Playing with wool

There are times when I am consumed with playing with wool. I look forward to it most evenings - if I don;t have wool in my hand - I feel as if I have not accomplished anything that day.

I have finished washing and carding my second fleece of the season. It is an OK fleece from an older ewe and it would probably have been a great fleece if she was not so dirty. It is not the mud/manure that is a problem, it is all of the bits and pieces of straw, seeds and sticks. I have probably thrown away 1/5 of the fleece because it was unsavagable. But then what can one expect for $10.00. Actually it was probably a good deal. A great fleece that is fairly clear of vegetable material can cost $60.00 to  $75.00 or even more. So I am not complaining.

I did so well on my little bags/pouches/purses that I am going to make a pile more. A friend has suggested that one of the sizes that I had made for the Christmas sale is perfect for I-phones - so I will make 15-18 of that size to sell at the Farmer's Market latter this year.

I have one more fleece left which is a coloured fleece ( which means it is either gray or brown - in this case it gray). Think when I get it washed - I am going to tint it either blue or green - something I have not tried before . I have been told that if I do it right - one gets just a touch of green or blue amongst the gray.

But for now I spin the ewe's white ( actually it is sort of a ceamy colour) fleece and latter this week I will have enough to dye and then I start to weave.

It all feels good.

Buses and trains

I went to Toronto yesterday - which in itself is not a big deal. 1.000s of people do it everyday - but I don't so it was a bit of an interesting trip. I decided not to drive in part because it seemed to make more ecological sense to use public transit, but also I didn't want the stress of traffic, parking and worrying about missing my medical appointment ( a MRI at Sunnybrook).

The Go bus from Peterborough to Oshawa was great as was the Go train to Union station ( but not cheap $33.00 return). The subway and the bus to Sunnybrook was equally as efficient. But what struck as being different from other bus rides was the mess of the city bus.

I have been on a lot of buses in various parts of this country. However with the exception of Victoria buses, my travels through the great ( and not so great) cities of Canada have been in the summer. I have gotten use to looking out of the window. You can't see out of the windows of the Toronto buses - they are covered in slush and sand sprayed by passing cars. I am certainly not blaming the TTC or anyone else - just making a comment that the trip through parts of Toronto was far less enjoyable because I could not see the houses or anything else.

Inside the buses the floors were mucky and wet. Again it is understandable given the weather but still it was rather miserable. People sometimes talk about how unfriendly people are in Toronto and they do appear to be less friendly than folks in other cities but I have always wondered if it is related to the weather. In Victoria the buses are clean both inside and out. But then the road seldom need to be sanded or salted. There is nothing to track into the busies. The seat coverings can be made of softer, more comfortable and attractive fabrics because they don't need to stand up to all of the sand and salt. You can always see out the windows - and of course things look so much nicer for much of the year. But perhaps most importantly, people when they get on the bus in Victoria are not burdened down by thick coats, heavy boots and wool hats pulled down over the ears. They are not physically exhausted from shivering and trying to burrow their heads between their shoulders.

So it is not that people in Toronto are unfriendly - they are just over burdened by clothing and  tired of winter before it starts - and they are depressed by the state of their buses. Probably nothing can be done about it - but if I had to travel everyday in such conditions - I would be depressed and appear unfriendly too.

It is worthy to note that only one person said thank you to the bus driver as they got off the bus. Torontonians need to work on that.

p.s.  the MRI at Sunnybrook - something ordered by my cardiologist was a piece of cake - I thought I might be a bit claustrophobic but it was no big deal - a bit boring in fact and of course noisy.

strange dreams

I have been sick for the past few days – it started off with a normal cold but after flying in from the West Coast late on Thursday night, it has gotten far worse. Not only am I coughing up some rather ugly looking phlegm but I have a bit of a fever that gets much worse at night. These fevers have produced some interesting dreams/hallucinations.

I “wake up” feeling very hot and sweaty and damp. I immediately try to remember where the   control is for the electric blanket. I can’t find them, which is not surprising as I don’t have an electric blanket. But the search goes on for some time (in my half waken dream state). I get more and more frustrated as I can’t figure out how to turn off the heat.

 I then get into an interesting debate with myself/another being. I insist that I am real in that I have arms and legs etc and that the world around me is real. The bed is real as are the furnishings in my room. The other part of me argues that nothing is real - that while we do exist, it is a being without form.  That we all live in a world where our existence as we imagine it is exactly that – our imagination.  I have this partial imagine in my mind – millions of bubbles drifting in an otherwise empty space – each containing an entity – the bubbles touch each other – bumping gently and for a time some of them stay connected – but each bubble creating its own world.

It is hard to explain in the cold light of the morning but in the middle of the night, as I toss and turn, trying to find some way of arranging the pillows so that my sinuses can drain, it makes absolute sense to me – we all exist in isolation and we all have complete control over our environment.

 Which gets me to the point of all of this. Why can’t I make this damn cold go away?

jet travel

It seems somewhat surreal being on the West Coast without having to work for it. While flying consumes far less time - it is not nearly as interesting. One can only people watch for so long before it comes a bit boring.

Surprisingly cold on the West Coast - not cool- down right cold. No snow but lots of frost on the ground in the morning until the sun melts it away (that's right - there is sun here - lots of glorious sun. From my son's new house I can see the mountains in the distance - quite nice.

Has been a great Xmas holiday so far - got to attend the live Nativity play (including fire works) on Christmas Eve with my grand kids, open stockings with them in the morning and have lots of time to go skating and tobogganing. As well got to play with all of their new toys - there are some pretty neat toys out there.

Then after a few days at home to visit with my mother, brother and sister, I flew out here for a week. Was even allowed to "babysit " with my grandson for a few hours on New Year's Eve while the "young ones" went out to a party.

Can't imagine a better holiday - except of course if I could do it forever - going back and forth between Duncan and Sudbury - wouldn't need a place to live.....

On the road again (heading east) #13

I was not even sure how to get out of Wawa. I had been there before but I had no conscious recollection of how I had left. It had been dark the night before when we had driven in and I had not been paying attention to such details. Why would I? I knew I had drive to Sudbury. That morning as I stomped with anger and frustration up the road towards the highway, it was dark and cloudy and windy. It was one of those morning that reminds one that fall is going to come sooner than one would like. I was pretty sure that I was going to get wet at some point that day.

Lots of vehicles drove by. Most of them were pick-up trucks and none of them gave me a second look. After standing at a rather poor spot just outside of town for quite a while, I decided to walk a bit further down the road. It looked as if there might be some sort of gas station/restaurant where a some of the trucks that had passed me by were turning off to. It wasn't much of restaurant but there were a lot of vehicles including some big trucks stopping. More importantly there were some reasonably wide shoulders and good sight lines. It did not look as if there was anything better further down the road, so I decided this was where I would make my stand. Visions of spending a couple of days on the outskirts of Wawa kept flashing through my mind. It was good that I had things to think about as I was there for a few hours, but finally a car did stop and I got in gratefully.

He was an retired engineer - at least I think he was, he said so - but I don't think he spent a lot of time in that field. I think he said that that he had never really liked the field. As a matter of fact, in spite of the fact that drove from the outskirts of Wawa to Sudbury - I got to know, at least in some aspects, very little about him at all. In other ways I got to know him quite well. But part of problem was me.

When I got into the car I was still pretty upset at being abandoned by my previous driver and rather than me appearing reasonably normal - polite and interested in my driver, I went into a rant about what had happened to me. I must have sounded like a flaming lunatic. My driver later said as much. In fact he was so concerned that when I asked him how far he was going he just pointed down the road and indicated that he wasn't going too far. I must have freaked him out. However I did calm down and by the time we got to Sault Saint Marie we were getting along fine and he did tell me that he was going to Toronto.

In keeping with the strangeness of the past few days, this ride had its own peculiarities. My driver was going back to Toronto to deal with some real estate issues. he and his wife own some rental properties and their commercial tenants were about to go bankrupt. He needed to sort out some of the mess in terms of rent etc. There was also a case of them being sued because someone had fallen outside of their building the previous winter. In all honesty I am not sure where he actually lived. I think he lived someone within the general Toronto area, but if that is the case he never said why he was in Northern Ontario - they may have had a cottage up there, but that seems to be a long way to drive just to be on a lake. I will never know if his reluctance to talk about the physical details of his life was because of my rant upon entering his car, or if because he was generally careful about what he disclosed. He did mention that he had picked up other hitchhikers who had had significant emotional problems so perhaps he was just being cautious.

I say he didn't talk about about the physical details of his life, that does not mean that we did not talk about other stuff. He said that he had anger issues - he knew that because his wife had told so. They were involved in some sort of rather strange therapeutic conselling process that sounded like a money grab. It was something to do with the suggestion that our eternal anger evolves from how our parents treat it and we need to deal with that issue before anything else can be deal with. Sounded rather Freudian and at the same time rather cultish. We had a long and interesting chat about this kind of stuff. I suppose what was so remarkable about my driver was that in spite of the fact that he was very much into this "treatment process", to the point that he was thinking about pay what seemed like a huge amount of money to be trained as a"therapist", he was very prepared to hear other suggestions as how to cope with stuff.

I talked to him about my practice of every night before I go to sleep to think about the day and then giving thanks. Something that I have done for much of my adult life - even on those days when life has been horrible. It makes it so much easier to forgive people, and the world in general for the "slings of arrows of outrageous fortune" that occasionally rain upon our heads. He liked it and I think he will do.

He got me to the turn off near Sudbury, let me out, and I thanked him not just for the ride but for the help in calming down.  As he was my last ride - my thanks to him was in fact a thank you to every one who had given me a ride. Twice on the way back I had met drivers who had given me a fresh perspective, a reminder of why I do what I do.

I am a hitchhiker. Oh I do many other things - I am a dad and a grand dad, I teach, and I spin and weave. I an adequate carpenter, plumber and electrician - but hitchhiking defines so much of what I am. For a few weeks every year, I shed my possessins, or at least most of them, and go out on the road to meet people, to trust people, to gamble that my view of the world is the correct one. So far I have been right - the world is a good place with people who will trust and help out a stranger on the road. Can anything be finer than being reminded of that?

Root Canels and Christmas Cards

One might think that root canals and Christmas cards would have relatively little to do with each other - and normally one would be right. The formed is seldom indicates a good time, while the latter indicates at least the possibility of good wishes.

I got a Christmas card from my endodontist. Which  was a bit bit of a surprise as I certainly have done everything possible to try to forget them. I suspect if they have any memory of me at all it would be of a guy with a graying beard, with a moustache that got in the way and who made it quite clear that none of them would ever be his favourite person. I certainly gave them no indication that that I would ever put them on my Christmas card list.

But they did send me a card with a gift certificate to get some free Crest toothpaste. The card also says that they have made a donation in my name to the Youth Emergency Shelter. Now I feel bad that I didn't send them a card.

Do you think it is too late?

Apologies to Johnathon Swift

 For the last year I have been reading the magazine - Scientific American. I have not renewed it for next year because, quite frankly, 90% of the time it is far above my scientific knowledge. I am sure stories about quantum physics, black holes and the inner working of DNA are all quite fascinating - but the information does me no good if I can't get past the first paragraph.

Today I am glad that I am not renewing it for another reason - it says me the hassle of cancelling my subscription.

There is an article in the December issue talking about raising flying beetles so that scientist can figure out how to attach cameras to their backs and by wiring electrodes into their nervous system, control where the beetles fly. The reason? So the army can sneak into caves and houses and see who is in there.

At first I thought it was a satire similar to Swift's "A Modest Proposal". I, in my ignorance and naivety was anxiously awaiting for the show to drop - perhaps the author would start to talk about attaching cameras to kittens, and by control their nervous systems, control where they walked - I wondered to myself if they would take the story to the point of using children - before they started to talk about the ethics of taking animals (beetles, kittens, children- it is all a slippery path) and programming them to assist the army.

But alas - they were serious and somewhat inclined to brag about their success. Apparently it is not enough to trick dolphins and dogs into doing a human's bidding  we now don't need to even pretend that the animals are on our side. There was no mention in the article of kittens or children - but you have to wonder what is next?