i only "eh" in jest...

i climbed out of bed unapologetically late today to find that it had rained while i was asleep. this was a most welcome sight, as Eastern Canada is in the grips of a sweltering heat-wave. the rain brought a brief respite, prompting the appearance of some much-needed pollinators who have been mostly laying low over the past week.

the animator caught a shot of a butterfly resting on a rain-drenched squash leaf in this year's balcony garden project... which he promptly turned into a jigsaw puzzle.

there was some dispute regarding the use of said image.

me: i'm gonna put that picture in my blog post.
him: did you ask for my permission to use it?
me: did you ask for my permission to use my camera?
him: [silence]
me: exactly! my camera. my photo. 
him: but i took it.
me: good luck proving that.

there has also been a spike in the number of wildfires across Quebec, which makes sense with all this heat. however, forestry experts have identified an additional, wholly-unexpected factor that is contributing to there being twice as many forest fires as usual at this time of the year.

you guessed it...it's the covid!

people are stuck at home, with little by way of distraction/entertainment, so the great outdoors presents itself as an attractive destination for anyone seeking to escape the confinement (while maintaining the common sense avoidance of other human beings). as a result, a lot more of them than usual are coming to the same dangerous conclusion.

"let's go camping, eh?"

now, i feel a need to pause here for a moment to address anyone who may have read that last sentence, and are now concerned that i may have gone native. i assure you that no such thing has occurred. i could not stop sounding like i spent most of my life in New York City, no matter how hard i might try. that quintessentially Canadian noise only ever escapes my face when i am joking about the place. trust me... i only "eh" in jest.

where was i again?

oh, yes... more people going camping, which means more irresponsible campfires, which means more forest fires. so now there is one more thing to worry about in what is already shaping up to be the most stress-inducing year in recorded history.

speaking of stress...

'twould seem i am doing a particularly bad job at keeping mine in check of late. i actually found myself on the receiving end of a bit of (wholly professional) medical advice that is unlike any i have encountered before. "you need to calm the hell down," he said. so now i can add that the list of things to (try not to) stress about. good grief!

i began my quest for calm by harassing a farmer about some sheep, and eventually purchasing a couple fleeces from the good people over at Kinnaird Farm. yes, i did recently get two fleeces (from a different farm). however, i really wanted some naturally-colored grey/black wool, so i convinced myself that this purchase was totally justified.

the only disappointment was that i could not go pick them up in person, as a visit to a sheep farm would definitely have knocked my stress levels down a few notches. the animator was prepared to turn the drive into a fun day trip. however, i am taking the whole 'common sense avoidance of other human beings' thing most seriously, so i ended up having the fleeces shipped to me... and the box sat unopened in a corner for several days.

him: you're not gonna open your package?
me: nope!
him: i thought you were so excited to get your fleece.
me: i am.
him: so why don't you open it?
me: the covid. 
him: i see.

it was like every gift-giving holiday rolled into one when i finally broke the seal on that box.

then i broke the vacuum seal on the biggest ziploc bag i have ever seen, and stood there in awe as the fiber expanded. everyone is entitled to their brand of crazy, and i totally embrace mine.

first there was Frosty, a North Country Cheviot/Blue-faced Leicester/Romney/Rideau Arcott cross. i have never worked with purebred Romney or Rideau Arcott wool, but i can see the definite influence in the cross. Frosty is a "hogget", which means a sheep that is in its second year. the term can also apply to the wool and the meat from the animal. yes, i do take my hobby very seriously.

i laid Frosty's fleece out (tip-side up) on a painting tarp that i commandeered for this very purpose. ten points if you spot the ridiculous cat. that is Cordy. she will show up again... and again.

i grabbed a few locks from different parts of the fleece. this one should have been called "Jacob", on account of the coat of many colors. it is insane that all of this came from the same sheep.

next came Blackie. this one is a NCC-BFL cross, and the fleece is finer and more springy than Frosty's. as with most naturally "black" sheep, the color of the wool is actually a super-dark, greyish brown.

i was trying to get a shot with my dark-grey kitty Philly for comparison, but she was more interested in running around like a lunatic.

i forgot to get a photo of Blackie's fleece opened out on the tarp, so i had to pause composing this post to do so (cut-side up this time) .

i took fewer samples from this one, as there was less variation across the whole thing. it is a mostly-uniform dark color with a tweedy patch that left me wondering if this sheep might be related to Don King. [disclaimer for legal purposes: i am in no way suggesting that Don King has engaged in any activity that might have resulted in his DNA being part of a sheep's lineage.]

as per usual, i grabbed some hot, soapy water...

and gave the sample fibers a wash, keeping them covered to maintain the heat in the water. the yogurt containers from last time have already gone into the recycling, so i am using takeout containers this time around... if you need all the details.

those greyscale colors really come alive after a wash. Frosty is on the top row, and Blackie is on the bottom. i really love those silvery-grey sections of Frosty's fleece. it would be nice to find a whole fleece that color.

i decided to wash Frosty's fleece first. i want to keep the locks intact, so i have been carefully laying them out in plastic mesh baskets that i keep for this very purpose, and washing them one basket at a time.

yes, it does take longer than if i divided the fleece in a couple-few batches and washed it like that, but there is something indescribably calming about sitting cross-legged on the floor, carefully organizing chunks of dirty wool into neat rows. that calm was, after all, the point of this whole thing.

unfortunately, Cordy (the Little One of our furry trio) keeps hanging around, trying to eat bits of the wool, and keeping her out of trouble is definitely cutting into the relaxing part of this exercise. try explaining to a cat that the doctor says you need to "calm the hell down". she is as troublesome as she is adorable.

i tied pieces of bird netting to a collapsible laundry rack to make a two-tiered wool-drying rack.

i would have added a third layer of netting to the bottom of the rack, but this setup doubles as a cat trap, so that would have been a very most terribly bad idea. she is seriously my favorite cat.

i want to fill the bathtub with this stuff, and dive in head-first. it is so lovely!

you can see the difference between the tips (left) and the cut-end (right) of the fiber. i wonder if this was the first time Frosty got a haircut. [addendum: the farmer said Frosty also had a haircut last year.]

i am about halfway done with this fleece, then i will move on to washing Blackie's. hopefully my poor cat will survive the over-stimulation.

there has also been quite a bit of spinning in between playing with dirty wool. i mentioned back in April that i had started spinning up the fiber i bought at last Summer's Twist Fibre Festival. [naturally, said festival is cancelled this year... which was another excuse for buying two more fleeces.] that got pushed to the side for a while, but i want to free up the wheel to start spinning all the fleece i have been accumulating of late.

i have two full jumbo bobbins so far, with about half a bobbin's worth of that fiber left to go, which should (hopefully) be enough for a simple sweater of some sort for self.

oh, and there was also a calendar at the bottom of the box of fleeces, and it is filled (naturally) with photos of happy sheep. one of those days was my birthday. it was total rubbish. perhaps i will get around to celebrating it some other day when life is slightly less insane.

it seems to be raining again. i am going to resume sitting cross-legged on the floor, playing with dirty fleece, with at least one cat close at hand to keep me company. i would not have it any other way.

best rabbit hole ever...

i am sat up in bed, watching nonsense on You Tube and eating floor-Oreos. hopefully i will do a better job of holding on to the opened pack next time around... hopefully.

it is Monday evening as i start writing this, and i am already waiting for this week to be done. last week was an especially rubbish one around here, and the weekend left me expecting that we were in for more of the same. i called my mother on Sunday, and my greeting to her was a dour, but apt one. "we are still alive. happy Mother's Day."

in that spirit of celebrating the tiny victories in life—including life itself—i present to you a tiny glimpse into the randomness that has brought some measure of joy to my corner of the Universe of late. 

we pulled a couple steaks out of the freezer and made a special meal one random day... just because.

these smashed potatoes have become his favorite dish of the moment. i boil whole potatoes (red potatoes in this case, as that is what we had on hand) in super-salty water, then smashed them lightly, and drizzled on a mixture of olive oil, melted butter, salt, black pepper, and a generous helping of crushed garlic. they go into a 425°F oven on a parchment-lined baking sheet until they are toasty around the edges, after which i turn on the broiler for the last couple-few minutes. i added a sprinkling of freshly-grated Parmesan cheese and shoved them back under the broiler for the last minute. not gonna lie... they are really tasty. he likes the leftovers served up with sour cream, so we make extra for the next day. so ridiculously good!

speaking of ridiculous... i woke up one day last week to find a new box in the entryway to our apartment, which currently serves as the 'quarantine area' for all incoming items.

me: was this here before?
him: uhm... no.
me: is this an 'unauthorized purchase'?
him: uhm... possibly.
me: what did you buy now?
him: it's a Master of the Universe. you like them. 
me: open 'er up.

after the absurdity of life of late, he can buy whatever nonsense he wants. so... welcome, Skeletor.

may you find peace among the countless other homages to a never-ending childhood that are already occupying our home. trust me... that is only a tiny fraction of the insanity in the studio. whatever makes him happy.

he hangs on to the boxes with interesting artwork, so this one was a definite keeper.

as i see it, we are all allowed our own brand of insanity. which reminds me...

i washed those two fleeces i talked about last time. this usually requires a lot of room to spread all that wool out to dry, but that would be asking for trouble in a home with three bored cats. so i divided the fiber into several batches that could be dried out of paw-reach, and washed them over the course of a week or so.

i separated out the 'best bits' from each fleece and took special care to try to wash them while maintaining the lock formations of the fiber, like this bag of cleaned BFL/NCC mule fiber. [i explained what that means in the previous post.]

i love the variation in the fiber from this one fleece. it is hard to believe that all of this came from the same sheep.

i did the same thing with the purebred BFL fleece.

this may look like a tangly mess, but i can easily separate the locks, which will help when it comes time to prep the fiber for spinning.

there is enough 'best bits' from the mule fiber for a generous sweater's worth of yarn, so i am storing all of that in a recycling bag until i decide what it will become. the BFL was a much smaller fleece, so those 'best bits' are living for now in one of the shopping bags that was sent along with my box of wool.

as for the mucky bits of both fleeces, they were washed in a less-organized fashion, using some plastic strainers and mesh baskets that i keep exclusively for use with fiber-related things.

i am going to need to open a few chakras before i can begin to tackle prepping this stuff for spinning. however, in all this madness, i welcome that challenge.

there were some impressively-long sections of the BFL fleece. i am actually considering getting one of their longer fleeces next year... should we last that long.

i am making progress on the summery top featuring my first ever batch of hand-dyed cotton-based yarn (which i spoke about two posts ago). i am taking all sorts of license in re-interpreting the designer's instructions... because i can. the top should be finished by this weekend, unless i get distracted by some other... hey, is that a butterfly???

oh, and i am still carrying those damn socks (from a few post ago) from room-to-room, although i must admit to having added not a single stitch to that project in over a week.

____________________

it is roughly twenty-four hours later and i am pleased to say that i have fallen down a rabbit hole that began with the Betty Boop classic "Minnie the Moocher", and has resulted in the past couple-few hours being spent watching segments of swing music/dancing from a truly impressive list of old movies. between the likes of the Nicholas Brothers, Cab Calloway, and Whitey's Lindy Hoppers, i have hummed, snapped my fingers, and tapped my toes enough to chase away most of the gloom that i feared would cloud the next few days of my life.

best rabbit hole ever!!!

i wrapped up my evening by returning to where it started... with good music and classic animation. this time, it was the Warner Bros classic "Three Little Bops". [the only video i could find that includes the whole piece was this one from Vimeo. and, yes... the video quality sucks.]

then my favorite animator walked in.

him: are you listing to the "Three Little Bops"?
me: yep. been listening to it on repeat for the last twenty minutes or so.
him: i was listening to that just yesterday.

then i smiled. it is nice to be reminded that our insanity intersects every once in a while.

equal parts humor and insanity...

i have been feeling like crap of late, truth be told. life is (unfortunately) like that some days, and i have learned to (try to) take those moments in their stride. this particular bout of crap had been going on for some time before we entered the test-run apocalypse, so now i am redoubling the efforts to keep myself sane distracted.

if you have been here before... it is pretty much more of the same.

isolation is the usual default setting for anyone at my advanced level of  social avoidance, so i did not anticipate that this current situation would leave me feeling genuinely stir-crazy. spoiler alert: it has. intensely. i look forward to getting back to a point where the decision to avoid other human beings is once again a matter of personal choice and not a medical recommendation.

apocalypse aside, life has been (relatively) unremarkable around these part. the Canadian people seem to excel at the art of going with the flow, so the city of Montreal ground to a halt with very little provocation. meanwhile, my favorite animator is busy treating the experience as a study in human behavior, and he has about a dozen scripts for everything from animated shorts to a series of feature-length films formulating in his head.

mostly, he is concerned about the potential disruption to his normal eating habits... like when i made the mistake of asking if there was anything in particular he wanted, as i was putting together a grocery order for home delivery.

him: did you get cheese?
me: we have some random cheeses in the the fridge, but i got a block of cheddar anyway.

he leaned back in his chair at this point, and cast a deep, contemplative gaze toward the ceiling.

him: hmm... i wonder what their Havarti selection is like.
me: what???
him: what? you know i like to make myself a platter with slices of Havarti and whatever veggies or fruit we have.

then i just broke out laughing in something that could be easily described as equal parts humor and insanity.

him: what? what did i say that's so funny?
me: i'm trying to buy groceries... in the middle of a pandemic... and you're wondering what the Havarti selection is like... so you can make platters with veggies and fruit??? and you wonder why i am in a constant state of panic when this is what i have looking out for me in a potential apocalypse. 

i got kicked out of the studio at this point, which—most would agree—made total sense.

and while it may seem like we are making light of this whole situation, that is definitely not the case. we understand the severity of the threat, and we are taking every possible step to reduce the risk to ourselves and to the people around us. with the exception of one trip to the market, we have been in self-imposed lockdown mode for the past two weeks or so. there is not much else we can do at this point.

oh, and we have also been eating lots of delicious food... like the awesome mac-and-cheese i made to snap me out of a bout of over-thinking that was bordering on becoming a full-blown panic attack.

if you squint a bit, you will see that i used farfalle (bow-tie pasta) as that was the only 'real pasta' we had on hand... other than some linguine, which i am saving for the next near panic attack. i also included a bit of sweet pepper, sweet onion, mushrooms, and a couple slices of bacon. life is better with bacon.

this took less than ten minutes of hands-on time to make. i set the pasta to boil in one pot, then i chopped the bacon and put it to saute in another pan along with the (also-chopped) veggies. i added a dash of flour and mixed that with the rendered bacon grease for a quick roux. in went some milk, and when the mixture started to thicken, i cut the heat and added a generous amount of cheese (mostly sharp white cheddar with a bit of parm and a small nub of yellow cheddar i found at the back of the cheese/egg bin). not gonna lie, i kinda wish we had a bit of Havarti on hand at that point.

full disclosure: i grated nothing. i gave all the cheese a rough chop on the cutting board, and i let the heat from the cream sauce do the rest. i tasted the mixture and adjusted the seasoning at this point. next came the pasta, and after a few quick mixes, i shoved the pan into a very hot oven, and waited until it was bubbling away and toasty along the top and edges.

it looks like chaos in a bowl, but it was incredibly delicious. mac-and-cheese is my ultimate comfort food, and i savored every bite (including the leftovers we had for lunch the next day).

it was a tasty distraction.
____________

i am adding a postscript to note that being at eye level with the canopy of a massive old maple, i was really looking forward to all those tiny buds bursting open, which it seems ready to do very soon.

there were even a few starlings that popped in for a visit a few days ago. if you squint a bit, you can see one of them among the branches. i know they are counted among the world's most invasive species—hence the use of words like scourge and affliction to describe a gathering of said birds—but i do not mind a small scourge, especially these days.

i mention all of that simply to point out that we were well on the way to something resembling Spring. until today.

and it is supposed to keep snowing through the evening... because Canada.

now we wait...

i genuinely miss the days when insomnia was an occasional occurrence, as it seems to have become my default setting of late. i spent all of last night sat up in bed, watching the steadily falling snow on the other side of the windows.

it is now shortly after sunrise—in theory, at least—and it would appear that the promised twenty centimeters (eight inches) seems to have been spot-on for a change. i felt compelled for some odd reason to grab the nearest non-scientific device and verify that measurement.

that looks roughly like twenty centimeters to me. this is me we are dealing with here, so naturally i did confirm it with an actual measuring device to be doubly sure. [that is a bamboo knitting needle, by the way.]

however, as it is still snowing as i am writing this, the final snowfall amount is likely to increase before that storm front is done wreaking havoc. and, while the heaviest part of the snowing has come and gone, and the near-gale-force winds they were promising seem to have skipped us entirely, the worst part of this storm is yet to come.

Canadians pride themselves on being able to drive through the worst Winter conditions, and that is usually the case... except for the very first storm of the season. that is when everyone seems to forget how to behave in icy road conditions. without fail, this first snowfall of the season is guaranteed to be accompanied by a sharp spike in road accidents. the local news for the next day or two will be filled with reports of multi-car pileups of the kind that leave you wondering how the drivers at the end of that chain of destruction failed to notice the twenty (or more) cars ahead of them that had already smashed into each other.

being Canadians, they tend to take these things in stride, and you find the occasional report of people pulling hockey sticks out of their trunks and having an impromptu match right there in the middle of a frozen-over highway while they wait for the emergency services to arrive. firstly, only in Canada does everyone seem to have a hockey stick within reach at all times, and secondly, only in Canada could such a nightmare of a situation be turned into something so ridiculously cute. i shudder to think what a multi-vehicle pileup of that magnitude would look like back home in NYC, and i can almost guarantee you that anyone who pulls a baseball bat out of their trunk in that situation is definitely not looking for a quick game.

man, i miss New York!

it is now the middle of the usual morning drive time, and i am surprised at how near-silent it is out there. the weather service spent the past few days issuing dire predictions of strong winds whipping all of that fresh snow into zero visibility, whiteout conditions, but that part has thankfully not happened. however, most people seem to have heeded the suggestions to plan to stay home today unless absolutely necessary. you do not have to tell us that twice.

beyond that, we live on a small one-way street that is only a few blocks long, so we are usually one of the last streets to be plowed. no exaggeration... i have not heard a single car either being started or being driven down our street, and that will likely remain the case for the rest of the day.

i find it especially adorable that the people across the street took the time to put their recycling out for collection. i get the distinct feeling it will be sitting in that spot for a few days before the city gets around to remembering that we exist.

in light of all the dire warning over the past few days, we spent yesterday afternoon driving around Montreal, crossing things off a list as we went, and we were walking to the car to head back home from our last stop just as it finally began to snow.

while this is being billed as the first snowstorm of the season, we actually got a bit of light snow back in the middle of last week. i opened the curtains Wednesday morning (following yet another night of zero sleep i should add) to find this.

farewell, trough of delicious strawberries. it was lovely eating you.

we took that light dusting as a friendly reminder from Mother Nature, and we cleared up the last traces of this Summer's balcony garden project. the ceramic pots had already been brought indoors to prevent cracking due to freezing, so all that was left was to remove the last bits of greenery from the large planters, then stack and cover them to prevent the loss of nutrients from the soil due to melting snow... which is a joke in itself, as there will be approximately two-to-three days during the course of the next five-to-six months when it will be warm enough around here to melt snow.

now we wait for next year.