Like The Queen
Whatever happens to strike my fancy, but surely some sort of fiber content.

2 Comments:

I hate working in April and May, too. Just not fair. I usually try to take some time off during these months as well.

Part of your "case of the Mondays" must have to do with your new baby Bella, I'm guessing. Momma wants to stay home and play with her newborn instead of going to the big bad job!

;-)

By Blogger Mary, at 9:58 AM  

I think I have a bad case of the Bess today too. :) I don't want to go to work, I don't even want to volunteer. I want to stay at home in my sweat pants and knit all day. If I had my new wheel, I think it would be even worse. It doesn't even feel like May here it's been more like March, but I know exactly what you mean. Maybe we should just give everyone the month of May off. Sounds like a good plan to me.

By Blogger erica, at 12:16 PM  

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Monday, May 15, 2006  

Lawsee. It’s Monday already and 5 whole days of uninterrupted work lie ahead of me. How did the world get this way? C? I’m so where you are. I’m so sure, too, that it’s not just you - can’t be - it is some astral alignment - it must be.

Funny how you can know a job and do a job well and even like a job, and yet, not want to go to that job. I always suffer from that disorder the worst in May, when Virginia becomes the most beautiful place this side of heaven. Crystal blue skies, a pulsing green to the forest that makes your head swim, fragrances so sweet and intoxicating you feel like you’re breathing in nourishment - or at least, desert. Even rainy May days in Virginia are a treat - soft grey skies are a magnificent foil to the vivid greenery all about. Abandoned gardens can still impress a casual viewer in Virginia in May. Walks down the lane in May afford vistas that shimmer in your eyes. Violets bloom in the swamp islands in May - in Virginia. Dogs come home with their fur grey with wheat seeds, from running through Virginia’s May fields. They leap above the barley, exploding out of the yellow tops with forelegs tucked under and ears pricked high. If Paradise were anything we could know or sense, it would be Virginia in May.

If I were in charge of the world I would make May come around about 6 times a year. I like other seasons, and October in Virginia runs a very close second to May, so we could have 4 of them. And then we need September, since that is my birthday month. A couple of weeks in July for swimming and a couple more in January for a little snow fun, and then December for all the festivities would round out a perfect year. At least, perfect for me.

But we have only one May and it lasts just a tad more than 4 weeks and then it’s gone. Mayflies bite. Heat attacks. Flowers droop. Drought conditions prevail. Humidity soars. It’s summer and I’m not 10, so I don’t get a long vacation. Having to work in May always feels like a sour practical joke. I usually manage to get some time off in May, but one of these days I’m going to take the whole month off.

Oh. Well. Where did that come from? Oh. Yes. Well. I don’t want to go to work today either. I’ll be happy enough once I get there, for I do have an interesting job. Just that I’ve done it for years and now is the last hiccup of time before the Summer Rush sets in.

Hmmm. and this isn’t what I wanted to write about. I wanted to comment on how strange it feels to have Zero e-mail on a Monday morning. I am not surprised that my nearest and dearest haven’t written - for I happen to know that each one of them is wildly busy this weekend. And it’s Mother’s Day. And weekends include Sundays. And I am not surprised that they are all busy. But I was surprised that TifFUNie and DontBBALD and Inve$mentsRUs didn’t send me any tender missives. It is a strange thing when there is no junque, junk nor junx in an e-mail box.

As for Life with a Golding Wheel, I just want to say that I am still climbing the learning curve with Bella. A 24/1 ratio is definitely tricky to spin. You spin at that ratio with the central flyer. It takes two drive bands, operating your simple spinning wheel like a gear driven complex machine. That means two flyers spin at the same time. That means that if your take-up is not just right, and you’re spinning very thin silk, it can leap from one flyer’s set of hooks onto the adjacent one and stop your wheel like a spanner thrown into the works. I believe I'll just remove the left flyer when using the 24/1 ratio. I’ve got some green silk wound onto the bobbin but it’s not anything close to the consistent spinning I wanted. Silk is tricky you know. I’m seriously thinking of winding it onto a storage bobbin and going back to nice, springy, flexible, cooperative, non-static wool.

The other thing I learned yesterday was that, just because a BD has watched you spin with delicacy and sensitivity, and bare feet, for 4 years doesn’t mean he won’t ask to sit down at your New Wheel and Not take off his shoes and Treadle Hard just to see how fast all those gears spin, and slip the tension cord so that the spring gets wound around the bobbin and stretched beyond use! Evidently this is not an uncommon situation, because there was a spare tension spring in the kit that came with Bella. We will know better, next time.

Pictures late in the day. I promise. Really I do.

posted by Bess | 6:36 AM
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