never dull
Apr. 20th, 2019 04:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7This has been a busy weekend.
I have a Solarpunk Mammoths Thing update but it's got to wait a bit, I'm run-down and need to proofread. Whew. Hey, I've been pretty good on the schedule, and I just wrote an unrelated novel and still haven't forgotten my mammoths, so, that's also good.
(Somehow I did all but one pot and a stack of plates of the dishes this morning, filling the dish drainer so I couldn't continue, and now Dude just went over to continue and has been washing dishes for like 45 minutes. I literally don't know how he manages to drag it out so long. I even put all the left-over ones in to soak in the remaining pot, so it's not like there's food crusted on or whatever.)
First thing, we drove up to the Buffalo Niagara Heritage Village, which somehow I've never visited before, and my former coworker's mom, who coincidentally also went to grad school with my mother in 1973, 150 miles from here at an unrelated institution, and is a former employee of the BNHV museum, brought all the materials she has about flax processing, which she still independently demonstrates for school groups and the like, and then we went out to the 1860s farmhouse that has the storage in the back where they keep all the flax processing equipment.
(Were there enough subclauses in that sentence? I dunno, I could go back and edit some more in. What d'ya think?)
So I got to see and touch both original and reproduction flax brakes, see the reproduction scutching board she'd designed and the site's carpenter had constructed, and see a variety of hackles (hetchels), and she loaned me an antique hetchel she owns so I could study it to copy it. Which was fantastic, now I have a lot of notes and a bunch of things to look up, and a bunch of her stuff in my possession that I gotta not lose and return to her, which is not historically a specialty of mine! yikes. i can do it. i know i can.
She also mentioned that there exists a photograph of Harriet Tubman operating a German-style low flax brake, on her knees, but she didn't have a copy of it. I can't find it on the Internet, but apparently it exists.
Then I got sucked into practicing banjo for a while, which was pleasant. I found a bunch of beginner tabs for songs I know and I plan to work on those this week. Conveniently, I won't be home for my lesson but the teacher's out of town on vacation anyway, so there is no lesson for me to miss. Good timing!
Then I had to go pick up the paper from the papermaking workshop I took last week, and the paper studio is near the grocery store so I could get the things we're supposed to bring to Easter dinner at Dude's aunt's house tomorrow, and that was a fine idea except that it's Holy Saturday and midafternoon and everyone in the entire fucking city was at the grocery store and it was a moshpit so I am exhausted.
But! Not dead. So. Good.
I have a Solarpunk Mammoths Thing update but it's got to wait a bit, I'm run-down and need to proofread. Whew. Hey, I've been pretty good on the schedule, and I just wrote an unrelated novel and still haven't forgotten my mammoths, so, that's also good.
(Somehow I did all but one pot and a stack of plates of the dishes this morning, filling the dish drainer so I couldn't continue, and now Dude just went over to continue and has been washing dishes for like 45 minutes. I literally don't know how he manages to drag it out so long. I even put all the left-over ones in to soak in the remaining pot, so it's not like there's food crusted on or whatever.)
First thing, we drove up to the Buffalo Niagara Heritage Village, which somehow I've never visited before, and my former coworker's mom, who coincidentally also went to grad school with my mother in 1973, 150 miles from here at an unrelated institution, and is a former employee of the BNHV museum, brought all the materials she has about flax processing, which she still independently demonstrates for school groups and the like, and then we went out to the 1860s farmhouse that has the storage in the back where they keep all the flax processing equipment.
(Were there enough subclauses in that sentence? I dunno, I could go back and edit some more in. What d'ya think?)
So I got to see and touch both original and reproduction flax brakes, see the reproduction scutching board she'd designed and the site's carpenter had constructed, and see a variety of hackles (hetchels), and she loaned me an antique hetchel she owns so I could study it to copy it. Which was fantastic, now I have a lot of notes and a bunch of things to look up, and a bunch of her stuff in my possession that I gotta not lose and return to her, which is not historically a specialty of mine! yikes. i can do it. i know i can.
She also mentioned that there exists a photograph of Harriet Tubman operating a German-style low flax brake, on her knees, but she didn't have a copy of it. I can't find it on the Internet, but apparently it exists.
Then I got sucked into practicing banjo for a while, which was pleasant. I found a bunch of beginner tabs for songs I know and I plan to work on those this week. Conveniently, I won't be home for my lesson but the teacher's out of town on vacation anyway, so there is no lesson for me to miss. Good timing!
Then I had to go pick up the paper from the papermaking workshop I took last week, and the paper studio is near the grocery store so I could get the things we're supposed to bring to Easter dinner at Dude's aunt's house tomorrow, and that was a fine idea except that it's Holy Saturday and midafternoon and everyone in the entire fucking city was at the grocery store and it was a moshpit so I am exhausted.
But! Not dead. So. Good.
no subject
Date: 2019-04-20 11:22 pm (UTC)oh wow I can't believe you went to the grocery store! Jade warned me to get my shopping done as early as possible because she said everyone was going to be at the stores.
no subject
Date: 2019-04-20 11:32 pm (UTC)I had no choice but to go to the grocery store, we were Woefully Unprepared and also we had nothing to eat for tonight's dinner and we'd gone out both Thursday and Friday nights and I can only eat so much restaurant food, I'm old.