I updated on Dreamwidth with some of what’s been

via https://ift.tt/2OL3M33

I updated on Dreamwidth with some of what’s been up lately (Rochester, flax harvest, chicken processing, a HERON!) (hi to everyone reading this as a DW crosspost, lol), but I forgot to update about my stupid hip, which is to say that over the weekend in Rochester of sitting around, it got gradually better, and now it’s fine, even though yesterday was spent on my feet the whole day doing chicken stuff and the cleanup afterward. So WTF!

I guess what set it off was that I spent most of last Thursday on my feet barefoot in the house, standing around as I tidied and cleaned and moved stuff. Maybe I need to get slippers with orthotic insoles. I don’t know. It’s my only suspicion.

I’ve had trouble on and off with my foot but only twinges, nothing incapacitating. This morning I’ve been sort of at loose ends– the Farmers are all busy and forgot to give me an assignment before they vanished, so I’m doing miscellaneous tidying up as I find it– and have wandered back and forth quite a long distance on foot, and was noticing as I walked that I have currently no limp or constraint on my gait. Not this morning, not just now. (Yesterday afternoon I was having back pain, so I could only walk slowly.)

I don’t want to become A Creaky Person, and I don’t want to be someone who limps all the time, so I need to pay more attention to when I feel good, and try to do things so I do that more. Anyway– the Biofreeze eventually wore off and may have actually psychosomatically helped because I was so mad at it.

One of this morning’s projects is dealing with farm first-aid kits. I brought a cabinet I’d bought for the yurt a few years back that had never quite worked out for what I wanted, and we mounted it on the wall in the barn, and took all the stuff out of a fabric first-aid binder that always got left open to get its contents all dusty, and put them into the cabinet; then we cleaned the fabric kit and refilled it with fresh supplies, and this morning I put it in the truck and then discovered the truck had a first-aid kit already that was in the glovebox and nobody knew it was there, so I pulled it out and transferred over a few things (a tourniquet, a nice splinter-extraction kit) and left the new, neon orange fabric binder from the barn in the door pocket where people will see it, and then took the little nondescript pouch inside to wash it off and remove the expired things and refill it and put it into the other truck.

It seemed like a good low-commitment project. I should have a first-aid kit in my own car, now that I think of it. (We were gifted a bunch of supplies by Middle-Little Sister who had one of those non-roll-over-able health savings accounts and so used up her balance by buying first aid stuff last Christmas or so.)

So that’s what’s up, that I forgot about in my last post about what’s up. Sorry if I”m not keeping up on other people’s posts, my time is never my own. 

gnefariousgnorc replied to your post “I updated

via https://ift.tt/33jUY7q

gnefariousgnorc replied to your post “I updated on Dreamwidth with some of what’s been up lately (Rochester,…”

yay flax! growing and processing flax and spinning and weaving linen is a super ambitious questline of mine! I have some grinding to do first though.

missbuster replied to your post “I updated on Dreamwidth with some of what’s been up lately (Rochester,…”

I’d like to know what happens to the flax after it’s been cut and… laid down? Does it soak?

(replying to both at the bottom because interspersing plays merry hell with formatting)

I love linen so much, but I don’t know how to weave at all, and I barely know how to spin, and yet. And yet! Attainable things, perhaps? Who knows how far I’ll get in this new-ish hobby.

I also took up papermaking as a hobby, ostensibly, because I want to use the not-suitable-for-spinning waste material in papermaking because that’s apparently a desirable thing to use. I cannot find much information about doing that, though, and I have yet to actually do any papermaking at home. So… 

So the process for flax is basically: 1) grow it, 2) pull it up, 3) let it dry (this is where I am; it’s in sheaves, upright), 4) “ripple” it to remove the seed pods, 5) ret it, which can be done either by letting it lie in the field or on a lawn to be repeatedly wetted by the dew and dried by the sun, OR by submerging it in either still or running water; the former method is slower but apparently better-quality in the end, and the latter is faster and more controllable, and then 6) brake it (physically beat it to break up the outer layer of the straw), 7) scutch it (scrape it to pull off the broken outer layer, 8) hackle/heckle it to comb the remnants of the straw off of the “line”, or interior bast fiber of the stalk. Then you can spin it and weave it. 

I have done basically none of this before but I’ve watched demonstrations in the past, so. *shrug* here’s hoping!