lorena

I always find nominations as difficult to do as writing the actual story. because I feel that I'm not nominating them for *me*, but for someone else who might not have expected to find them in the list.

Routinely, I try to include at least one tv show or movie or media, something easily available; at least one book; this year it's two books and three tv series of various vintages, with the oldest one available on YouTube.

And I may have a story in mind for a couple of them, just in case.

***

Apparently, the drive band of my spinning wheel burst from old age. It is the original, same age as the footers that broke, so it's time. But I'm still probably going to spin the shetland by hand because it has very little crimp and my fingers feel how to do it on a spindle. That also gives me some time in front of the tv watching movies, never a bad thing.

I'm out of practice at spinning, so it's not surprising that when I realized how little crimp the Shetland wool has, I decided to spin it on a hand spindle instead of on the wheel.

The surprise was when I went into the back room (tv room) where the wheel is and found the drive band in pieces on the floor. Someone, I suspect the younger kitty who is curled up right next to me, saw it as needing to be killed, and definitely killed it; it was in half a dozen pieces.

So now I will need to get a new drive band for it.

This is the same wheel that needed to have its footers replaced (the straight poly pieces that hold the treadles on) because they broke. It hasn't had a lot of use lately anyway because of that.

I don't know what he thinks the drive band is, but he definitely used some of his brains as well as claws to get it off the wheel, where it was set up ready for use.

sigh. cats. I'm almost at the point of braiding myself a drive band from hemp and soaking it in lavender oil, to keep him away from it.

Is it possible for FB to choose specific accounts and slooooooooooow them down? If so, I'm a target. My FB constantly reloads, eats posts, and runs slower than when I used a 300-baud modem, back in the 90s.

sigh

... back to working on my list of nominations for Yuletide.

I seem to live between odd dichotomies these days.

It's hard to go to sleep, in part because of lack of noise. I have just enough tinitis that when I can't hear the traffic it's hard to sleep; think of permanent mosquito in your ear. I found a technique in FB reels for tapping hard on the bone behind the ear that gets rid of the worst of it, but it doesn't always work. So I use an app called Calm, which has 'soundscapes' including things like six different kinds of rainfall, waterfalls, forests of various kinds and white, pink and brown noises, find whatever works for me that night and leave it on all night. That helps. Or I could stay awake till nearly 4, when the noise from the Capital Beltway a quarter mile south of me cranks up to its general daily roar.

A friend suggested that I get a night light for the bathroom in the shape of a capybara, or in her words, 'an imperturbable capybara'. So I did get it, and have it set to the lowest level of light, but I am not yet used to any light there. Normally I have my Kindle nearby, and when I need to get to the bathroom I flip the cover open and use it as a night light. Last night, the capybara was sitting imperturbably on my toothbrush holder, but its light shone out on a wall that I'm not used to having lit, so I had to remind myself that I had a friendly and non-aggressive critter there shining the light (I need reminders when I'm almost asleep but my body discerns something different.)

That meant that I slept on my left side last night, with my face away from the lit wall. Which, for most other people, would not be a problem, but I have all my life had a slightly curved spine, leaning to the left. (During the 2000s, I was doing deepwater running twice a week and the supported floating combined with gravity straightened my spine out, but I have not done it in several years now bcC (because Covid) and it is leaning a little. When I sleep on that side it leans more. As a remedy my husband put up a bar in one of the doorways that I can reach up and grab and dangle myself from, and my own weight straightens my back out painlessly. A side effect of the bar is that my grip strength has increased a bit, so I could do better at pulling out vines yesterday.

Much more of this balancing and I may start thinking of Philippe Petit balancing on the rope between the Two Towers, long ago.