Gardening

The first spring plants are in the ground. We got 18 Napa cabbages, 8 red Pak Chois, 7 green Pak Chois, and 17 broccolis planted today. The full moon's not until Thursday, but today the sun is in Leo, a death knell for the plants. I expect to see a bunch of plant carcasses out there soon. I also got some carrot seed in the ground. There are 75 cruciferous (that's whatcha call the cabbage family) plants left to plant, but I don't know if all the Napa will make it to the garden. Some of the seedlings are already starting to bolt and they're only 3 in. high. Don't know what's going on with them.

The onion bed needs another tilling before we can plant them, so they (the onion plants) are hanging out in the shop. I hope to plant them this coming Sunday or Monday (Scorpio), then beets and more carrots on the 20th/21st (Pisces). But since things rarely go the way I plan. . .

There's no way I can follow the moon and zodiac for planting tomatoes, etc., this year, so I'll do what I usually do and ignore them both. I've never had really BAD luck with growing, unless you count that year that I got a bunch of seeds from Fedco. Don't know what it was about them, but most varieties had low germination rates. We ended up having to buy plants locally to replace them. It kinda put a sour taste in my mouth about Fedco.

Gung Hai Fat Choi - Year of the Dragon

I've started getting ready for the weaving "demo" at next month's meeting at Limestone Creek. On Sunday I measured out 80 ends of 5/2 perle cotton, 80 in. long, for the warp. I warped the Dorothy today. I warp front to back, meaning I sley the reed first, then thread the heddles, tie onto the back apron, wind the warp onto the back beam (with a layer of paper grocery bag going in to keep the threads from burrowing into previous rounds), then finally tying onto the front apron. I'll also add two floating selvedges (selveges?) later. It should be plenty wide enough so everybody can see different patterns emerging as the weft goes in. I'm taking a bunch of books too, so they can get an idea of the hundreds of patterns possible. I've just done a "straight draw", that is, threading the first thread in the first heddle on shaft 1, the second thread in the first heddle on shaft 2, the third in the first from shaft 3, and the fourth in the first from shaft 4. Five through eight go into the second heddles on the shafts in the same order, 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on, until there are 20 heddles on each shaft that have threads running through them. I used white, sort of an off white, for the warp. Then the weft will be one of four different colors, also 5/2 perle cotton which was left over from the overshot class, to show contrast.

I've also started collecting various things to take with me - sley hook, heddle hook, different shuttles, the aforementioned books, the few things I've already made, including the sample from the overshot class I took and the "Cats Track and Snail Trail" runner I made on the end of that same warp.

DGD pointed out the sliver of new moon in the sky tonight at sunset. It was new at 2:39 am yesterday (Chinese New Year), making it about 39 1/2 hours old when we saw it at around 6:10 pm, just about the youngest I've seen. I think the record for the youngest moon observed is around 19 hr. I don't usually see them until they're at least 45-46 hr. old.

Photographic Nightmare

The Full Hunter Moon (plus one) is climbing and Cygnus the Swan is high overhead, flying along the Milky Way. I like the winter constellations like Pegasus (the Great Square), Orion (the most obvious constellation in the sky), and then later, Leo (that's mine). Occasionally I get ambitious and try to find the Andromeda Galaxy (just off one corner of Pegasus in the constellation Andromeda, hence the name).

Yesterday, DH and I spent about 4 hours at his mother's, going through her photos. ACK! Very little organization. She has about a dozen albums, but they're those "magnetic page" ones. Half of them open up as you turn the pages because they don't have enough static and the other half have STICKY pages, so once something's in there, it's IN there. A terrible thing to do to photos, especially the older ones that I'd like to scan. And what's not in the albums is in photo envelopes, file folders, regular mail envelopes, boxes, etc. in a plastic storage tub.

So yesterday's time was mainly spent going through pictures and asking MIL who was who, if I didn't already know, and writing names on the backs. Oh brother! Her memory got worse as the afternoon wore on. Somebody she said was Joe Blow at noon became John Doe at 3 pm in a different picture. If it was obvious to me that she was wrong about a name, I just left it off or put a ?. We brought two tubs home with us and last night I started going through and sorting out duplicates, photos from different time periods (it's easy with dated pictures), and some other categories. Today, I continued the same. I'm still not done.

And nothing personal if you, dear reader, are the same kind of person, but MIL saved every stinkin' card - birthday, Easter, St. Patrick's Day, Valentine's Day, get well, retirement, Secretary's Day, you name it - she ever received, not to mention wedding invitations, programs, tickets, hospital bracelets (her own, not her son's), shreds of ribbons and fake flowers from wedding favors, newspaper articles about some neighbor's kid or somebody she worked with, etc. We are gonna have one helluva bonfire when she goes.

One good thing that has come out of "The Great Photo Roundup" is that I've found some old pictures of MIL's maternal grandmother. Here's one of them.
I already have a bunch of her father's mother. I've been e-mailing to a 2nd cousin of hers (who is actually DH's age), so as I scan them, I send them to him. There are also some of DH's father as a youngster and teen and of his grandfather, which I'll be passing along to DD and DGD. DH is voluntarily estranged from his father - hasn't had contact in about 40 yr. - but DD would like to know more about him and his family, so I've been working on that genealogy, too.