wild-eyed roundup

Half-way through a slightly crazy fortnight, so this is just a brief pitstop…

It’s teaching time at the university again and I’m at the helm of a course I haven’t taught on before while I batter my way through the administrative tangles of the new year. Life is a medley of chores mixed with existential questions. Like: why have they just sent me a new contract when I signed and returned one a month ago? Is it a routine snafu, or something I need to worry about?

So if I am not actually in front of students — my own or the university’s — I am working every hour there is either on the computer or at the loom. And the washing machine has broken down. This is poor timing, but not a bolt from the blue. It has seen 20 years of service and for a few months I have been expecting every wash to be its last. We are only up to our knees in dirty laundry so far… though the new machine isn’t due to arrive for another week and by then we may have completely disappeared from view. In case you were worried, I do intend to wear (a) clothes and (b) clean clothes for the Open Studios. No need to stay away on that account.

Oh, and in the midst of the work-and-laundry crisis, something went boom at the hosting company where my website resides. The server is now fixed, but a table or two in my database has been left a bit crumpled. I have several helpful people offering me incomprehensible tips on how to fix it, but frankly I am not even going to get to thinking about that for at least another week. It seems to me that things are actually working reasonably OK, in spite of the underlying errors, but if you have any problems… well, I suppose you won’t be reading this, will you??

In the good news department, my neck is much, much better. The physio gave me a weird stretchy thing to do 10 times every 1-2 hours through the day and it works a treat. I was weaving v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y at the start of the week, but am basically back to normal operations now. And as long as I’m not too lazy to plug in the KVM switch and use the desktop monitor for my laptop, I can manage at the computer for a reasonable length of time.

On the loom, well, I’ve woven six metres of fabric with the orange weft and have now switched to lilac:

And I have a new warp on the Megado, beamed and threaded but not yet sleyed.

“wild-eyed roundup” was posted by Cally on 12 Oct 2013 at http://callybooker.co.uk