Well it’s been a minute!

We’ve been busy here since February just living life and working. I’ve also been trying to take it easy on my elbow tendons and thumb’s IPT joint. They’re all still acting up since the renos last summer.

I’ve been doing some sewing machine servicing but it takes a toll on both.  One machine takes me the better part of a day because I have to modify my grip for my thumb and the tendons burn for a couple of days afterwards.  Super fun.

So let’s see, what’s been happening? (spoiler, as usual – it’s a lot.)

Right after the last post, the furnace decided to fry the main board and so we had to replace that.  Luckily, it was just after a cold spell and we could keep things from freezing with the wood stove while the board was en route.  Some days, house ownership seriously ruins my calm!

In late February, I decided I would finally cement in my mind how knitted cables work so I can modify designs to how I want them to look.  Naturally, I did this with 2 colours because why wouldn’t I try to break my brain completely?  And did it ever.  I started knitting as a kid when my mom taught me the basics.  Back then, I learned to knit English style. I’m not sure I ever graduated past the knit stitch.  When I came back to knitting many, many years later, I resumed knitting English style but shortly after switched to Continental.  When I sat down to this cable work, I thought the best thing to do would be to knit with both hands – one colour in each.  I’ve done it before but not with cables.  And, my right hand insisted it had no idea what yarn was never mind how to hold it.  It took hours to convince my hands to do what I wanted but I did manage it eventually.

In March, I finally set a spinning goal for the year.  One fleece by the end of the year. I picked the smallest one, a Shetland fleece that I’d washed and prepped last year.  Then I realized it was a small enough fleece and I was spinning it fast enough, I could potentially finish it before the Tour de Fleece starts on June 29th.  As of June 6th, I have about 56gr left and plying but I won’t make it because of something else we’re doing in June.  More about that later in the post.

Then I accidentally deleted archaicarcane.com during routine maintenance and backups.  Some of you will have noticed the site disappear for a full day back in March.  That was me.  I’ve never done that before in 27 years in IT.

Around late-March, I finally had to admit to my GP that I had been experiencing small episodes of tachycardia since around Christmas thanks to falling off my low iodine diet and super dosing myself over the holidays.  They were usually short lived but multiples a day and by early-March starting to subside with a resumption of our low iodine diet.

No good.  I was to go back on anti-thyroid meds to slow my thyroid again.  I have been resistant because last time, I had kidney problems – to the point where I suspect I was close to needing dialysis but no one (other than me) wanted to run labs.  I negotiated a very light dose that I was told wouldn’t do anything (so was under orders that if anything changed or worsened I was to get my rear end into the office or to emerg.) and a week or so later I requested some slightly belated baseline labs to monitor my kidneys because the last labs with kidney values and liver (what these meds usually affect) on them were the previous year’s annual checkup.  About a week into taking the anti-thyroid meds, the tachycardia disappeared almost completely.  After 3.5 weeks on the meds, I was no longer experiencing any hyperthyroid symptoms but labs showed my liver and heart values were out of range.  I was referred to an internist (as I still didn’t have an Endocrinologist) who I saw 2 weeks later. Since both could be caused by the meds, I came off the anti-thyroid meds again because I’d gone from clinically hyperthyroid to sub-clinically hypothyroid in those 5+ weeks on a tiny dose.  The Rx is now to get healthier heart wise and recheck everything in 6 months.  So my job at the moment – now that summer finally looks like it may make a stop in Central Alberta –  is to go back to our previous lifestyle of enjoying life outdoors.  The thyroid roller-coaster I’ve been riding though is,… a lot to deal with.

To that end, we’ve been trying to get out and exercise when we can.  I have my bicycle out and at the very least, we try to go out to the lake nearby to shoot bird photos nearly every day.  I’ve encountered so many birds I had no idea we had here. Great Blue Herons, Night Herons, Black Crested Cormorants, Common Loons, American Coots, Osprey, Ruddy Ducks (which amuse me to no end).   I had an idea that most of these were in the province but had never laid eyes on them.  Now, I’m able to photograph them and my stealth sneaking abilities are improving which I’m sure is good core work.

It’s also that time of year when the babies are hatching and Oh, my heart!

Stability in my elbow is still variable so I’m not woodturning much but I do get downstairs to turn a spindle shaft every few weeks.  The next thing I plan to try to make a wood cross arm spindle with the mortising attachment on the drill press and the spindle sander I got shortly before the water apocalypse happened last summer.

While working on the fleece spinning project, I realized that I was going to run out of Woolee Winder bobbins and decided to treat myself to a novel solution.  The circular sock machine (what? Wasn’t she just talking about spinning? It’s OK, it will make sense!) likes cone wound yarn for similar reasons that sergers like cone wound thread.  Winding even cones is challenging on my double ended bobbin winder because that’s not really what it’s designed for.

There’s been this project I’d been wanting to print for a while but it’s really seldom that I will print someone else’s designs these days because it’s hard to judge if the project is complete or has problems or will fail causing wasted materials.  It also needed about $100Cdn in hardware to assemble it, about 1.25 KG (approaching 3lbs of filament – assuming no failures) and more than 100 hours of printing time so it was a commitment to be sure.  I decided in May to make an exception and so I printed a Sunfire2 designed by Dave Huelster.  The thought being that I could wind the bobbins off to the cone winder faster than by hand and more gently than the double ended bobbin winder.  It’s an ongoing experiment.  I will report back on the outcome, probably mid to late July now.

and the first practice winds:

Why so long if I was on track to finish by late June before?

So,.. yeah. We’re in the process of doing a thing.  As of this evening when I started writing this post (6/17), we’ve made an offer and had it accepted on a small acreage in a hamlet West of Edmonton.  As long as all goes well with the “subject tos” – one of which is selling our current house which our realtor is going to work on listing Wednesday and the listing will show up online some time mid-to-late week, I think – we’re moving out of Morinville. That means, I have only a few days to get the house “show home” ready.  I expect that means I will be working on it still between showings to get it to where I want it.

For a handful of years, Morinville’s not been as good a fit for us as in the past and last year’s water debacle showed me I maybe want newer and possibly less stressful infrastructure at this stage in my life.  The town also feels like it has different priorities going forward than we do.  I may write more about that one day after we’ve moved away.

That means that starting tonight, we’ve begun “staging” the house by de-cluttering it for the photos and showings.  That’s going to be a real challenge in the studio.  To that end, I plan to sell off a little more than a dozen sewing machines – potentially including my APQS Lucey – and 2 spinning wheels.

The current tentative machine list is:

• Pfaff 130 in cabinet
• Betty – a Singer 127 7 drawer Treadle
• Pfaff 1222 – work in progress (mostly needs tuning and testing)
• Spierpon Queen CS (Jones)
• Singer 301A (LBOW)
• Singer RAF Model 15
• Singer VS2 Fiddle Bed (rough) Treadle
• 15-90 Centennial in library table (I think – brain not braining well at the moment)
• 201-2 in cabinet
• Singer 128 La Vencedora Decals
• Jones CS Treadle
• Frister and Rossman TS
• National Made Treadle (Unserviced)

Spinning Wheels:

• Grunt, the Spinwell
• Anne, the CPW

That should open up significant floor space.  We may also sell the travel trailer and downsize it later since we don’t really need the toy hauler part anymore – but for right now, it’s going to help us move house contents and be where we live if the timing of possession of this house by new owners doesn’t quite line up with possession of the new house.

Edit June 26:  Our house has a pending offer on it as of the 23rd and all things will be decided regarding the old house and the new by this time next week (July 2).  In the meantime, I’m trying to herd ducks into a row while also keeping up with work and packing.  Scared to jinx anything, I have decided to hold this post until we know for sure about the sale and purchase of each place.

Final Edit: July 4th.  We did it.  We take possession of our new house on August 30th or sooner if we can arrange it with the sellers and the mortgage company.  That means that there will be a period of time in August where I won’t be shipping orders / servicing machines and I will likely close the store for a period of time.   Additionally, sometime in September I will be getting my thumb fixed and that will mean no servicing but the shop will reopen and maybe it will mean I have time to blog while healing.

OK, re-reading that, I need a nap now.  Wow, what a couple of weeks it’s been and we’re just getting started.

Tonight’s post title inspired by Bad Company’s Movin’ On:

“I get up in the morning and it’s just another day

Pack up my belongings, I’ve got to get away.
Jump into a taxi and the time is gettin’ tight
I got to keep on movin’ I got a show tonight

Mmmm, and I’m movin’ on, movin’ on from town to town
Movin’ on, baby, yeah I’m never touchin’ the ground.”