it is

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I took my car to the garage yet again for a final repair to replace a broken transmission mount. The car has been making awful noises for over a year now and this was supposed to fix it. I don't doubt the broken mount, however the noise is still there. I arranged to go out for lunch with a friend at a place across the road from the garage while they did the repair, this is the first time we've gotten together since mid-March and we had a great time. The garage phoned me to say the car was ready and they would leave the key in the car because they like to take a two-hour lunch. After lunch I drove my friend home and a couple of hours later I called the garage to say I was coming back to settle the bill.

I told the mechanic the noise was still there, he was sure he had fixed it so he wanted to take another look. In the end, by process of elimination, he is deducing that the problem is the transmission itself. His recommendation is not to fix it, too expensive, and start looking for another vehicle. He gave me a discount on the cost of replacing the transmission mount. Transmission might break, but it won't fall off! So there we are, dying dog and dying car.

My friend's vision is completely gone now, she is much worse than she was in March. But she's a barrel of laughs and it's good to spend time with her, we laughed ourselves silly. At the restaurant the staff were all masked. At one point one waitress started yelling at a man to get out, get out right now. The man left and we were staring at the waitress wondering what just happened. She laughed and said, We do this all day, I yell, he leaves by the back door and walks around to the front door and comes back in again. He's here all day. She was just making space for the noon hour custom.

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I am having some problems with my loom so I phoned my old teacher for advice. We had a nice chat about this and that but she couldn't really advise me. I have come to the realization that this loom is defective and perhaps I should look for another one. A loom that fits the bill will cost me three or four grand new, less if I can find a used one in good condition. Having had the experience of using better quality looms at the classes I used to attend, I know it will be worth it, even if I have to order one new. And I'll be able to re-use some of the parts of my existing loom. It was handmade by a gentleman in Ontario and it looks good and appears well put together, but the devil is in the details. It was intended to duplicate a Leclerc loom, so I am looking for a 'real' Leclerc loom. But it's a lot of money, a new loom or a new car? Don't know that I can do both.

The Hosta

Former Hosta bed

Yesterday I cleared out the last of the Hosta from their bed on the north side of my back yard. They were not doing well there, too much sun for a bunch of shade-loving plants. When I bought this place it was full of perennial plantings, including lots of Hosta. There were also quite a few trees shading them so they were happy. But over the years I have had to cut down a bunch of trees and now most of the Hosta are over-exposed and not so happy. They get sunburnt. Last fall I had a dying pine tree cut down next to the northside Hosta bed so this year they are way over exposed.

There's only so much shade left in the back yard, I can't save them all. But this particular bed was the worst looking because the plants were small and struggling. The older and bigger plants may not like the sun but they have the resources to survive a few months of it.

I started moving the Hosta from the northside bed a couple of weeks ago, finding locations for each plant where it would get a mostly shady day, digging it up and transplanting it. This is work I can only do on relatively cool days, it is quite strenuous. Yesterday was a cool day and there were five plants left to move. I found spots for three of them on the north side of the house, the rest I simply moved a few feet eastward so that they were partially shaded by a large clump of Solomon's Seal. Not Hapi's Solomon Seal but another one.

Hapi's Solomon Seal with emergency stash of old bones

Now I have an empty garden bed to think about. A neighbour sells day lilies every summer from his extensive back yard daylily plantation. He had some out in his driveway a couple of weeks ago but they are not there anymore so I guess he sold them all. I used to walk by his house every day with Hapi on our way to the Reservoir, but we drive now because it's too far for Hapi to walk, so I don't get a lot of opportunities to chat with him about when he might have more for sale.

I'll have to think about it, see what comes up.

And in case you are wondering what is the point of writing about this, here it is. I view this blog as a kind of diary or journal of daily life. I like to record things that happened and this is as good a place as any. I am not really concerned about having a big audience or trying to increase my readership, I am just writing this for my own satisfaction. You're welcome to read and comment, but don't expect big things here.

My not so free day

Before the rain, when the beach was sandy and the water was clear

I had to take my car back to the garage yesterday morning, nothing serious, just a follow-up to a previous visit, and I thought I had the rest of the day free. Took Hapi to the Reservoir and viewed the damage from the other night's heavy rainfall. As I previously noted they've been renovating the beach and trails at the Reservoir and the heavy rain did a number on it. The trails are mostly okay but the beach washed out to sea, so to speak. Half of the nice beach sand that they had just trucked in got washed into the pond, leaving the gravel underneath exposed and the pond turned into a mudhole. What a mess. Of course all immaterial to Hapi, as long as she can wade in and enjoy a nice soak, mud or no.

Got home and read an email inviting me to a luncheon meeting—all bring-your-own and socially distanced on a shady patio—in less than an hour's time. That was fine, I could do that, and while I was at the meeting my son texted asking if I was available to talk. Sure, why not, just give me an hour to get home again. Only that chat ended up being the better part of two hours and then it was time to get Hapi's supper, respond to some of my writing group emails, get my own supper, and that was pretty much the end of the day. So much for a free day.

The meeting was interesting, we were trying to figure out how to revive our book club. One person refused to do Zoom and a couple of others refused to meet in person indoors, even in a very large space with a small group. So no concensus on that, but everyone agreed that we all missed our old club meetings. We also fear that things are going to get worse in the fall. The local university is going to be going half online and half in person, but there is no plan for providing quarantine space for returning students from away. The town also has no plan for dealing with that. I hear that South Shore ports are dealing with an influx of Americans boating up the East Coast, and we've already had two outbreaks (Nova Scotia and PEI) because of one American who was told to quarantine but decided not to and after infecting a bunch of people tested positive himself. One of the people he infected worked in a continuing care home. This province needs to up its game in enforcing quarantine orders.

My son is trying his hand at online dating, this is actually a pretty good time for that. Because of the pandemic people are spending more time getting to know each other online before actually meeting, and rushing into sex is pretty much off the table. I think that is a good thing. He told me that he had recently received a wedding invitation from an old friend who he considered to be seriously emotionally damaged. He said it made him feel like life was so unfair: here's this guy who my son was sure would never be capable of carrying on a serious relationship inviting him to his wedding, while he himself was still single and looking. Not that he didn't wish his friend well, but darn it, why couldn't it be him? I laughed and told him I understood the feeling completely.

We compared notes on Hapi and Hiro, her brother now deceased. He said that in the last few months of Hiro's life he felt like a full-time hospice worker, Hiro's care was now his job. Sounds familiar. This morning I chatted with a couple who own a dog of similar age and condition as Hapi and they agreed that it really was a full-time job. You wrap your life around it, it takes up so much of your emotional headspace, never mind the time and effort of actual care. They usually go to their cottage on PEI in the summer but they won't be going this year, too hard on the dog. They saw Hapi and me across the pond and told their dog that Hapi was here, their dog picked up his pace in anticipation of meeting Hapi, but when they met he immediately sat down with his back to her and she ignored him too. Dogs are funny.

Renovation

Renovating the Reservoir beach

I was watching my weather app the other day, it was warning of severe thunder storms and tornados about to hit Toronto. As far as I know the tornados did not materialize, but parts of northwestern Toronto got lots of rain, flooding and power outages. Meanwhile at home a very under-reported storm was shaping up for the late evening. The forecast said a bit of rain coming in the late afternoon but not enough to trigger any warnings.

Wow, did they get that wrong! It was an almost record setting deluge overnight with flooding. My sump pump kicked in for the first time in months and was still working hard 24 hours later. Boy am I glad I got that pump and the French drains put in! Several shops in low lying areas had to remain closed yesterday due to flood clean up. Large parts of the Valley are below sea level with extensive dyking dating back hundreds of years, but it was the water coming down from the sky not in from the sea that was the problem.

The good news is, my basement stayed dry and my romaine seeds finally decided to sprout after I had given them up for dead. Who knew flooding was what they required. June and May were unusually dry but the weatherman more than made up for that in a single day, almost 75 mm of rain overnight. The record for July in these parts is 78 mm (set during WWII).

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I've been moving furniture the last few days. It started with the notion that I would get more weaving done in the winter months if I moved the loom from 'the loom room' which I don't heat in the winter time into the living room which I do heat. The living room is small and already chock-a-block full of furniture, so I had to come up with a floor plan that would accommodate the loom. I thought if I moved my desk out and the loom in it was doable. I also thought better to do it now than to wait until the current weaving project is finished, which could be months from now.

Obstacle #1: even folding the back beam of the loom up (it's hinged to do so), the loom is marginally wider than the doorway to the loom room. I tried to force it, thus messing up the recently completed threading of the loom. Reluctantly I backed off and proceeded to take the door off the hinges to obtain that extra half inch of width needed. It's an old door, very heavy, and as it turns out, the hinges are coming loose from the door frame. With great difficulty I got the door off the hinges. The loom passed through the doorway with maybe a millimeter to spare.

Obstacle #2: a loom in the living room makes the living room look like a textile factory. I had taken a lot of measurements and had determined that the loom would fit, but that didn't mean that it would look okay. It completely dominated the space due to its large length, width and height and also due to its very mechanical appearance. After the episode of the doorway I was not up for moving it back or for another round of furniture moving, but I did think that if I simply exchanged places between my favourite reading arm chair and the loom, its dominance would be less noticeable.

Obstacle #3: The loom looked better after the rearrangement and I was tired and hungry so I quit for the day. The next morning I realized that the new location of the arm chair was now blocked from the natural light coming from large windows at the front end of the room and I needed a lamp to be able to read when it was broad daylight outside. Plus I would not be able to see the birdfeeder from the arm chair in its new location, and the loom was set up in the wrong direction to see much of anything. Argh. I spent the whole day mulling that one over and realizing I was going to have to move almost every single piece of furniture in that small room to get what I wanted.

And also realizing that while taking measurements and arranging furniture according to its width and length and overall floor area was doable in my head, I was not taking height measurements and even if I was I could not really picture the effect in my head. I suppose some home decorating design app would take care of that but I was now in no mood to go hunting for such a beast and learning how to use it.

I spent yesterday moving the furniture again. I can now live with the current arrangement, in fact I think it is better than the old one. There are a couple of minor problems (such as having to move the pictures on the walls because their old arrangment now looks completely wrong) and I still have the clean up of the old loom room to do. I spent a couple of hours straightening out the warp threading after it got messed up on its passage through the too narrow doorway, and another half hour getting the door back on its hinges. One of the hinges is loose and will need repair, but I don't think I would have noticed that without having taken the door off in the first place, so I suppose that is a good thing.

I tried to convince Hapi that the newly empty loom room would make a good bedroom for her but she's not buying it. It was a warm night so I left the back door open in case she wanted to go out in the middle of the night. She did, but required help getting up the basement stairs so I had to get up for that. Today I have yet another car repair to take care of and I have to find another place for Hapi and I to go for a walk due to huge park renovations going on at the Reservoir.

Pandemic life at its best!

The Grand Old Malamute (of York)

The sign used to say 'Absolutely...' but a dog owner insisted on having that word blotted out

To paraphrase a familiar nursery rhyme:

When she was up she was up

And when she was down she was down.

But when she was stuck in the middle

She was neither up nor down.

Hapi got stuck on the basement stairs. She was headed up, but her right rear leg gave out and she couldn't move. I stood on the stairs with her for a very long time, petting her and encouraging her until she finally made the last great effort to get up to the top. Later I realized I might have helped her with a towel-lift around her middle, but I didn't think of it at the time.

It's worst late at night and early in the morning, she seems to manage well enough during the rest of the day and even in the middle of the night when I am asleep.

I am thinking about the alternatives, as far as access to the basement goes. Her second choice would be to sleep outside, which I don't mind except on rainy nights. She doesn't notice the rain until she is sopping wet, then she goes into her doghouse and gets her bedding sopping wet. And if the rain is pounding on the deck roof over her doghouse, she'll just stay out in the rain because she doesn't like the noise.

And I of course will sleep right through it all and not address the situation until I awaken in the morning.

There's always something...

Rolling, rolling, rolling: bins and warps

Preparing the warp for winding

On Friday afternoon I invited a couple of women friends for an afternoon beer in my back yard. My back deck is large enough to accommodate three socially distanced chairs, and covered so even if it had rained we could still meet. Since neither of them had been in my back yard before we wandered around a bit to look at the various flower and vegetable gardens. The previous owner of the property planted a lot of perennials so I cannot take credit for how beautiful it is in the summertime, but I do like to show it off.

Both of my visitors live a couple of blocks away; on a map our home locations would make a triangle. It just so happened that it was garbage day. One of my visitors, S, lives in a duplex and the person in the other half of the duplex asked S to put her compost bin out for collection as she would be away for the week. S agreed to do that, but she forgot. When she saw the garbage truck go by she suddenly remembered but it was too late. So she rolled her neighbour's compost bin down the street to a cross street where the garbage had not been picked up yet, and left it there with a note attached explaining why.

On her way to my place S passed the compost bin and saw that it had indeed been emptied so she rolled it to my place and parked it in the driveway. She didn't want anything to happen to it while she was visiting. When she left she rolled the bin back home with her. She is a tiny woman, the bin is almost as big as she is. What a funny sight: S and her compost bin rolling up and down the street!

My other visitor agreed to come by again in a couple of days to help me wind the warp on my loom. With great difficulty one person could do it alone, perhaps it would take an entire day that way. But with one person to help it takes about an hour. One person sits (or stands) at the front of the loom slowly advancing the warp toward her with a lever, while the other person stands at the back of the loom holding the warp tight and combing out tangles in the fine threads. There's a lot of stopping and starting to deal with tangles.

Now I have to tie the warp to the back roller and then wind it back from the front roller. According to my instructions I won't need a helper for that. This method of preparing a loom for weaving is fairly unique as far as I know, it was developed over years of production weaving by my former Halifax teacher Nancy Boyne. This method is good both for having numerous opportunities to check that the threading is accurate and for ensuring the tension is even due to winding the warp twice before tying it down permanently. It's not fast but it almost guarantees accuracy.

First winding completed

My warp winding buddy commented on how meditative the process was, a lot of repetition and concentration, with a little coordination thrown in for good measure.

What a day

I don't know why but yesterday was exhausting. I didn't think I was unusually busy but perhaps I was.

First thing in the morning, after my usual coffee and toast of course, I drove to the Kenny's Farm outlet to buy fresh strawberries. They are only there during strawberry season, it's a small barn in somebody's back yard. They used to sell their berries from the back of a big cube truck but now they have access to the little barn once a year. Unfortunately I was there an hour too early so rather than drive home I took Hapi for her morning walk on a nearby trail. It was still cool and quite lovely, I hadn't been there since some time last year. Hapi waded in a small brook under a footbridge.

The walk back to the car was hotter, the clouds had burned off and it was shaping up to be another hot humid day. We got back to the strawberry barn just after it opened and I negotiated for some strawberries. It was cash-only and I had forty bucks which was more than enough for one flat (eight quarts) but not enough for two, and they didn't like to break up flats. However they did have one half-flat for $14, I had $12 leftover after buying the first flat, so they sold me three quarts from the half-flat. These strawberries were on sale because they were picked the afternoon before and left in the barn overnight. A bit bruised but still in pretty good shape. I drove home.

I started processing the strawberries for freezing right away, washing and trimming and spreading on cookie sheets to freeze individually before throwing them in freezer bags. It takes about 15 minutes a quart, so almost three hours all told. I did 7 quarts right away and had some lunch. Later I checked the garden to see if anything needed emergency watering in the heat of the day, the squashes and lettuce looked a bit wilted. Hapi's walk was enough activity for her so she spent the time sleeping under a big clump of Solomon's Seal.

I phoned my dying friend on the west coast and we had quite a long chat, she is feeling much better than she did the last time I talked to her. Her meds have been changed and that has helped. She was getting palliative care but that has stopped because she is doing so much better. She thinks she might make it through the summer, she is feeling so good. I used to kind of resent our relationship, she does all the talking and I hardly get a word in, so we end up talking about whatever is on her mind, hardly ever what is on mine. Now I just let her have at it. I have lots of time to say whatever I want to, she probably does not.

I walked downtown to pick up Hapi's pain meds at the drugstore, ran into a friend outside the store and chatted a bit, then returned home. On the way home I stopped at a home-made ice cream shop and got a salted caramel ice cream cone to eat as I was walking up the hill. I can only buy an ice cream cone when Hapi is not with me because she goes bananas for ice cream and I have to share. I probably should share since one ice cream cone is really too much sugar for me, but I don't like to.

The walk home up the hill wiped me out, I had to stop a couple of times to catch my breath. That's not normal. Was it all the sugar in the ice cream cone? At home I sat down and read for a bit till I felt recovered and then in the late afternoon I took Hapi for a walk around the block. She insisted on stopping by a friend's place, it is as if she is my social director making sure I get enough socializing during the day. The friend had had a hectic day and wanted to have a beer with me to relax but I said No, I still had 4 quarts of strawberries to process before the end of the day. And I wanted a bath.

Between the ice cream cone and all the strawberries I ate while processing them I was not hungry for supper, I just had some corn chips and guacamole. There was rain in the forecast but these days the forecast is so unreliable that I watered the garden anyway. It rained. Hapi had an early supper and went to bed in the basement, later I got her up for one last pee before I went to bed. One of her rear legs wasn't working properly so she slipped on the stairs. I was right behind to catch her so no harm done, but it is gut wrenching to watch that happen.

She returned to the basement on her own and I left the back door open so sometime in the night Hapi let herself out again. She was asleep in the grass this morning, drenching wet.

Weeds and errors

The "weed" in yesterday's post is Musk Mallow—Malva moschata—and it is considered an invasive weed. It grows on dry but fertile soil, flowers profusely and is considered an edible "wild salad" plant. It was brought to eastern North America by early European settlers. It is a relative of the hollyhock. 

Years ago I had a small clump of daisies by the driveway, and it has since spread all along both sides of the driveway and into the back yard. I've let that one go too, this daisy is not the cultivated variety but the wild one, I see it everywhere. So between the forget-me-nots, the daisies, and now the mallow, my property is being overrun with wildflowers. There are also buttercups, dandelions and yellow hawkweeds growing in the lawn; years of lawn mowing have encouraged these plants to flower low to the ground, below the level of the mower blade. Smart plants. 

And then there's the Creeping Charlie, once that gets onto your property you're done for, it can't be exterminated without heavy duty chemicals. I've got it everywhere. The only weed I actively try to control is the False Bamboo, which grows all over this town. I pull it up every time I see it (on my property or growing right in the road nearby) and if I can't pull it up then I strip off its leaves in hopes of starving it. Somebody introduced that plant thinking it was a nice ornamental, but it chokes out everything. Like the Creeping Charlie only much bigger. I'm prepared to live with Creeping Charlie but not False Bamboo. Unfortunately my neighbour has a big clump of False Bamboo which they allow to go to flower, I think that is why I am fighting off an invasion of the stuff. I politely suggested they cut it down but they are from out of town and don't really see how invasive it is, they like the flowers. I wish we had False Bamboo Police that I could complain to.

I got all the threading done on the loom and the next step is to wind the warp onto the front roller. Unfortunately I discovered two threading errors late yesterday afternoon; I decided not to tackle them at the time because of the receding light and my growing tiredness and hunger. I know where they are so that will be the major task for today, to get those threads sorted without breaking them. It's annoying to have to backtrack, but it's also to be expected. 

When this project is completed, I'm thinking about moving the loom into my living room, that way I can continue to weave in the winter time. The loom room is not heated in the winter. It'll look kind of weird but not being a big home entertainer that shouldn't matter. I've done some measurements and it will fit if I move some other furniture into the loom room.

Nova Scotia had its first new case of covid-19 in three weeks yesterday. It's so easy to let down one's guard when there have been no new cases in that long. I was telling my son that our provincial premier is a bit of a stick-in-the-mud, very risk-averse, cautious and conservative. Never thought I would hear myself saying this, but I like him for it.