Weaving - Finding Wool

I thought I wanted to be a weaver. As long as I was doing a little bit of weaving every once in awhile - it was quite affordable buying wool from a local wool shop.  When I decided to make my first large wall hanging I realized that (1) I could not afford to keep on buying wool and (2) that I never could find the colours that I wanted.  I thought learning how to spin and then dying the wool would solve both of those problems. How hard could spinning be?  After a failed attempt to spin using a spinning wheel I had bought at a farm auction, I took a three hour class in spinning basics. I then bought part of fleece on-line and started to play. That first fleece was, I think a lovely fleece. It was, of course, still full of lanolin, but there were no bits and pieces of straw or seed (what sheep folks call vegetable matter) stuck to it. I processed it all by hand, spinning it using a homemade drop spindle. While the final product was useable, it was a time consuming and still a fairly expensive process. I decided to buy a whole fleece directly from a sheep farmer.

I bought my first full fleece from Mary Grant from Bolsolver who is an internationally recognized spinner. I met her through a friend of ours who use to shear her sheep.  She and her husband had been raising championship sheep for years. Her fleeces were clean and wonderful. They were all skirted (meaning that all of the wool that had been dragged through mud or had chunks of manure dangling had been disposed of). There was almost no vegetable matter attached to them. Because of the high quality of the fleeces, they were very expensive. Buying from Mary was always fun as she had lots of stories to tell about sheep raising and of being a master spinner. When I went out there to buy a fleece I mentioned my story about buying an old broken spinning wheel and the frustration of trying to get it to work.  Mary solved that problem by selling me a used spinning wheel.

It is surprisingly difficult to find farmers who have raw fleeces for sale. Most wool is not worth very much . In fact much of it is worth nothing at all. Sheep that are bred mainly for the meat frequently have wool that is un-spinable. Farmers who raise sheep primarily for the knitters' and spinners' market can and frequently do charge a lot of money for each fleece. The really well known producers seem to have a market for their fleeces before they are sheared. I have been lucky to find a local farmer who, while he does make money off of the lambs, keeps a flock of Cotswold sheep primarily because they are a rare breed that was in danger of dying out in Canada. Cotswool sheep have lovely fleeces and Tom's prices are very reasonable. However, his fleeces have lots of vegetable matter in them and I need to get rid of all tags ( all of the bits and pieces of wool that are covered in mud, manure or a combination of both). They are a lot more work than Mary's fleeces were.

This past week he gave me a call and said that he was having his sheep sheared and did I want to come out a pick out the fleeces that I wanted? Of course I did.

 Sheep are not the brightest of animals and all it takes to get them into the barn is someone rattling a wee bit of grain in a bucket. Once one runs in, the rest seem to follow.

It should be noted that while the lamb in the forefront was as white as it appears, the other sheep are dirty, especially their back-ends which can be quite disgusting. Here the sheep are being placed into the barn so that it is easier to catch them to be sheared.

Tom's sheep are quite friendly and while they don't actually come over to have their ears scratched, they certainly are curious about what is going on around them .

  I meant to take some pictures of the actual shearing but once I started to help sort and bag the fleeces my hands became so covered in lanolin that  I did not want to touch the camera, It really is sticky stuff.

 

The sheep are not nearly as attractive after they have been sheared. Not surprisingly, they are also not nearly as friendly. 

I left about three hours after I had arrived, covered in lanolin, smelling like a sheep. My car which now held ten bags of wool, did not smell much better.

In previous years I have tried to buy the largest fleeces. This year I went for slightly smaller fleeces but ones that seemed to have less vegetable matter and were less matted. I am hoping that that will mean less work and less waste.

Verbal Harassment - Crime and Punishment?

There has been much discussion in both the mainstream and in the social medias as to what to do with the yahoos (Merriam-Webster ) who at a Toronto FC game yelled a particular set of obscenities (FHRITP as it sometimes referred to in the press)at a female reporter. The football club (soccer) and the stadium owners have banned the men from the stadium for a year. It has also been reported that one of the men involved who works for Hydro One has been or will be fired for his behaviour. This incident and its response is on the heels of Jian Ghomeshi's dismissal from the CBC due to allegations of sexual assault and football (American) star Ray Rice being suspended from his football team for his assault upon his partner. Anyone who supports the rights of all women to be free from any sort of harassment must feel the urge to give a cheer for these corporate responses (no matter in two of the cases of how slow they were in coming). Responses that surely must indicate that there is finally a consensus that these sort of behaviours are not just inappropriate but that they are wrong, and that there must be a consequence for men who engage in them.

While I am glad that there is some sort of public response/outrage - I am not at all convinced that the consequences are appropriate or even useful. They are certainly being applied inconsistently. When I went to George Brown College in 1970 to learn how to support young people who were struggling with mental health issues, one of the first things I learnt was that the consequence must be relevant to the inappropriate activity. While Ghomeshi's dismissal from the CBC was appropriate given his public persona, Hydro One's firing of an employee for his very public behaviour when he was not representing that organization strikes me as somewhat inappropriate. What the man did was wrong, but it had nothing to do with his work.

While it is true that companies could, through the threat of being fired, perhaps force some of their male employees to behave better in public, there is no proof that such initiatives have ever been truly successful. In fact such an attitude reminds one of Mr. Harper and his fellow Conservatives who apparently believe that the best way of stopping someone from doing something is the fear of punishment - a treatment methodology that has been refuted by all who study the subject in any detail. Perhaps a more appropriate consequence would have been to tell that man and his buddies that if they ever wanted to attend another event at that stadium that they would need attend to awareness classes and participate in some sort of restorative justice process with the reporter. Perhaps Hydro One could have supported that initiative.

Of even greater concern to me is the fact that while a handful of men may receive some sort of very public shaming, nothing is really changing. Will companies who hire construction crews fire them when they "wolf whistle" or make sexists remarks as a woman walks by? Will companies fire men who visit strip clubs and again make remarks that are at the very least degrading? Will Hydro One and other large corporations do anything to eradicate their not so subtle sexual discrimination policies that ensure that the glass ceiling is as thick as ever? Will the Canadian Armed Forces do anything other than the bare necessities to deal with the prevalent sexualized culture. Will internet sites that promote this sort of behaviour be taken off the internet.  I don't think so.

Until all of these things and more happen, the occasional public figurative slap across the face will be irrelevant. Until at the very core of our culture there is a fundamental shift in thinking (paradigm shift), these public punishments do not reflect a significant advancement in the rights of women. At best it shows that we know we should be ashamed of these behaviours but as of yet are not prepared to do nothing about them.

Dementia and Fear of the Future

I suspect that it is not all that unusual for people of a certain age to start to wonder about their future. Given the amount of media attention that is occasionally paid to Alzheimer's or other forms of dementia, the occasional joke amongst friends about "a senior's moment' (which is a polite way of talking about a lapse of memory) or the perennial older person who may be a bit forgetful on some television sitcom, it is not surprising that growing old is, on occasion, part of our thoughts. And the news is generally not good.

Dementia and others related conditions are not curable and our traditional methods of supporting people are quite frankly abysmal.  The two choices for care are to either to leave those individuals in the community with a patchwork of support systems that rely heavily upon the family and potentially put both the caregivers and the individuals at risk, or to warehouse people in large institutions that were initially designed as quasi medical facilities staffed with too few staff and an administrative structure that is focused on economic efficiencies. It is not surprising that so many Canadians are advocating for laws that allow for some sort of assisted suicide. Too many of us have spent time in those custodial institutions with our parents. We have seen the lost souls wandering around, frequently agitated because their memory loss prevents them from understanding their world they now inhabited populated by strangers and sights that are totally foreign to them.

There are some interesting alternatives being developed. In Holland "De Hogeweyk' is a village-style neighbourhood for elderly residents with dementia, offering maximum mobility and an opportunity to lead a normal and active daily life" (Detail Online). It is a community especially shaped for individuals who are struggling with memory loss by creating an environment that will feel familiar to them. Living spaces that feel more like a community both in terms of size, of the era they are decorated in and who lives in them. The assumption is if people can live in small houses or apartment like settings, eat and spend time in places that look like something they can remember from their past and socialize in whatever way they can with people of similar backgrounds and experiences, then they will be less anxious and hopefully happier.

This model is slowly being exported to other countries. A year or so ago, Georgian Bay Retirement home in Penetanguishene, Ontario created a similar type of environment (CBC). It has specifically designed rooms that allow the residents to feel as if they are living in a world that is familiar.

Not everyone agrees that such environmental modifications are either necessary or in fact helpful. There is an argument to be made that it is unethical to lie to patients as to what is actually happening. That by creating a false or pretend living space we deny to those individuals what grasp they may have over today's world. From my perspective - if I no longer can remember in any great detail the world I live in and if society does not have the courage to allow the plug to be pulled, then the least it can do is to let me live in a world, that may be false, but at least it is less stressful or more comfortable.

The geography, the history and the very fabric of society in Canada has for the last 60 years been shaped because there were (and still are) so damn many of us baby boomers. Public schools were built to accommodate us, universities were expanded, the college system was created, suburbs developed and now more alternatives will be created for seniors. We know that we don't want to live in retirement/nursing homes. We know that there must be alternatives. It is nice to see that some of those possibilities are already in existence. There will be more.

Feeling Sick - Spending Money

I am starting my hitchhiking trip west this summer by taking the train to Winnipeg. I initially did this a few years ago when I realized that it was taking me an incredibly long time to get from Sudbury to Thunder Bay - once it took two and a half days. As well when I looked at all of my trips I realized that for the most part, once I got to Thunder Bay, I ended up taking the bus to Winnipeg. Between the mosquitoes and black flies and the cost of food and the bus etc. it was only a little bit more expensive to take the train directly to Winnipeg. Doing so saves me from the torture of the blood sucking bugs and the boredom that can be Northern Ontario. Interestingly - coming back in August, I have far less of a problem getting rides. In fact I really look forward to that part of the trip. Buying a train ticket feels as if I am cheating in some way - but as I am about to turn 66 - I get to do that.

The cost of a rail ticket, like everything else including the cost of a Greyhound ticket and food, has gone up in the past five years.  It no longer feels quite as good as a deal but none-the-less, I have just bought my train ticket and like always I feel a bit ill. 

Like so many people of my generation, I was raised by parents who had experienced some difficult times during the Depression of the 1930s. Growing up it felt as if at almost every meal there was some reminder as to how terrible that time was. My parents were, to say the least, frugal. With the exception of having a mortgage for the house, I don't think they ever borrowed money. Every penny spent was carefully thought about. As a child I was very conscious as to how poor we were. In hindsight I realize that we were not particularly poor. My dad always had a secure job, there was always nutritious food on the table (even if my mother had to frequently remind us how hard it was to feed a family of five on so little money) and we lived in a nice house. In fact we were not poor at all. I just felt poor. The implications of growing up in a household where money was always a concern has had, for me, relatively serious and long term implications.

I have always been anxious about spending money. It was not that I didn't want to have things one needs or wants, but rather there was a constant worry, at the back of my mind, that I would not have enough to support my family, or in my later years - me. I have felt at various times of my life immensely guilty that I have purchased something for myself, sick that I have had to spend money on an unplanned purchase or car repair or at the very least panicky that I have made a bad financial decision. Something as simple as buying a new shirt or pair of pants can cast me into five or six hours of turmoil as to whether or not I should take the item back. Spending a fair amount of money on something like a train ticket can cause physical discomfort for a few hours. My chest feels tight and my stomach slightly nauseous.  If I am not careful, it can be quite overwhelming. Generally it is quite manageable and I just ignore it.

I don't remember my father ever buying anything frivolous just for himself. Of all the things that he taught me - this is one thing I wish he hadn't. It is a good thing to be frugal. Because of my caution about spending money, I do not owe any money to anyone; I have money in the bank that will, with any luck, help me maintain a reasonable quality of life for the foreseeable future and there is enough to spend money on a train ticket.

I just wish that some days it was a bit easier to enjoy all of that.