House and Farm updates

Window is repaired, and only $50. Yay! Purchase and Sale agreement signed, also yay. Talked to realtor about the attempted break-in and how we're making the house look more inhabited between now and closing. Turns out that there are people who are breaking into houses they think are empty and ripping out (literally) all the copper piping. Scrap copper's selling at $2/lb. now. I'd heard about the stadium lighting somewhere in the U.S., and the irrigation system in CA, and of course the people who fry themselves trying to steal wire off high-power transformer stations, and then there was that closed factory where the thieves thought the power was off...it wasn't. Ick. Anyway, it hadn't occurred to me that there was enough copper in a residential house to be worth the bother. Desperate times indeed.

We made a trip with a very full load Friday evening, and just before we went up, L was finishing up his work day, so I went out to the studiolo to see about winding yarn for another warp -- I could use some more scarves for the festival. I fiddled with the cotton/linen/silk blend stuff, but it was indeed quite fiddly. So, I looked over the yarns I'd saved out for weaving this fall, and chose a lovely rust/red/green/gold wool yarn to work with. It's mostly the rust/red color, with little bits of the other colors - very autumny, at least if you're from New England.

It was wonderful to be winding warp again. The weaving process is an interesting one, full of order, discipline, creativity, with the potential for disaster at every turn for a little spice. For instance, measuring out the yarn on the warping board, you create lovely parallel lines zigzagging across the board. And yet all it would take for a problem to occur is for you to miss going around a post or for the yarn to slip off a post. The tension is supposed to be as even as possible on your warp grouping, so that you can be sure each end will be approximately the same length (avoids waste). Life is like though, isn't it... you do your best to plan things out, to handle things carefully, and then something unexpected happens. Sometimes you can adjust quickly, sometimes not.

Working with this particular yarn, as the parallel lines formed and caught the afternoon sunlight, it was like capturing a part of the sun itself. And as I went through the repetitive movements, I could finally feel that I was settling down from dealing with the attempted break-in, retrieving the calm, sense of order, and joy of life that I need for juggling all the things we have to achieve this autumn.

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Today we moved a bunch of plants up to the farm, and L started breaking ground for them. Some are in, the rest hopefully tomorrow. Warren and Susan have moved a lot of stuff to their new place, and were working on cleaning out rooms from the west end to the east end. So we were able to do a lot of wallpaper removal (using Marian's steam paper remover machine), etc. Did some patching and a little mudding. Warren suggested priming and then mudding, because the walls are old and a little crumbly (tiny, tiny little bits come loose as you're trying to put on a smooth coat of joint compound). So tomorrow we'll try that, instead of mudding then painting.

We're also going to bring some furniture and a few boxes up tomorrow. I don't want to spend an hour or two going up and down stairs, but it would be nice to get some more things up to the farm.

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Concentus practice at 6pm tomorrow also, so we need to get up there early so that we can get home in time. I'm bummed that we won't be able to celebrate the equinox with gwynt_y_storm and others tomorrow, but with the excitement we had this week, I'm feeling the need to get a lot of things done as quickly as possible.