Not According to Plan

I stopped what I was doing and went for a walk in the field yesterday because if the forecast is correct, it's the last day of Indian Summer.  The forecast is for rain tomorrow and snow in the mountains.  I believe it - it's cold and blustery today!

I've made a number of routes through the field but I always try to finish up along the irrigation ditch.  It will go dry very soon when the irrigation district shuts off the supply for the winter.

I'm not the only one who likes to walk along the ditch.  It looks like an entire raccoon family went for a stroll!

I finished weaving the rest of the warp on Dora, my workshop loom.  I zigzagged the edges and threw the sampler into the wash along with the rest of the towels. I think the plain weave tracking is really attractive.

This is the sample on the left from the above photo which was woven as double weave, double width.  My crease shows but I'd still like to try it again using my handspun yarn for a wider lap robe without wrenching my arms out of the shoulder sockets on a wide warp.

I was introduced to pick-up in an Andean Pebble Weave class and didn't like it one bit - too fiddly!  But boy did I like pick-up in double weave and after struggling with it in class, the right sample, I did the same thing again at home and thought it was very cool.  I want to do it again but in wool and a more interesting motif.  It seems like a good cold-weather project for this winter.

Remember my inspiration picture?

The colors are absolutely right but the towels are a disaster.  All my previous colorways have come from nature and the colors appear together in harmony.  The values are off here and I have complementary colors crossing together on every towel with muddy results.  Lesson learned - Mother Nature knows best!

Ian and I have been taking Tai Chi for Health classes at the Oregon Tai Chi school since February and I'm ready to step up to the next level.  We've become friends with Joanie, a lady who drives down from Redmond, and after two years taking our class she also wants to enroll in the school.  We met for QiGong this morning, plunked down our money, got our uniforms and are now official students of the school.  I'm really excited.

This is the beginning class that she and I will be taking and it's held five times a week.  Beginning next Saturday we've decided to make this our class so stayed to observe for a while.  Master Chen asked one of his Washu students to lead the stretches.  He can't be more than ten years old and we were encouraged to see all levels in this class.  I know we will fit right in.  One of the students is a young man who is recovering from a traumatic injury and if he can do these two sessions back to back, so can we.

It's been an interesting week in the Campbell household.  I went with Ian to Urgent Care Saturday night when it became clear that he doesn't have the flu but is passing another kidney stone.  As the time stretched on, I felt like I was going to fall over if I couldn't like down and since we only live five miles away, I came back home and stretched out on the bed, waiting for the call to come back.  Yet another reason why I'm glad we live here.

He had an x-ray and saw his assigned urologist on Thursday.  The short of it is that he has two options.  He can take Flomax, drink more water and wait for it to pass naturally, the doc's preference, or if we decide to take our New York trip anyway and he hasn't passed the stone by Tuesday, he'll do surgery on Wednesday to remove it.  At this point, Ian has decided to let it pass naturally and if that hasn't happened by Tuesday, then he'll cancel our reservations and tickets.  Old age adventures - ugh.  Things are not going according to plan!