olde country

I've recovered from my jet lag, more or less, and made peace with the head cold I brought back as a souvenir from the East coast, and now I'm ready for an update. Virginia was hot, humid and dry, all at once. Fogs in the morning, clouds in the afternoon, grass that crumbled underfoot, great clouds of dust, odd sprinklings of dirty rain at unexpected moments. My friend Hawkheart always said I was unnaturally obsessed with the weather, and I remain true to type. This weather was freakin' weird! Leaves falling brown and yellow off the trees, in the hot wind, with nary a red nor orange to be seen. The weather is the weather, though, and we'll weather the weather, whether we like it or not.

My vacation had some central themes going on, which have continued to haunt me back into Hawaii. Some were happy themes, like the very fiber-centricity of it all. Yarn, knitting, spinning, hanging with friends who knit, visiting my sis's knit night and meeting all these delightful folk:


including this lady, whom I've been looking forward to getting together with for a long time.

She generously furthered my nascent spinning career by donating me her spare niddy-noddy. Who'd have thought anyone would ever have an extra niddy-noddy laying around the house?!

Crafty Bastards and the Virginia Fall Fiber Festival in Montpelier yielded up a whole lot of inspiration and the wee bit o' stash addition, which I'll share in due time, as my camera batteries are quite dead at the moment.

Another central theme was the meeting of bloggers; namely Reya, Ms Pam and Knit Nana. This was a huge thrill, and makes the miles of disconnectedness in my life right now feel like a smaller thing, somehow. Along the same lines, getting my dearest DisKnit to co-author this blog with me was just terrific, as it ensures our ongoing wacky dialogue, which never seems to miss a beat, anyway, despite the miles and months between us. Still, more DisKnit = much more goofy fun in my life, and that's a good thing.

Darker themes for the trip included the lives of nearly all my friends being in some sort of chaotic mid-life crises. Is it normal, this awful upheaval of the mid-to-late forties, in women's (but even in my men friends, too) lives? I find myself being sad-then-joyous-then-weeping-then-laughing in a gruesome rollercoaster that absolutely wears me out. I found it reflected in the stories of 5 different friends, all roughly my age. Such shared personal drama allowed for lots of tarot reading, and heart-to-heart discussions lasting hours into the night, on several nights (and one morning, too) but we've had happier meetings of the mind, goddess knows.

And of course there's the family drama. My parents aging, my mother's impending visit, in January, which will be fun, but not without its stress. My dad, having the "this is how we want our inevitable deaths to be handled" talk with the sis and I, which actually resulted in good sharing about our whole family's desire for cremation or green burial, and felt like a meeting on common ground; not a oft-occuring event in my family life, where we usually freely and vociferously disagree on a wide variety of topics.

I returned to blogland to discover that many writers are making 31-day projects of self-improvement; journaling, exercise, spiritual practice...since I am late to the party, I will merely make the effort, from tomorrow's new moon to the new moon after Samhain, to try to do some spinning each day. The Fall Fiber Festival aftermath finds me with a surfeit of spinning fiber, and I need to do something about it. Maybe if I spin it all up, my sis will knit it all up?