High’s and Low’s…

I left Harrisville, NH last Friday.  I drove to the Catskills in NY State, a spectacular region, where my youngest sister has a cabin.  I’ve written about it before.  Both my sisters met me at the cabin for a rare sisters’ gathering, a weekend to relax, renew, and re-energize.  God knows I needed it…

We did some fun sisterly things…

Ice Cream in Phoenicia

Picnic on the lawn in Woodstock with a 50’s version on the outdoor stage, of Shakespeare’s As You Like It…  (Bird on a Cliff Theatre Co.)

Spa Day at Mohonk Mountain…

And a climb up the infamous “Labyrinth”, a rock formation up the side of the mountain that takes your breath away, literally and figuratively.  It was hard, and scary and my mountain climbing little sister cheered us on as she scampered up the rocks like a pro.  No one broke anything and we decided not to kill her when we got to the top.  The view was too beautiful and totally worth it…

We should have had our spa day massages after the climb.  I’m still in pain…

We stopped at our favorite winery, El Paso, and then at our favorite crafts haunt, Crafts People.  I picked up some earrings and a new dress, and a new mug and bowl from the pottery building for my morning granola breakfast.

Life is good.  Or at least it was when I set out to drive home on Monday.  With everyone in my house gone, I asked one of my son’s friends to stay in the house to keep the dog happy and make sure nothing went amiss.  Dave was great, the house looked clean and picked up, and I started to settle in…

That’s when I noticed the pool.  It was a swamp.  It was disgusting.  Then I noticed the airconditioning wasn’t working…  It was disgustingly hot.  Then Dave told me they found horrible disgusting insects the size of NJ in the basement, the kind you don’t mention in mixed company…

Re-entry sucks…

I did my best to call whoever needed to be called to fix whatever needed to be fixed, meanwhile I had 15 hours to prepare for Wednesday’s adventure, I promised my daughter who is lifeguarding at a Girl Scout Camp all summer, that I would come up to the camp (about two hours away in NY State, wasn’t I just there?…) and teach the campers how to weave on looms made from gathered materials from nature.

That was all fine, or at least it was a good idea at the time, but I had no samples of this sort of thing, since I don’t make my looms from yard debris, though God knows there is enough of it out there.  So I hired a lovely friend of my daughter’s to come up and work with me for the day creating samples and figuring out the best way to teach this to a bunch of 10-12 year olds.  I didn’t know until late Tuesday night that there would be 26 of them…

Larissa helped me gather twigs and branches, we had a blast foraging through my yard, it was nice to look at something other than the gigantic crop of weeds that have taken over in my absence.  We twisted branches into looms, and took advantage of natural forks in the branches, and generally had a complete blast.  Larissa was able to move through multiple looms since she wasn’t obsessive/compulsive like I am, and made samples that would be wonderful to show the campers.

Meanwhile, I worked on the forked loom, and got so into it I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening on it and am so excited with how it turned out and it isn’t a piece of clothing…. Who knew?

So yesterday I got up at 5am, and headed up for the long drive to the camp, loaded down with all kinds of stuff to use in the looms, I did have to buy additional tapestry needles, I didn’t have 26, but most everything else I could provide, and was happy to help.  It was lovely to be with my daughter, to see her in her element, and I found out she is now their resident sailing instructor…  How/when did that happen?

All was well until I came home.  Exhausted, and wanting to just check email and curl up and chill, I made the mistake of heading out to the pool to add the additional chemicals I had been instructed to add by the pool place to clean up the swamp.  The pump cover O-ring had broken, and water was leaking everywhere, along with a hose, and to make matters more uncomfortable, it was pouring rain, and one of the ponds had emptied in my absence.  What I really wanted to do was sit down in the middle of the yard and cry.  What I actually did was get in the car (it is now rush hour in NJ and if you live in NJ you know this is not a good time to be out on the road driving unless you are coming home from work and prepared to spend a couple hours in a commute) and slowly and methodically work through the pool stores, after no luck at the hardware store, looking for an O-ring.  I’d sit with my smart phone in the car while the rain came down in torrents, and Google the next pool place, and I found what I was looking for on the fifth try….

It should be noted that my entire trip, that took over an hour, only covered about 10 miles.  The interesting thing about NJ is everything is here, practically in walking distance, in any direction, because driving here is nearly impossible at certain times of the day.  So I had lots of choices, and eventually I found what I was looking for.  And that’s a good thing…

I picked up the O-ring, and a replacement hose, and returned to my home, in the pouring rain, re-scrubbed the pool, cleaned out the spillway of the pond from the overgrown plants that clogged it up, replaced the O-ring/ pump cover (not before going back out to CVS for Vaseline, which seemed to have disappeared from my house) and replaced the leaky hose.  Of course it was pretty hilarious, standing in the pouring rain, trying to screw on a hose clamp with greasy Vaseline covered hands.  But that’s another story.  I wasn’t laughing at the time…

Like I said, re-entry sucks.  It is hard to be responsible for everything.  I kept telling myself that no one died, and this is all just stuff, small stuff really, and that I needed to get a grip and act like a big girl.  I passed out at 9pm.  When my son, who is at artillery drills in the hills of Virginia woke me at 10:30 and shared how he was in a tent on top of a hill with no protection in the same torrential storm, with a river running through their tent quarters, I felt pretty silly complaining about all my issues with the pool.

So today, I just concentrated on printing and preparing everything for the American Sewing Guild Conference in LA, which is in Mid-August, but I have to ship by this weekend since I’ll be at Sievers School of Fiber Arts in Wisconsin all next week.  I’m counting the days until my husband returns from Saudi Arabia…  (Less than a week…) Stay tuned…