So this perimenopausal thing is Strange - in all the usual ways, I suspect.

Sometimes I'm wakeful beyond sense, and instead of being hyper tired the following day (and while it's offset there's usually Enough sleep) I wind up hyper sensatized. That can be a great thing and can also be nervewracking. It's been a while since I've lived as deep and as open as possible; it's become so easy, curling into the comforts of nearly-enough. Opening up to some fresh growth here in this odd-weathered summer rain we've had just recently. Yeah, good exemplars can shake you up that way too, and there are some of those new to me. A gladness unfolds, and these vague words around it are about all I have to write - yet.

Loving my Beloved, my work and my other work and these avocations deeply and well, with as well a sense of a personal wake up call to unfurl to.

A buddy at REI wrote this up and keeps copies in his vest pocket to hand out to folks seeking something a little beyond the ordinary.

The Shealor Lakes, at 7500 feet, are about two miles west of Silver Lake, off Highway 88 in the Sierra Nevada. There are no reputed campsites, no toilets, no piped water, and no four wheeled vehicle has ever been there. Probably no mountain bikers, either. At night no city or car lights can be seen, nor vehicle sounds heard. It is primitive backpacking camping.

Take Highway 88 east from Jackson, CA, to the first place you can look down and see Silver Lake. Very soon Plasses road angles back down to the right. Go on down the main road towards Kay's Resort on Silver Lake. About half way to Kay's is a small sign on the left, "Shealor Lakes Parking." If you miss it, go to Kay's and turn back. There is no water at the parking area. The trail, easily followed, loops north around a hill from which you can see the lakes.

Get a fire permit on the way, up at the first Forest Service Ranger Station east of Jackson. No other arrangements are necessary. Have a good time!

Of course, with all the park closures around California this year, you might want to consider doing some extra pre-preparation and camp no-fire.

Looking forward to fiddling for rapper for Swords of Gridlock tomorrow at the San Francisco Winter Traditions Day of Dance: here's details if you can come to see and hear:

Ring of Cold Steel Longword Dancers invite you to a Day of Dance on the San Francisco Embarcadero. ROCS and 6 other Bay Area traditional dance teams will be joined by two Los Angeles teams dancing at Pier 39 (10:00 am - noon) and Victorian Park (Beach & Larkin) from 2:00 - 4:30 on Saturday, January 15.

Leap of Faith, North Bay, Kyla Brooke
*Ring of Cold Steel, San Francisco, Michael Siemon (our gracious hosts)
Deer Creek, San Francisco, Ethan Hay
Bombastic Border, East Bay, Randall Cayford
Swords of Gridlock, EB/Peninsula, Randall Cayford (overlaps BB/DC)
Mad Molly, Peninsula, Amy Baldwin
Dark Energy, Peninsula, Stewart Hall (overlaps DC/MM)
Wild Wood, Los Angeles, Julie James
Rising Phoenix, Los Angeles, Terry Hill

The lists posted to dancers includes Bob Orser of my other team, Emperor Norton's, although the team as a whole isn't going. Perhaps I'll play him a jig…

Wow, seems almost like one conversation with a pal started something yesterday, though it's just Another Meaningful Coincidence that Farhad Manjoo published an article on punctuation http://www.slate.com/id/2281146/ that's now getting linked all over the Twitter-feed I see. At least the author is somewhat compassionate with noting how really it's emotional ties to how-we-learned that keep folks using their preferred method.

I confess I do notice who writes with extra spaces, and hum to myself, "manual typer" or "ah, typographer" and teach my Advanced Practice in Word for Dissertation Students classes not to use the second space and why (for the typographer's reasons), but it's the underlining as emphasis or book-title that I 'splain not to use in favor of italics as being "1954 manual typewriter-speak for 'O Typesetter please use italics here!'" At the same time I'm also secretly pleased in knowing a letterpress typographer of, say, Franklin's era would have ended that last sentence with some space after and between the !, ', and " marks.

After all the angsty wailing over punctuation being ruled by Ophiuchus (and isn't the public reaction to that old droplet of info just hilarious) is over, we can all go back to using our preferred methods at least in draft, and let it all settle down to Consistency in Use. Which, simplicity being what it is, should in fact include doing a global search-and-fix to remove second (and third, and fourth) spaces from manuscripts. Of course this will also catch those paragraphs where someone has committed the foolishness of using spaces rather than a tab to indent to a paragraph…

And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year's sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, revelling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us - listen!
All the long echoes, sing the same delight,
This Shortest Day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And now so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
Welcome Yule!

-Susan Cooper, 1977 (thank you)

Wonderful eclipse last night; happy peeps at the dawn this morning early; weavers on their way over for the morning, and visiting with friends this evening. Solstice blessings all around, my dear ones!

No, not the Bob Franke song, but we might have to pull that out a little later...

Major house areas clean, check.
Junipers in front trimmed & porch swept, check.
Fresh never frozen 25 pound turkey picked up at the market, check. Final groceries and paper goods gotten at that same time, check.
Rental chairs and table safely stowed in garage, check.
liqueurs and aperatif sippage set out on sideboard, check. (just 'cos I don't, doesn't mean others don't get to taste what we make...)

Lise puttering away at Further Additions to the (Vegetarian) Stuffing, check.

Time to go peruse the Rest of the List, but it's dark so I'm not sweeping the back patio again till morning...

Happy Thanksgiving, all! Hope you're celebrating with loved ones, and maybe even have the Feast of Three Sisters spread out on your table.
What?
You mean you thought somewhere along the way my Puritan ancestors had to do with inventing, 'scuse me, a FEAST holiday? Bwa-ha-ha-notsomuch. One of the antecedents to what we call Thanksgiving is a centuries-old traditional harvest holiday celebrating three crops grown in together - corn, beans, and squash. Ah, you say, looking at your festive spread, now that makes sense! As it also does in the garden: corn pops up early and gives the beans something to climb, the beans set nitrogen to help feed the corn, and squash spread out their leaves and protect those tender toes that corn has, and everybody's companionable growing together. Well worth a feast day and gathering of friends and family to share.
To your very good health and joy.

Dawdle-y driving vacations with visits along the way are WONDERFUL, say we from li'l Quincy, CA along the randomized route. Tonight we're roughing it in style in the Spanish Creek Motel (though we had G3 and hot showers in the  campground in Colusa last night, too, hee!) 
Today: Colusa Sacramento River Rec Area (great little quiet spur to put in a little boat) and the Chinese Temple in Oroville; drive across Plumas Natl Forest (mtn!) on littlest road (119) on ye map. Oooh. 
Tomorrow: Plumas County Museum, Worldmaker Trail cos we love sights with stories and history, and visits with friends just a bit further north. 

Much better post pneumonia - my doc is pleased, and says now it's just eight weeks or so for the affected lung tissues to heal (ack!) - but it feels so good to have brains again!
F'rinstance, three current editing projects are done and off the table, delivered and billed to the academic clients, and ftp set up for delivery to Syne of my audio volunteer support to weavecast, editing of her raw interviews - wonderful things to listen to.
I am once again the master of the run-on sentence as well, I see.

It's delightful to be touching base with LJ friends again, and rediscovering what many of you are up to that it turns out I don't really connect with in other online venues quite to the same degree.

- what a drag! Too zoned on the meds making me better to think, much less be awake for terribly long at any one time.

Finally poked over to, and joined DeviantART. All o' you who've gone before me, please drop me a note; are you there? d'you like the venue?

*oops, falling over again*

So - I filled up an entire bobbin this evening, how cool is that? I've been going to a spinning session at Cece's place on most Mondays for somewhere a little over two years, and while that's a social and not a study group, I sorta progress. Slowly.
Now, pal Heather, who came over for dinner and spinning, is studying for a Masters Certificate in Handspinning through Olds College in Edmonton, which can be done distance except for one of the six sections, which is a one-week on site intensive in the summer. We're swapping jam for tutoring and each having a blast; I went over to her place last week for a few hours of spinnity tutorial goodness and let me just say I'm a far better spinner today than I was a week ago Thursday morning. Part of it is deepening vocabulary, part of it is hands-on demo & splaining technique, and part of it is practice - but I realize I haven't been "running my scales on the instrument" with the spinning wheel, the way one does with a musical instrument, to really get to know it. What does that mean? In spinning wool, there's two different ways to spin, worsted and woolen, and while part of how you get there is in the pre-drafting of the fiber, a bit part of it (my grand A-HAs from last week) are how you hold the fiber, and which hand pulls which way, and where you allow the spin to enter the fiber.
I can now spin woolen. I'm now a more intentional worsted spinner.
The other part of "running scales" is in playing with the different settings - on a spinning wheel, this means messing around with the different ratios of the wheels drive pulleys, which changes how much spin/twist goes into the fiber per turn of the drive wheel, and how much tension you put on the whole assembly. Looser tension, larger drive-whorl = less spin. Good place to start if you're drafting slowly. It's a fatter yarn, Add a little tension, and you get a thinner diameter. There's also the matter that the thinner the thread you're spinning, the more twist it needs to have in it to stay coherent & whole.

Anyhow.

Spinning for a few hours this evening after dinner of Salade Niçoise (with salmon, yum) and artichokes out of the yard, I spun up an entire bobbin of this lovely grey Shetland roving, practicing spinning Woolen. I have a nice bump of the stuff and will set up three storage bobbins from which to ply. I haven't done triple plying from bobbins before, just two-ply; I'm looking forward to it.

After that, I sat down and Navajo triple-plied some skinny Blue Faced Leicester (BFL) in a natural grey overdyed with cochineal (red) by Kristen of A Verb For Keeping Warm (isn't that a great fiber biz name) - which delights me as a method, because it's basically finger crocheting a long chain of the single and letting it twist back on itself. I have about 57 yards of that, pulled off to the niddy-noddy and skeined.

My loves, that feels like Production, and I'm greatly pleased with it.