Plum Crazy

March had turned out to be a crazy month even for the Pacific Northwest.  This is soon to be the wettest March on record.  For anyone who is familiar with the book "The Illustrated Man"  there is a story about a man who lives on a planet where it always rains.  It rains so much that they have these special pods to take shelter from the constant onslaught of rain.  When the weather gets like this, dark and wet day after day, I think of that story and wonder what it would be like if it never stopped....  Of course, this isn't some distant planet and sooner or later it will stop and the grass will finally pop out and everything will look green again.  In the meantime, it's enough to drive this light starved lady crazy.  But as you know, there is always a silver lining and I have to admit all this moisture is a good thing to make up for our lack of snow in the valleys this winter.  I think about the folks in Colorado, battling unseasonable dry winds and wildfires.  All of a sudden, all this moisture doesn't seem quite so bad.  However, I'd love to be able to package some of it up and send it out, special delivery for the folks who need it so badly.

To pacify myself, I have been spinning some hand painted superwash Merino that I dyed last fall.  This is the last of the superwash that I had dyed - ready to spin into sock yarn.  I love watching the different plum colors flow through my fingers.  But the real happy surprise is how it looks when I finally get it plied into it's final yarn.  How the colors twist into something else is always such a wonderful adventure.

Now - if that elusive sun would just come and visit - a few hours would be appreciated.  Just long enough to slog to the barn and feed without getting soaked to the skin and long enough to haul the pots in from the shed so I can get them washed and ready to start seeds this weekend. But at this writing, the rain is a steady stream pelting the roof making me want to cocoon into my chair with a down throw and a nice book.  But this gal has sewing deadlines to meet so it will have to wait for later.  In the meantime....it's driving me plum crazy!!

Try A Little Kindness

The past couple of days have been a lesson in frustration.  I have been trying to embroider on my embroidery machine and it's been doing all kinds of strange things.  Perhaps it's the magnetics from the solar flares that we've been having this week or maybe it just needs to go in for a good cleaning.  Whatever the reason for it's hijinks the end result was a lot of stress which is something I could do without.  In the end, I had to change what I had planned to something the machine would cooperate with.  By the close of the day, the muscles in my back were tight and screaming at me and I was downright pissy.  Not at all the energy I want to put into my project.  So today I am not going anywhere near the sewing room.

Today, I am going to be kind to myself and have a day of hopefully stress free tasks.   I think most of us are kind to others but not very kind to ourselves.  For some reason we think we have to be hard on ourselves in order to be the best we can be.  Perhaps it's our Puritan roots coming home to roost but that kind of criticism is over rated.  So I think I will indulge myself today by reading my Facebook friend, Richard Twillman's new book on my Kindle - Another Voyage - A Different Dream.  I could use a different voyage than the one I've been on the last couple of days....

In thinking about Kindness this morning, I remembered something that happened to a friend of my daughters when they were going to the Art Institute in Seattle several years ago.  She was a struggling student - a young woman struggling with her sense of self and her place in the world.  Every morning as she was walking to school, there was a homeless man sitting in the same spot.  Every morning he would smile at her and say "Good morning Beautiful" and she would smile back.  When she had enough money she would buy him a coffee and he would always have something uplifting to say. One morning on her way to school, she saw two Police officers where her friend always sat and they were roughly handling his body - you see, he had died in the night.  The girl rushed up to them with tears on her face and protested the rough handling of her friend.  The police officer said "What does it matter to you - he was just some homeless guy!"  and she said to him, "He was a person.  He was a nice person, he deserves better than this!"  but the officer shooed her away telling her to move on.  Kindness Costs Nothing But Love  Anyone can choose kindness.  Anyone can choose to make a difference.  Anyone at all.

            Good Morning Beautiful - Have a wonderful Day!!