Weaving has become an obsession with me. I warped my loom in Rowe last week. I was proud to say after 430 ends only one was threaded wrong and I was able to fix it with a string heddle. I love having an instructor who knows the craft so well she can teach you the tricks that get you out of a jam.
I wound an extra long warp so I could weave three of these throws in succession with different colors. This is the traditional blue and white. The next will be with a variegated green/brown combination and the last will be anyone’s guess. Christmas is coming. I figure I can have these off of the loom by Halloween and move on to other gifts.
Although I weave during the week at the studio in Brimfield we are weaving cotton. Cotton is what I started with when I began learning to weave, it gives a beautiful definition to the structure. For that reason I like weaving with it, especially when I am doing something new. My last project for the class this past spring was the red and white wool throw and it was revelation.
I love the feel of wool. I love the way it feels going through my hands. Winding the warp seemed effortless, it had a calming effect. That’s really the reason I love having something in wool always going somewhere. It’s not just the counting and meditative repetition of the act of weaving, it is also the feel. This throw is warped in Jaggerspun Maineline 2/8 yarn, it is soft and wonderful to work with. The weft on this section is Bartlettyarn Maine Wool which is a beautiful worsted weight yarn.
The other aspect of weaving with wool is the smell – I’m thinking it’s only fiber people that will understand that statement. It smells like it came from an animal, it’s wonderful. Don’t get me wrong – it doesn’t smell while you’re weaving but you can take a hank of wool and breathe it in, ahhhh. It’s in the finishing that some of these remaining oils are washed out and that’s what makes the fiber “bloom”. There are so many times when I look at the weaving on the loom and think it doesn’t look as good as it should. Once it is washed and dried a miracle happens and it often looks better than anticipated.
That’s the thing I’ve found with weaving – every aspect of it is equally important to the finished project. People tell me they love to weave but hate to warp. To me that is the most important part, otherwise nothing else works. It is time consuming, yes, but I take it as a challenge. I try to beam my warp so the tension is even, thread my heddles so there are no mistakes, slay the reed without skipping a space all the first time. It becomes tedious when I don’t pay attention and have to take it all out and start over. Throwing the shuttle is the easy part most of the time. Finishing can be tedious as well but when you do it it’s magic. What looked just okay on the loom becomes a masterpiece once it is washed. All aspects of the process come together.
Joseph’s Coat
I have been thinking about my family (my mother, father and siblings) for the last few days. How we interact with each other, our senses of humor, our interests. I have always thought that people are who they are because of the lifelong bond they have with each other. The shared experiences. My sister, brother and I can relate to so many things because of the memories we have of situations that closely relate to what is happening now. Or how we saw our parents and grandparents react in different situations. We use our past experiences to make decisions on events or to figure out the social protocol within our social sphere. We also have the same sense of humor. It’s really more than that though, our minds all work alike.
My two daughters grew up spending most of their time with my husband’s side of the family. They have a lot of cousins their own age and we all spent most weekends together. They grew up with cousins as best friends. That’s not a bad thing. My sister has two daughters around the same age as mine. They did not spend a lot of time together because of the distance between us or later because of time constraints. It’s not like they didn’t know their cousins, they just didn’t have the same intimate knowledge of one another as they did with their father’s side of the family. They didn’t really know their aunt and uncle on my side well at all – only because every holiday we all spent with our respective in-laws.
A couple of years ago one of my nieces was home for the holidays. We hardly see her now – she’s lives on the other side of the country. My sister’s family came to spend the day with ours. They brought their dogs. We spent the entire day laughing. Once everyone had left my younger daughter said, “I’ve always felt as though I didn’t fit in, now I realize I was just hanging out with the wrong family!” She had found her place. The place where you really understand your roots, or why you are the way you are.
This was the beginning of realizing that who we are may be more genetic than environmental. For years I tried to fit into my husband’s family but they are not who I am. What we have in common is our children.
Since my son and I have reconnected this realization comes home so often that it is fact to me now. He has never known his biological family until this past spring and we did not know him. The first things noticed were the physical attributes but the subtle, personality traits showed up almost immediately. The day he met my daughters was really a whirlwind but after he left everyone was in agreement – he is one of us. It all fit. For us this has been easy, a delightful revelation each time we get together. We gather him in and never seem to get quite enough, the visits end too quickly, there is so much of us to share. At the same time I wonder how overwhelming we might be. How much do you really want to know about a past that never existed until last March?
Since those first few meetings I’ve learned many things about him, about me. Some things can be looked at as bizarre coincidences but the reality is that we are who we are born to be, not who we spend our lives with. Our interests, how we communicate with others, our spiritual selves, those seeds were planted at our conception and we in turn pass them along to our children. My children just happen to be the ones that have made this so abundantly clear to me.
This was going to be a rant about health insurance but is going to be a rant about our present healthcare system – from the inside out.
Tuesday morning I woke up with what I thought was an asthma attack. I hadn’t had one in over 2 years but always have my trusty albuterol inhaler available. I was short of breath, light-headed, and I had this pain in my back. I felt like someone was sitting on my chest. I used the inhaler – nothing. Damn. I called my doctor thinking I would be going in for a course of Prednisone and would be done.
Well, my doctor wasn’t comfortable with my symptoms. He sent me for stat blood work and a chest x-ray. This is at 11:00 AM. At 3:30 he calls and tells me he thinks I really need to go to the ER. The D-dimer blood test was a little elevated and he thought I should have a cat scan to check for a pulmonary embolism – and oh while I was there just stay overnight and have a nuclear stress test in the morning. Then he said something about my insurance having an issue but don’t delay, go to the ER now. Oooookaaay.
I spent from 4:00 PM until 2:30 AM in my little room on a gurney in POD A of the ER at Baystate. When I arrived I was thinking “Oh, this is pretty comfy”. By the time I went to my room I was thinking “Dear God, get me outta here!”
I took the photo in the ER, I wasn’t feeling so bad at the time and figured I could make a post out of this little experience. As I took the photo I was thinking “Wow, this probably breaks every HIPAA law there is”, but I took it anyway. I intended to take more.
I had a great nurse while I was in the ER. She had been nursing for 45 years – in the ER for 25, she knew her stuff. She put in an IV. We had a conversation about how healthcare was nothing like it used to be. She said back in the day they would never do all the tests they do now. The tests were to cover the drs. butts in case something happened. If the lawyers were taken out of healthcare it might be saved, as it is now it’s swirling in the bowl. She really didn’t need to tell me that, up until this point it had been all about the tests. I had blood drawn 2 more times in the ER.
The CAT scan took place at about 8:30 or 9:00. They go through all of the side effects of the dye that they were going to inject me with. I had a vague recollection of having this done before but for the life of me I can’t remember when. The test was done in a short period of time and it was back to my little ER room to wait for a bed.
When I finally went up to my room they put the monitor on me and left me alone – for about a half an hour. Then my roommate was moved in. Once she was settled I drifted off to sleep a little. At 4:00 a nurse came in to take more blood. At this point I had a screaming headache. I questioned the reason for more blood tests – I was just staying for another test. She told me they needed it for the stress test. She stuck me – got nothing. She said she would call phlebotomy. Half hour later another nurse comes in – stuck me again (ouch!), got nothing. She said she would call phlebotomy. About 5:00 I called the nurse and told her I had a really bad headache and was really nauseous. They gave me Zofran IV for nausea and two Tylenol. While she was there she wanted to do the blood test. I argued, told her to tell my dr. I was noncompliant but finally just relented, it was easier.
Now I have to tell you the top of my head felt as though it was going to just blow off. This was the mother of all headaches. I had told 3 RNs about this and they brought me two Tylenol – ooookaaay. My dr. came in and I told him about this headache as well. Let me see here, I couldn’t talk to him because I am in a fetal position because my head hurts so much. I couldn’t open my eyes because the light bothers them and he says I’ll get you a Tylenol with codeine. Okay. There’s something wrong with this picture.
Between the Zofran and the Tylenol I made it through the stress test. I went back to my room and resumed the fetal position because my head was killing me. Cardiologist after cardiologist came in to tell me that all of my tests are fine – sheesh. I couldn’t really talk to them because the nausea had come back. “Do you have a history of migraines?” I do but they never last more than a few hours, I always have an aura involved and this headache is getting worse.
My dr. calls my room phone to say I’m going to discharge you now, everything looks fine. When the nurse came in I told her that I think this has to be a reaction to the dye in the CAT scan considering when it started. I told her this is the kind of headache I would be going to the ER for. She says she’ll call my dr. She comes back and says he wants me to have a double dose of Zofran and morphine. REALLY?!? I have a reaction to morphine and they all know it, that’s his solution. Fine, do it, I have to get home.
I get the injections. Okay, the morphine dulls the pain enough so I can get home, but the vomiting begins as I expected it would.
I leave the hospital around 6:00 PM and go directly to bed when I get home – along with all of the dogs who have missed me sooooo much (okay, that part was pretty nice).
The headache finally abated Thursday afternoon.
I am concerned and disgusted by the tunnel vision of all of the caregivers around me once I was on the floor. The only thing they could look at was my heart and did not listen to a word I said about anything else.
What started out as some tests ended with me being quite ill. All of the results were fine. I still have no idea what happened, why I had those symptoms and my dr. says we will keep an eye on things. Maybe I did something to my back, that’s his answer. I should let him know if I have any other symptoms going forward.
I’ll be sure to do that. Mmmhmmmm. The problem I see here is if I have symptoms how bad do they have to be before I call anyone again. This was a totally insane experience because my dr. freaked out about an elevated lab. Obviously doctors these days NEVER spend time as patients. Almost everyone that ran tests or took care of me was competent and nice except for the physicians. There is something very, very wrong with the way this system works. How can 6 physicians look at a patient in a fetal position, unable to function in any way and think that is okay? My tests and labs are okay so I’m fine.
I was never so happy to get home to my bed and lick my own wounds. Now, I can’t wait to see the bill.
We have a couple of friends who work for the railroad, they are or were engineers for both Amtrak and freight. They are interesting people to talk to. I had a conversation one afternoon with one of them about the amount of time I had spent as a kid doing things related to trains or tracks or train wrecks. I decided to dig through the archives and post just a few of the shots taken in the 60’s and early 70’s of us spending time on tracks.
On every vacation we would have to stop at something that had to do with tracks – while this wasn’t a train it was a trolley at the Seashore Trolley Museum in Arundel, ME. It seemed like no matter where we were going on vacation we could always make a stop at a place like this.
Of course there was Steamtown, USA located in Bellows Falls, VT which was just close enough so we would go fairly often. It opened in 1963 and these photographs were taken in 1964.
We would stand to have our picture taken, but most of the time we would watch my Dad climb all over and sit in the engineers seat on the various engines that were there.
In 1984 Steamtown was moved to Scranton, PA and my father and mother made a trip to see it in its new incarnation. He always knew where those locomotives were or were headed.
Then there were the train wrecks. These were truly family events for us as kids. Very rarely would we go with our Dad anywhere except on our once a year vacation. If there was a wreck within a reasonable driving distance we went. Often we would go on consecutive nights to see how the clean up was coming along.
This wreck was in Charlemont in the winter of 1967. This was an exciting time for us.
This was also before the days of lawsuits and liability issues so when there was a wreck it took on a carnival atmosphere (maybe it was because I was a kid that it seemed that way). People would walk around the wreckage – help clean out box cars taking home whatever they could (they would be called looters now – it was a different time). We would go at night and watch them work under huge lights, part of a gallery of locals where this was about as much excitement as you could ask for on a February night.
This last photograph was taken at Clark’s Trading Post in Lincoln, NH. We went there a number of times on vacation but it was only in recent years that I realized it wasn’t because my parents loved Franconia Notch, it was more about going to Clark’s and seeing the locomotive that they had there. We always had to take a ride on it and I’m sure Dad talked the ear off of the engineer. While there we would also have to go to Mt. Washington and watch the locomotives for the Cog Railway come and go. At the time they were steam and pushed the cars up the mountain.
In later years my father bought a 1923 Erie Steam Shovel (like the one in the children’s book Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel). He complete restored the multiple engines on it, had the boiler re-manufactured and would fire it up occasionally to delight and entertain family and guests. He would contact the owners of Clark’s and talk with them about it because Clark’s was the only other place that had one that ran. He sold it a few years ago to a man that wanted to finish the restoration, he didn’t want someone to scrap it.
There are still two large steam power plants on the property – one was used to power the sawmill. The other was a steam generator he took out of a factory in Vermont.
Steam has been an all encompassing passion of my father’s his entire life. He had always talked about putting tracks around the property so he could run a locomotive around it. I always thought that was more to get a rise out of my mother but have come to understand that it was probably a sincere dream of his. We may have been bored out of our minds on some of those trips to Steamtown but at the same time there is nothing I have found that gives me chills like a steam engine chugging it’s way along the tracks.
This is sad and not unexpected. But I long for the film days with a Graflex 4×5 Speed Graphic and time spent alone in a darkroom.
The Chicago Sun-Times has laid-off its entire photography department.
I had to take a moment to digest that idea. Photography has been an essential part of the newspaper business since the New York Daily Graphic ran the first half-tone photo reproduction (of New York’s Steinway Hall) on its front page in 1873. William Randolph Hearst apocryphally sent his photographers and illustrators to Cuba in 1898 with the message “you supply the pictures, and I’ll supply the war.” For more than a century, photography and journalism have been virtually one and the same. This was a shock!
Yet, in another breath, it is not such a shock. The photographers of the 19th century – like Alexander Gardiner and Matthew Brady – and the 20th century – Robert Capa, Weegie and many, many others – were highly-trained craftsmen in the fullest sense of the term. Photography was an enormously…
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From Vikusik on Flickr
Sunday was a sunny, beautiful day. I sat in a chair at the edge of my garden husking my popcorn when a huge dragonfly landed on the front of my t-shirt. It’s rather startling when an insect of this size lands on you – especially when you hear it coming in for a landing. It was stunningly beautiful. It sat in a spot that allowed me close inspection. At first I was wondering why it had little red legs under it’s chin then realized (due to the crunching) that it was eating another insect recently caught.
The property has a lot of wetlands and I look forward to seeing dragonflies every year. There is usually a yearly swarm which is a sight to behold. We have flying ants that take off from nests in the stone patio and it seems like the dragonflies are ready and waiting for this event. A few years ago it looked like a dragonfly cyclone over the patio as hundreds of dragonflies swarmed over the emerging ants for dinner. They must have been tasty.
Last spring the New York Times did an article with a few videos about dragonflies, thought I would share – Nature’s Drone, Pretty and Deadly.
I’m just glad I’m not a flying ant or mosquito.
My Mimi (Lena Babineau Alix) with me – 1956
Last Friday a long time customer of ours came in to have the oil changed in her car. She and her husband have been bringing their cars into us for over 25 years. Her husband passed away a little over a year ago after doing battle with dementia for a number of years. She was with him 6 days a week for over 3 years at the veterans hospital.
Before his illness they spent a good deal of their time outdoors. He was an avid fisherman, they had a place in Maine, I believe on a lake. Family was everything to them and all would spend many, many days fishing with their father/grandfather.
As she reminisced about the days shortly after the death of her husband she told me the first words out of her 12-year-old granddaughter’s mouth were “Who will take me fishing?’. Father and uncles all said that they would but her response was “But it won’t be the same”.
I felt her granddaughter’s pain. My grandparents have been gone for many, many years now. I miss them dearly. They all had their strengths, the things that they played to. Grampa was the Red Sox, beer and spanish peanuts, always. Nan taught me how to embroider, we learned to quilt together, handcrafts were the game. Pampi always tinkered with things (he was actually quite brilliant in his mechanical ability) and was always ready to laugh. Mimi was the one I played with, laughed with, hugged, adored. She was the one who I trusted and loved more than the others. She was always on our level through every age. When visiting Mimi and Pampi I always felt unconditionally loved, I could do no wrong.
It’s the little things that we remember. I drank my first cup of tea at their table (really warm milk). Tea was always ritual with them – a pot was brewed after supper, every night. We would sit around the table and talk. We would laugh at Pampi’s antics to get a rise out of the wife he clearly adored. The great aunts and uncles would visit, tales of the past and gossip of the present would rule, an uncle would slip into French when he was excited. Laughter, always lots of laughter.
One of my nieces was lamenting the fact that her children will never know her Mabel the way she does. It’s true we said but you never knew our Mimi and that is sad for us. Each child in each generation has their own experience. I hope that I am the kind of grandmother that my grandchildren can lament their children not knowing. I do know that they will probably grow up drinking some sort of hot beverage, sitting around a table and talking about the old days. They will probably also spend a good deal of time outdoors looking at bugs, birds and plants. I can teach them to use their hands and hopefully their minds and I hope that’s what they’ll remember.
My family can certainly relate to many aspects of this post.
The other day I played my first proper game of croquet with my seven year old son. I’m pleased to say that I beat him convincingly. I’m horrified to say that I’m pleased to say that I beat him convincingly. I’m pleased to say that I’ve rationalised my own horror at how pleased I was to beat him convincingly.
I first played croquet when I was about his age. The game is part of my childhood – interwoven with my most persistent and recurring family memories. And it’s not all good. Croquet reminds me that I have a foul temper, that fits of incandescent rage can descend like spooky red mist in an instant and that my capacity for self control has always been limited.
Croquet is a nasty nasty game. Much more cruel and unpleasant than golf – and all the better for it. Of course, croquet, unlike golf…
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Fort Pelham Farm 