Yes, this time it has truly been an eon. I almost decided to let the blog die. I've been partly suffering from low-grade depression, which makes me think that my life is crap, and partly inertia. Let's get the ugly stuff out of the way first.

My knee has healed and I have full range of motion. I still get tired pretty quickly and my back isn't as strong as I'd like but if I did my exercises more rigorously that would help. However my right knee hurts now. Behind the knee cap, all the time. There isn't anything more surgically to be done since my surgeon said my patella was pretty thin already. Heaven help me if I have another infection. Let's not go there. So it hurts which makes me want to not exercise it which is no doubt counter productive. I've had a few bouts of gastric upset as well. This week I had a skin cancer (just a basal cell one) removed from my upper lip. I thought it was going to be really minor but it has proven to be more uncomfortable than expected. I feel like somebody punched me in the mouth and have a bandage over my upper lip. Gross. I went back to my optometrist who is going to fit me with a different style of contacts that cover more of the eye and supposedly give better vision. Meanwhile watching the footy is tiring as I can't see what's going on clearly enough.

I've been madly spinning everything in sight. I sold off $200 worth of spinning fibre on ebay to clear the decks a bit (and downsized the knitting stash to D as well) and am just spinning whatever comes to hand. Right now it's a blend of wool and alpaca in rusts, browns, fuschia, and orange. Plying merino and silk in red with black and white accents. Knitting has gone on the back burner with my eyes not 100%. My hands are often sore as well since winter has arrived. We've had temperatures at night below freezing already.

My genealogical work progresses. I am poking at a branch that were the first Dutch settlers of Albany, NY, and plan to map out the migration of some of the early Massachusetts ancestors. I found I have one ancestor who came over on the Mayflower, William White, and his son Resolved White. There is one ancestor with the exotic name of Naomi LaPorte who was a French emigree fleeing the French revolution. That's as close as I get to my mother's myth that we were descended from General Lafayette's brother.

I've been watching Masterchef again, but I skip the team competitions and watch when they are concentrating on a dish I would consider making myself. Maggie Beer sets the bar too high I think and doesn't allow enough time. I do wonder about the cooks hurtling about madly to finish their dishes in time, then cut to the kitchen totally clean and each cook brings a dish up one at a time. Some things must get cold or sit in their juices too long. Maggie's grape upside down cake must have been still hot when served or they are fudging the timeline elsewhere. I've been catching up on the TV series Fringe on DVD which seems an intriguing mix of X Files (not a fan), Lost, and Alias. J.J. Abrams shows his influence in all three. I look forward to seeing more of Leonard Nemoy as the enigmatic William Bell.

Last but NOT least is the weaving course I took at the ANU School of Textiles. It was billed as 3D weaving which involved making textures within the woven cloth, with things like pleats, waffle weave, and seersucker. My class project is above, a scarf of felted wool with stripes of rayon that created ripples and bubbles. I had to weave like hell because I was sick fo a couple of classes. But it turned out exactly right. I bought a battery powered fringe twister which was a treat for sore hands, then put it in the washing machine for felting. It's now soft and interesting and I can't wait to do another.

And yes, I got my hair cut. Now it's just under ear length and layered. Much easier to maintain.

Well, I told you I was wondering why I wrote this blog and I haven't come up with enough things of import in the past 2 months to write about. I have come out of my depression without intervention by a professional (fortunate, since my appointment with the shrink isn't until April). I have started work at the Library as a volunteer doing not very interesting material but it was good to see all the friendly faces. My physical well being improves. My back no longer hurts except for occasions when anybody's back would hurt: long time spent bending over, etc. I continue to have pain in my leg muscles after I walk any distance which is disappointing because walking was how I wanted to get fit. One day of walking means I am very sore the next day. I've had my enthusiastic Bhutanese gardener go after weeds in my garden. The Canberra weather has been extremely bizarre: cold and wet which is hardly a typical summer. My tomatoes don't know what to do when we had an all-time record low for January of 1C. They produce a handful of tomatoes. The lima beans are still going and have produced pods. I made 2 batches of zucchini pickle relish from blimps produced in the garden. We are at this moment having a hailstorm. Housewise, I got the drains cleaned out, have been nagging my gutter repairman to do the job he signed up for in November, and had to get my old DVD player wired into the new digital set-up because my new whiz-bang DVD player/recorder won't play region 1 DVDs and there is no hack for it that I could find. Since I have hundreds of American DVDs, this was not permissible so I had to take a step back to an older DVD player that has been hacked.

Otherwise, I read, watch TV, spin, work on my family history. The photo above is one I scanned from a collection of photos my sister had. I've made a couple of contacts with distant, previously unknown, relatives. I managed to get some data for my MIL's genealogy search as well. Books: I finished Judgement of Caesar by Stephen Saylor. I love his Roman mysteries and have read every one. I also finished Stephen Fry's second volume of autobiography, The Fry Chronicles. I raced through the Steve Jobs biography which I found absolutely riveting. What a complicated, driven, genius of a man. We will miss his mark on society since he personally approved of every tiny detail of every Apple product. I have been an Apple fan for a long time and now know some of the why. I bought a first generation Macintosh the first month they were on the market. My BBBB is now is Thames by Peter Ackroyd. My previous BBBBs proved not to be sleep inducing and are therefore languishing half read. I've been reading science fiction on my Kindle. I go through so many hard science/space opera novels that it hardly bears listing them.

I spun coffee brown BFL, some hand dyed BFL in blues, browns, and roses, and am now into 15 oz of merino & tencel in a lovely aqua/sea green. Bought two lots under different colour names from two different vendors and it turned out to be the same thing. I spin so much and knit so little that I wish I could sell some. My current new favourite TV show is Homeland partly because I love Damien Lewis. I am also a fan of the Canadian series The Republic of Doyle and Flashpoint. I am watching the British mini-series Exile because I love John Simm.

Next week I see the eye surgeon, have a mammogram, and I intend to make appointments for my teeth, the cat's annual check-up, and my hair. I am finally tired of the locks enough that they're coming off again. This weekend I am going blackberrying in the state forest with some of the girls. This assumes there are blackberries given the weird weather and that it doesn't rain.

Is that enough for 2 months? Don't know whether there is enough interest in what I do write, but I'll continue to update my waiting audience when there is something to post. Maybe after I start the weaving course in 2 weeks.

Your Word is "Hope"

You see life as an opportunity for learning, growth, and bringing out the best in others. No matter how bad things get, you always have at least a glimmer of optimism. You are accepting and forgiving. You encourage those who have wronged you to turn over a new leaf. And while there is a lot of ugliness in the world, you believe that almost no one is beyond redemption.

This was the result of a quiz on Blogthings that I saw in somebody else's blog. I find it surprisingly accurate. I am generally hopeful even wirth chronic pain and depression. This week you haven't heard from me since I have a cold. Yesterday I was about to put that in the past tense but then I coughed all night and am coughting today. It's a beautiful day and I was all set to make pickles but it's back to bed for a while anyway..

I've been spinning alpaca at night while watching season 2 of The Unit, one of my favourite TV shows and one that gets jerked around by Aussie networks TV. Season 3 has been released in the US but I don't know about here. These were a rental. I adore Dennis Haysbert as well as the rest of the company; I thin even the Bear would like all the gunfights and explosions, but I like the characters.

It's late and I'm tired and have a headache but I just wanted to say hey before hitting the hay (joke, folks). One thing about me is I watch a lot of TV. Everything from documentaries on Nat Geo to CSI. My guilty pleasure TV-wise this year is the American version of "So you think you can dance." We are promised an Aussie version next year. I just love watching these kids dance their socks off. We are about to get the grand finale next week and I would choose either of the male dancers as they just continue to excite and amaze me. It's the only "reality" TV show I can tolerate and the airwaves are crammed with quiz shows and other forms of crap. Which is why I watch a lot of DVDs as well as TV; I'm a participant in a program where you set up a list of movies you want to watch and they send 2 at any one time to you and you send them back. I am catching up on TV shows that Aussie stations showed in the middle of the night if they showed them at all and movies that I missed, and it takes the effort out of going to the DVD rental place and guessing at what they might have in stock that I might want to watch.

Book reports: I finished Sean Williams and Shane Dix's trilogy Evergence and think it was one of the most satisfying outings in action hard sci-fi I've read in a long time. I have started reading Richard Morgan's Thirteen which I bought twice because it was published under a different title in the US and the UK (Black Man) which makes me so mad. His previous novels (Altered Carbon, Woken Furies) were of the same futuristic thriller genre. In between I read the latest Kathy Reich's novel Bones to Ashes which was predictably a page turner. I hated what they did to her novels in making a TV series which had only the slenderest of commonality with the novels (female forensic anthropologist, full stop), changing the locale, the surrounding characters, etc. My BBBB Empires of the Word bogged me down by the time I hit the end on the role of English as a lingua franca today. I've read a lot about this and I just got stuck. I may come back to it after I read The Root of the Wild Madder by Brian Murphy about the making of carpets in Iran and Afghanistan, and The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker which is Semantics 101. Why am I reading linguistics books? Didn't I get enough of this in grad school? I also squeezed David Crystal's By Hook or by Crook in there somewhere (etymology, especially of British place names, this time). Two recent purchases burning up the shelf space are Eric Clapton's autobiography and that of Patty Boyd. How this woman married two of the men I have idolized since I was a teenager and made neither of them happy I must find out.

I am still cleaning alpaca. One reader asked how it spun up and I can't tell because I haven't spun any yet! I've been madly washing it but haven't spun it. I am spinning very fine merino that I will ply with mohair and then dye for sock yarn, and some of it I will ply with the palest of the beige alpaca (which sometimes looks almost white) and dye to even the colours out. I got lots of white merino from the free fleece. I'm mostly trying to move alpaca from sitting around dirty in trash bags to clean and ready to spin. I am also grumpy after placing a rather large order for weaving kits with Heritage Yarns only to be told they don't ship outside the US and Canada. I would have thought this would have been an opportunity to grow their business, and I wanted to take advantage of the strength of the Aussie dollar but nope.

I have decided against the trip to Italy and beyond. I realized I am just not strong enough physically. I cannot by myself haul suitcases around airports. Tactile Travel has a less active tour in Sept but it's not in the part of Italy I want to see. I may just do another trip to the US, or Canada, or New Zealand. I can speak Canadian and Kiwi after a fashion.