It is a mystery

We only got two inches of snow here, we're too far west of this storm. I hope everyone else has power and can shovel out quick! Jade in NYC still has power and sent me some photos of a lot of snow but I'm waiting to hear back from my siblings on their snow situations. Z should be good, she's in NYC but my brother in MD hasn't responded yet but pictures last night indicated he also got a bunch of snow.

The weather was fairly miserable this week, it rained, it snowed a little, it rained some more. Everything is properly mud and the ground has started defrosting. It's gross. We are preparing to tap maple trees this week, so all the focus has gone there for work.

I baked Wednesday since it was proper nasty and made potato rolls, fig newtons, yogurt and blueberry bars. I ordered more sorghum flour and tapioca flour from Bulk Foods and they had black mission figs on sale, so I got some and made Stella Parks' Fig Newtons recipe. I hope she's doing okay, she left the internet as far as I can tell. The potato rolls are fine, I ate them for lunches all week. I keep trying new recipes in the hopes that I can finally have the perfect gluten free bread recipe but I think I will always be disappointed. I want them to be wheat bread and they simply will not be that. I have had the best luck with delicious flatbreads like the pita which aren't so tied up in delicious bread memories and are reasonably tasty. I do want to try sourdough since I bought a whole book of gluten free sourdough recipes but I think I need to stop getting my hopes up in general. Of course they won't taste like wheat. Sourdough will happen when my parents move out and I have a fridge to myself for experiments. I miss making wheat bread. And eating it. 

I signed up for a pottery class in February and I'm thoroughly enjoying it, I went both Wednesday and Thursday night to the studio and have been enjoying it. I don't think I'll continue it, I don't actually need another hobby and one that is so time consuming but it is a lot of fun and the teacher has been reasonably impressed with my progress. I've made a bunch of bowls, a mug and a pot. I think I'm just going to keep making bowls because I need bowls in my life.


( more rambling and photos )

Hey all, if you'd like to join the crafting hangout, it is tonight from 6-8pm ET!

monday, I drove 2.5 hours each way down to a meeting for nutrient management credits. The one state has decided that consultants don't get to do online programs for credits anymore, so I need to go to in person meetings now. Its not the worst now that I live closer. I made it down and back in plenty of time, the meeting was fine, I got a decent amount of knitting done and chatted with some folks from my old company that I haven't seen in years. 

Tuesday I cut and split more wood, my dad brought down more trees. I filled a wood bin full and got it under cover. 

Wednesday, I drove to Ohio. This trip was originally to purchase and pickup a used donut machine for the farm. Late last week, the ebay guy bailed on me, we had been negotiating prices in messages and abruptly, the listing was gone and he stopped responding. Not sure what that was about because he said he had two of them, but whatever. Since the donut machine was in Ohio, in the city where Tyronicbob (A- from crafting night) lived, I arranged to stay with her a while ago. When the ebay guy bailed, I let her know but figured it's February, I didn't really have anything urgent going on, I could totally drive to Ohio. 

I never did anything irresponsible or impulsive in my 20s, when I feel most people do their silly impulse trips, so why not now? 

It was a 7 hour drive which on the way down, I hadn't slept super well that night and the drive dragged, I was Too Aware. I stopped several times and took at nap at one rest stop just to make sure I could keep going. Snacks and podcasts got me to A's house by 4:30 or so. I have learned that Ohio culture is putting the name of the town on the overpass bridge in case you don't know where you are and all the other signs aren't helpful enough. The city A- is in had some traffic but overall, the drive was quiet. I didn't have any long haul driving buddies which always makes me a little sad. 

When I arrived, I was pretty tired, but we settled in and chatted and watched some olympics events as background noise and then we ate tacos that she had made ahead of time and put in the fridge. We relaxed, watched some stuff and chatted more, then we got talking about the podcast Kill James Bond and Abigail Thorne's writing/directing/performance of The Prince and A- put it on the tv. It was phenomenal! What a cool play, cast and performance. The recording is on Nebula, not sure if a subscription is required, but wow, super worth it if you do have to pay. The plot is that people get stuck in Shakespeare performances as the characters and are trying to escape. It's so full of feelings and it's so good as a recorded live performance. After that, sleep time for me. 

A- did some funky stuff to adjust her sleep schedule enough to be awake and aware during the daytime and we watched some hockey before heading over to the conservatory. It was absolutely so cool! There was beautiful glasswork interspersed with the plants and they had an orchid greenhouse on display with all sorts of winding paths and absolutely bursting with plants. They also had a desert greenhouse and a butterfly greenhouse although the butterflies were only just hatching and being released. Extremely cool and the colors of plants and different shapes and layouts, the rocks, the paths, the glassworks. Super cool and really awesome work. 

Then we went and ate lunch at a nearby market, which had a bunch of small food stalls inside a big warehouse building. We got somali food, which was stuff on rice, absolutely delicious and warm and filling. Then we got ice cream, which was from a local place, smooth and creamy and delicious. A- drove the long way everywhere we went to give me a tour of the city and all the neat things, then we headed to a historic neighborhood to an incredible bookstore. 

This bookstore is in two back to back connected uhh, closest thing I can describe them as is triplexes, but really they took these buildings and opened up some doors between them and created just a labyrinth bookstore. The website says it has 32 rooms, but they're all small and narrow and weirdly laid out and there's nooks of shelves everywhere. It's so cool. It took us over an hour to find our way up to the third floor where the scifi and fantasy section was. All the books they carry are new but they had a ton of more obscure books. Really cool. I bought a bunch of books, some nonfiction, some fiction. 

A- was starting to get tired, so we headed back to the house and I settled in to watch some snowboarding and she took a nap. We ate lunch leftovers for dinner and then watched more olympics. We created a delightful game as we watched the pairs ice dance free skate replay. So pairs figure skating is mostly about having dramatic feelings (love or tragic) and most of the music is pretty boring. So instead of listening to the music, we created better romance stories for the pairs based on an element of the performance and hashed it out to a movie plot. It was so much fun. For instance, the USA team had the flamenco/matador inspired performance, so we decided that the plot was actually about the movie that was being made about matadors, the woman was the talent scout for the local area, the man was the local bull wrangler who loved his bulls very much. The movie was a disaster due to the director's conflict with the lead actor and the talent scout pulled the bull wrangler into being her local guide and help until she got frustrated with the director and just shoved the bull wrangler into being the lead in the movie. He does it under protest and that's his only acting role ever. The talent scout decides to stay in spain to stay with the bull wrangler because he just wants to go back to taking care of his sweet little babies (the bulls) and she's a bitch with a clipboard (h/t to Sonnet from craft nights for this phrase/person type) and can wrangle people in spain who need wrangling and they live happily ever after. 

The only ones we didn't make up stories for were the Cleopatra performance (look ma, no hands was the absolute best lift ever), the matrix performance, the Dune one and the scottish performance (so oddly done that we didn't think they really thought it through. they could have changed the music and the costumes to be so much better, We Had Opinions). We came up with first mate/captain on the high seas Moby Dick style, jewel heist, spy romance, research historian/archivist, godzilla attacking the city and only the jet fighter/nuclear scientists could stop it but it's a tragedy so godzilla won in the end, an alien invasion blows up paris and they have to flee and he's secretly a parasitic alien and they blow up the other aliens and fall in love, and some others that I can't remember right now, but what an absolute delight to banter back and forth and build a little story out of pretty meh music. The performances were all great but honestly, dramatic/tragic feelings is very boring at this point. I wish I could find photos of everyone competing since that would help me remember all the stories, but I can't find a good feed for just photos and the replays have been removed, so oh well. 

I went to bed after that because it was responsible of me to do. 

This morning I got up around 6, ate breakfast and was on the road by 7am. A- did some split sleep to see me off and so she'd be good for work tonight and I drove home. I did have a tractor trailer driving buddy for a couple hours on the highway which was nice. I got into a good driving zone today, let the podcasts roll and the time passed quickly and I wasn't too aware of it which was nice. 

I got in, went and laid in bed for an hour, went to take a shower and my dad accidentally let the outdoor burner go mostly out so the water was cold, so I went and got that started back up and took a shower at my parents house instead. 

It was an absolute delight to hang out with A-, she is so sweet and fun and great to hang out with in person, not just on the internet. Her cat was a chatty little goof too. It was so nice and I'm so glad I went even though it was a long drive and a short trip. So much fun! That's 3/3 internet friends being absolute delights in person, so I'm on a roll. 

I knew this cold was coming, so I spent the last few days cranking out some firewood. Thursday, I split all of the log that I cut up, just dropping it onto the ground. This is split as small as I can make it to help it dry out and burn fast and hot. The basswood is very nice to split, the centers of the log, I could push it an inch into the wedge and it would pop the whole thing, so I could stick a section on and split four logs out of it in about 20 seconds. Very good. Then I went and did another dump trailer load of wood for the burner. I didn't really need it yet, but I had the time and also the storage space for it next to the burner. Plus I knew I'd go through a lot of wood with this weather and I'll be busy next week. 

Friday, I played musical equipment. The winch was on the M which is our biggest and beefiest tractor. The dump trailer was hooked up to the E. I had to take the winch off the M, unhook the trailer, put the winch on the E, put the forks on the M and also rescue the winch cable from the logs my dad skidded because the PTO pull button on the M was frozen and he couldn't pull the cable back in. I dropped the winch in place, put the forks on, lifted the logs so I could pull the cable out, then hooked the E up and got everything put away. 

Then I used the forks to get wood storage and stack the split wood. My dad built a bunch of U shaped things out of three pallets to hold wood, so I fetched those from the heifer shed which was irritating because of the things stacked in front of them. I did discover that the deer had broken into and fully emptied a bag of cover crop seed that had gotten left out there. Rude. I moved the rest of the seed back to where they shouldn't be able to get to them. Hopefully. I filled two of the holders with wood. In the picture, you can see one of the two rows of logs that fit in the holder.



Then I started cutting those logs. Only got most of one done before it got dark and the wind started picking up. 

It was 9F when I woke up this morning at 5:30am, by 8am it had dropped to 1F and it's come back up to 5F but we've had some intense wind so far. I can't run the indoor stove with these kinds of winds (the chimney isn't tall enough for our roofline, so the wind will blow down the chimney and smoke the inside of the house. we are on the hunt for the right size chimney pipe to pop on top to help with that), so I loaded the outdoor burner up but it isn't quite keeping up. It's currently 61F in the kitchen, which on the east side of the house, so I'd say the living room is probably 58F. I am wearing layers and blankets. It's not the burner's fault, there's only one loop in the whole house in the downstairs, so there's only so much it can do. I just added a couple of logs to the burner when I went out a few minutes ago. To be fair, we run around 63, 64F in the kitchen normally, so we aren't much below normal. ETA: the wind dropped off right around dark, so I've started the stove back up!

I did get dog blankets and towels and covered some of the windows and doors that are problematic. We should make it through tonight with enough ambient warmth (-4F plus wind predicted) and it will be less windy tomorrow, so I'll start the stove back up even with some wind. We never get the predicted wind speeds because of the mountains, so 30mph winds predicted tomorrow will be ~20 and that's good enough for me. We have 48mph predicted today and we've only gotten 33mph. It is extremely cold outside, I'm running between buildings when I have to go out because it's so cold. I'll need to fully bundle for the next burner load up tonight. 

One of my heated blankets has bit the dust, the one that I keep downstairs. It has made a funny smell the last few times I've used it and I found an area where the heating wire seemed twisted up, so I picked open a seam and the wire is normally white, but in that section it was red and coiled up very tightly. Seems bad. So I'm just using it as a regular blanket now and I've emailed the company I bought it from. 

I feel like maybe I should try and do some computer work but the cold is making me sleepy, so I've been spinning and working on my loom and watching olympics, mostly hockey. Some of the big air skateboarding which is just a bonkers sport. I feel like we've gone too far. It's too much. Humans shouldn't go that high or spin or land like that. 

January crafting goals

• finish weaving yarn inventory - spreadsheet already set up and entry started - entry all done except for two cones that I found well after the fact and still need to enter
• get loom into crafting room - done! and started putting a project on it already
• spin! and ply the two things I've got languishing - I have been spinning, but no finishes. I've done three bobbins and almost done with the fourth of the big spin on my CPW. Also been working on spindle projects
• knit the sweater, maybe try and finish it? I've got two crochet projects that I want to make - ugh, I was making progress on this until I hurt my finger
• finish the coat?!?!?! - okay, this was ambitious, but I'm now working on buttonholes, so I'm getting clsoe
• hang some art on the crafting room walls - hung three pieces of art!
• other - wound an 8 yard warp and have been tying it onto the previous warp that I left on there so I can just pull it through the heddles and reed. My tensioning sucks on this warp, so I'll have a lot of adjustments to make. But I'm mostly done tying on and I'm getting very good at the knot.

Weaving yarn inventory! This was really good to do. I found a bunch of things that are very similar and I can use together in projects and a bunch of weird stuff that I might give away. I took each item, weighed it, figured out fiber content, yardage or estimated yardage, yards per pound, and recorded some other useful information (handspun, where I got it, haloing, etc). I had to burn test some cones since there wasn't labels and there's a bunch where I estimated yardage because I couldn't actually tell what weight yarn it was. But I can now sort by color, ypp or anything else and get a bunch of yarns that are very similar. I also tagged them all with numbers and sorted them into two boxes, one of synthetic yarns and one of natural yarns. I also included a bunch of lace weight knitting yarns in here because I'm not going to knit or crochet with lace weight. Probably not. So they would make a great weaving project all together is my guess. Total number of weaving yarns: 73. Technically more since I haven't entered the current projects yarn but shhh

( Read more... )

February goals

• hang up more art
• weave!
• finish coat?
• spin - finish the big project? ply and clear some bobbins, I need to free some up for big spin.
• Knit sweater
• fix blanket that my aunt wants me to fix, big problem is that none of the yarn I can find will color match it and it is 50 years old.

We got around a foot of snow, no ice at all. It stayed aroudn 7F all day sunday and rose to a balmy 20F yesterday. My dad got giddy and spent a good portion of the day plowing all the snow, I think he's missed doing it since I came back and have doing it. I cleaned off all the vehicles and shoveled the sidewalk at least. It was -8F this morning somewhat unexpectedly, but I left the faucet dripping and everything was okay there. 

I felt under the weather the last two days, I think I stressed myself out too much with Friday and Saturday work, especially the straw spreading so intensely. My problem elbow (right) feels weird. Not super sore, just weird. I was using it more when putting bales in the shredder to keep pressure off the wound in my left index finger and I think it's unhappy because of that. Someday I will get that checked out. But also I suspect I have a period coming up this week which is always a terrible time. I was able to get a new T prescription finally but the effects won't kick back in for a bit. I suspect my tiredness is hormonal related generally. Bleh. 

Sunday, I spent a good amount of time spinning, which is something I can do so long as I remember to keep my index finger away from thr wool. Can't knit for sure. 

I did remove the stitches yesterday, the skin flap finally sealed itself up solidly and the stitches touching things were hurting more than the cut, so I just got them out. Plus I think I was fussing with them in my sleep even though I had wrapped it. It still makes washing dishes extremely difficult. 

Yesterday, I read fanfiction, made this cookie recipe (delicious even if it was way way way too thick to pipe even after adding a lot more milk, I wonder if the milk quantity was a typo), tried making foccacia and burned the bejeesus out of it, made risotto for dinner and crafted. I was very tired and down feeling for most of the day but I did perk up and feel better with crafting hangout time. Yay socializing! Plus I made progress on projects. 

Fanfiction wise, I have started reading a few witcher fanfics. I don't even go there, but somehow ended up reading (via the author gremble rec'd below):

The Accidental Warlord and His Pack by inexplicifics - listen, I don't even go here. I know basically nothing about Witcher, but this series explains everything anyway. It's very enjoyable. Very wish fulfillment but enjoyable all the same

Then I looked at friend dragonlady7 (bomberqueen17 on Ao3 and tumblr)'s fic which I do love all the stuff she writes in other fandoms and decided to jump in and have read almost all of her witcher fics in the last three days. It's over 1 million words. It's very good. Still ongoing but she's a great writer and I do love threesomes with feelings and she likes writing those. Even her smut is usually in service of character and relationships development so I'll read it which is pretty good for my taste. Most times smut is skippable but I'll read hers mostly. 

other two fanfics I've been reading lately

Bring Down Rain by gremble - ever want to think about the inherent horror of ComfortUnits in the Murderbot universe but also how they're people too???? it's so good. Still updating, but the author is pretty consistent and it's almost done

for the want of a jewel by FormLessVoidbeast - The above series reminded me of this original fic which I had read first and now that I've looked, it is inspired by it. Really fun and good, interesting worldbuilding too. 

Friday morning we spread three loads of straw before the wind picked up too much to spread more, personal best for me and I was pretty sore for it. But I sat around the rest of the morning and then went out just before noon to clean bale strings out of the shredder. That went fine, it goes pretty quick if you don't let them build up too much. I was putting it back together, I took my glove off to thread the nut, started tightening it, the wrench slipped and I jammed my left index finger onto one of the shredder blades. To be fair, the nut is under the shredder, so I was working crouched on the ground up over my head (equipment chocked, always always always), but it felt bad. 

The cut is parallel to my fingernail and wraps around the front and went quite deep. I sat on the couch for about an hour after rinsing it and it was still bleeding decently, so I took myself to urgent care. The good news is that they weren't busy at all, so I got seen immediately and it was rinsed and I got a couple stitches in the front of my finger to help stabilize the skin flap. The shot to numb my finger hurt way worse than the actual wound. 

It was bitter cold yesterday morning (3F), but dad and tried to shred straw anyway. However, we are using the Kubota which is the newest tractor and has a very fine mesh fuel filter. And it was so cold that the diesel had thickened and the tractor would start sputtering every time we tried to turn the PTO on. So we gave it up. I went back inside for a few hours. Went to cut some wood and somehow during my cutting ,the chain jumped the track and dinged up the new bar and chain. I think the side nuts loosened up somehow but now the chain won't fit on the track, so I need to see if it can be fixed. Deeply annoying, stupid mistake to not check.

Then I started moving tractors under cover. Even in the afternoon it was so cold and I ended up having to jump the 395 and still need to jump the E this morning. I split a little bit of wood with the 395 while I had it running but there are log chunks so big that I need help rolling them. They're huge. In that time, the wind died down enough and I put the 395 away in the metal shed and headed down to west. It was 11F and the kubota worked fine. We got the last two loads of straw down, working past dark even if I bunged up the final row we did by accidentally dropping two bales off the wagon and being short of what we needed. We were worried about safety after dark with making the step between platform and wagon, but it turns out the hardest part was not seeing the bale strings. Don't recommend, won't be doing that again. 

At some point, I bonked my finger despite my best efforts and reopened it a bit, I think it was the wood splitting or when I whacked it on the railing. Probably not smart to split wood. I have been keeping it wrapped when out working and that's been okay, not too bad to grab bales since I can flex it backwards enough to stay out of the way.

I did drain the downstairs bathroom but I think it froze in the faucet since it was just a trickle that came out once I reopened it. I think I'm going to switch to letting it trickle instead of drain, we are suppose to have overnight temps down around zero all week and it already partially froze. Plus I'm getting tired of having water go down my sleeves when I drain the pipes. And it's annoying to fill the back of the toilet from the kitchen. Toilet line shouldn't freeze since it's closer to the basement. ETA: cleaned the faucet filter and we are back on full blast! going to trickle it at night still

The snow has started here, just about an inch or so but it's coming down fast. The plows went by once already, which is surprising but they are probably going to try and keep on top of it. I haven't seen any vehicles go by, so everyone is staying home if they can which is very good. I need to go pick up the wood I split yesterday and jump the E so we can park it under cover but otherwise we are good. I'm planning to bake today and lay around and do not much useful things

project: get my parents moving on projects is going well, I helped my mom paint most of a room in the rental this afternoon, high priority since they finally have renters moving in feb 1st. it took 30 mins of her flitting around doing sanding and wandering away and me taping things and then we got to painting. I rollered and she did brush touchups of corners and edges. I'll need to roller the main areas again tomorrow but progress! There is a second room and then we'll switch to their house doing primer on some walls there. 

My phone has decided to receive group text messages again, verizon must have changed something on their end. I'm still using a unihertz phone and just accepted that I wouldn't receive group texts, the only ones I am regularly in are my family group chat or my parents and I. So I could just ask my parents if there was group texts in the family group chat. This actually worked okay. Not great, but I didn't miss much. But something changed, I now get all the group texts. 

early bedtime today I think, two loads of straw spread, moved a bunch of equipment, pulled a lot of twine out of the straw shredder too.