The Sun and the Wind

We've had a very strange on-again off-again winter and spring. But despite what the weather does, the days continue to get longer.

Yesterday was the first time this year that we noticed the late afternoon light reaching our living room. We get glorious golden late-afternoon light. It lasts just a moment, and we love it.

The wobbly old glass in our windows adds to the beauty. The walls look like they're underwater.

It's time to take a fresh look at what's on the mantel. I took most of the indoor orchids outside, and then a huge windstorm blew in, and several pots were smashed. Damn. The indoor crockery is firmly attached with "museum wax" because we live in earthquake country, so shifting things around takes some doing.




This isn't a particularly good photograph (neither are, honestly) but it shows the progress on my hand-spinning. I've almost finished with Ziggy, the fleece I've been messing around with for an absurdly long time. Ziggy is the World's Greasiest Sheep. I've washed his fleece a stupid number of times. Ziggy had dark grey wool, with some paler grey bits. I spun the lightest color by itself, but when I wound it into a little cake of yarn, I honestly could see the color difference. Strange.

Ive been pondering my options. I really want to knit a nice sheepy sweater for myself. I measured all the yarn I've made, and think I'll have around 1,200 yards of yarn. I haven't knit up any swatches yet, so I don't know what gauge I have. Will I have enough yarn to make anything meaningful? It's hard for me to tell.

* * * * *

Robb has been putting together a brooder box for the baby chicks that will be arriving in the mail next week. Given everything we've read about the mess of raising chicks, we've decided to keep them in the garage. Robb did a major straightening up. Among the many things that got shifted around was the door that should go between our dining room and our kitchen. This is a cool swinging door, made of gumwood. Unfortunately the paint on the kitchen side of this door is a huge peeling mess. Robb wanted to re-hang the door, but I argued against it. Our kitchen has not yet been repainted, and I didn't want to add any more awfulness to that room.

So, instead of moving the door back into the house, we leaned it up against the inside of our garage doors.

Some time after the garage was built in the 1920s, someone made alterations to the doors, presumably to allow a larger car to fit inside. They added a bit more roof, and attached some wood to the doors, so that they could close at an angle. When I repainted the garage last summer, we realized that the tacked-on roof was completely rotten, so I tore it off. With my bare hands. With the roof gone, we removed the additions to the doors so that they could close normally.

When we bought the house, the garage itself didn't have a roof, and the whole things was on the verge of falling down. We had the building straightened up, and had a new roof put on. But now Robb thinks that the current doors were put on while the garage was in a state of decline. They might have been plumb when the garage was falling down, but now that the building is standing up straight, its doors are all catty-whompus.

Oh, the joys of owning an old home...

All of this might have been little more than an oddity, except for that windstorm.

Robb had hung several layers of tarps against our drafty doors, in an attempt to moderate the temperature in the garage. Baby chicks need to stay warm, and they weren't going to be happy if we didn't do something about the gaps between the doors. We thought things were pretty snug.

I leaned the stray kitchen door up against the garage doors, leaning into the tarps. I went inside to get ready to go to work.

And then the wind kicked up, blew through the crack between the garage doors, through the layers of tarps, and knocked the door over. Right into Robb's back.

Robb is fine now, but being clobbered by the door was a painful shock. That was a ferocious wind.

A Year Ago
Exciting Siding, or Bored Boards

Two Years Ago
Reclaimed Lumber and Black Widow Spiders

Three Years Ago
Bicyclists Slow Down! Sheep Herd Ahead!
This Means Ewe!

Four Years Ago
Robb Hikes!

Five Years Ago
Outsider Art

Six Years Ago
How to Cook When You Can Hardly Walk