slowly she turned

No April Fool’s today. Nothing could shock me. I would believe anything.

I can’t seem to deal with updating this website. I don’t want to make anything for sale. I haven’t been doing my stitch meditations for the past week. I don’t feel like starting seeds or planting anything. I don’t care about cooking any more. I have been doing a few other things though, so I’m not a total wipeout.

The weather temps are beginning to result in blocks of warm colors for the high temperature column in the tapestry diary. Pretty soon the blues in the low temp column will be set aside. Greens are coming in more often for spring, and yellow, appropriately for today, considering the record high pollen count in our already pollen-ous city. I’ve learned that the Weather Underground history is often wrong, so I rely more on my observations for the center column. I am playing chicken with that light gray and gold yarn, although I have yarns in about the same shades to replace them, I’d hoped to use the same ones throughout April.

Mostly I’ve been working in or on the back studio building. A handy friend of ours came over and fixed the doorknob and the cracked door frame for us, as well as a door knob inside our house. The best thing was that he fixed the thermostat in our fridge that we had spent hours on! That’s a big relief. Now we don’t have to keep a constant vigil over it, and I didn’t lose too much food because I have a working mini-fridge in the back and a small freezer that was empty because I had decided that I didn’t need it any more. Well, I did, and given the way things are I might need it in the future!

I put up a magnetic screen over the studio patio doors in the back (there’s no patio), and will put up another over the studio front door today. It gets stuffy back there quickly. So I also ordered a refurbished window AC unit off EBay yesterday. I am trying to stay away from Amazon and Paypal, but it is hard because really, the big box stores are just as bad. I’d love to find a hardware store that doesn’t support the regime. If anyone knows of one online, please leave me the info in the comments. I sure do miss the little local hardware store we used to frequent that was just down the street.

A couple of weeks ago I spent a few days down at Lake Waccamaw. (On the tapestry diary, indicated by what looks like a mirror image of EL, but is actually LW.) My intention was to go to Holden Beach and hunt for fossils, because the weather forecast was great. I put it off a day and then the weather turned windy and rainy so I didn’t make it to the beach. It was good to see my sister and niece, though, and I actually enjoy watching stormy weather at the lake. I’ll get to go to a different beach with some friends for a long weekend in late April.

^I had video of the windstorm the next day, but the wind was pushing me so hard that the camera was wobbly. Suffice it to say that there were big breakers and the Spanish moss was flying horizontally and flipping upwards. There were even small waves on the canal. There was a brief sunny time when a huge rainbow stretched over the lake.

I used the time inside to stitch.

Reading: I checked out Wendell Berry’s most recent book of short stories from the library. I didn’t realize that he was still writing fiction. This one was “How It Went: 13 Stories of the Port William Membership” and they were all told from Andy Catlett’s remembrances as an old man. Andy Catlett is Berry’s alter-ego. If you love WB’s fiction, it’s for you, but it isn’t an exciting read. It reminded me of some of the old characters from my childhood in rural North Carolina, toward the end of the tobacco subsidy era.

After that my hold of “Mistborn: The Final Empire” dropped on Libby and that was a complete turnaround. What a fast-paced wild ride! Loved it, although I did find some of the fight sequences to be overly long and repetitive. I immediately put a hold on the second book in the series.

Still reading “Virgil Wander,” since I put it down to finish my library check-outs. Also checked out “The Killing Moon” on Libby since I realized that there are several N.K. Jemisin books that I have somehow missed.

I went to my new dentist (sniffle – I told my hygienist and dentist of almost 40 years that they couldn’t retire until after I died, and they disobeyed me!) and he informed me that I needed two crowns, one of which needs to be done sooner than later. Since they are on the same side, I scheduled them both to be done on the same visit. One thing I learned from “Castaway” was that you should not put off dental work. My COBRA dental policy ends this summer and then I will probably go on the state retiree dental policy, which is not as good. So that’s coming up this month.

Still not watching much TV or movies, but we began watching “Dark Winds.” I read all the Tony Hillerman books way back in the 80s-90s. And I did register for the online Collage Makers Summit, but I haven’t done much of it yet. I am excited about a couple of the instructors, so that is going to spark some art making.

Well, as usual, when I wait so long to post, there’s a lot to catch up on as far as recording a life journal. I’ll try to do it a little more often this month so I can put some thoughts down instead of just documenting events.