Yellow leaves

In case you didn't believe me about the coming of the yellow leaves, perhaps you do in this photo:

Fall Harvest

First, a rainbow picture showing some leaves turning yellow - fall is very much here:

Still, yesterday was nice enough that I got to spin out on the porch for a bit.

Today was cooler and cloudy, raining now. Yesterday I noticed that the upper parts of the potato plants had died off. I decided that today was as good a day as any for the harvest - don't want to wait until the ground is frozen! This year's crop:



The other kind of harvest that's been absorbing me is the dye garden:


Little bits of white fleece, alum mordanted, dyed with onion, marigold, coreopsis, tansy and rudbeckia (one with both marigold and rudbeckia). I'm carding them up and I'm going to spin them together, Deb Menz style.

Hopi red amaranth on silk (left), superwash sock yarn and wool, tin mordant:

 All the lovely red stays in the dye water, so sad. Even the sock yarn became more yellow when fully dry.

 Marigold plus indigo on wool, one ply started grey, the other two white.

The most exciting dye of the year is purple basil. I followed Rita Buchanan's advice to leave it for a day or two in the dye pot, then leave it be another few days before rinsing. Same fibers as the amaranth pot, also tin mordant. For both, I dyed the wool and silk first, then the sock yarn after.

 We got this sort of color from black hollyhocks once, but haven't managed to get enough flowers any time since! I think basil is the way to go.

Happy to be home

The first time we went to pick up Lola from the pet sitters, she wasn't anywhere to be found. No word the next day either, but we finally got her on Wednesday. She's happy to be back:

Dragon dancing

We recently got back from two weeks in Orangeville, at the International Centre of Taoist Tai Chi. The first week was a workshop on Lok Hup Ba Fa, a form older than Tai Chi and the second week was a Tai Chi workshop - with a total of 601 participants! That's a lot of people to feed, more than can work together in the big practice hall. We stayed out in "tent city".

On August 9, we all went into Toronto to celebrate Awareness Day. There is a blog post on that here, but taking the dragons out meant that practice was needed beforehand. I signed up for doing the dragon dance so most of the pictures I took are of the dragons. One dragon needs 20 people to carry, while the other needs 50 - and is the largest in North America. The small dragon can do a variety of figures. Together, the two can do the "double spiral".

Getting the large dragon down from its storage location.

Practicing indoors with the small dragon.

The small dragon doing "the stairs".

Another attempt at "the stairs", just starting.

Towards the end of our stay, things got rainy and foggy. This is in front of the main temple.

I recall taking other pictures, but those are all on Rob's phone.

Colorado Clouds

I just got back from Colorado last night (this morning?).
It was my annual trip to visit NCAR in Boulder, where I
work with people on a variety of projects. While there,
I took these cloud pictures for Rob:

View from "my" office. Enrique was sharing an office with someone who was out of town last week, so I got her desk - with window!

Same view, a few hours later. We got an inch of rain that day.

We hiked to Chautaqua one evening and this was the view from the trail.

Same storm. We saw lightning flashes between the ground and the cloud.

Fridge back together

So, I left you some time ago with the news that our fridge broke down. It turns out it was still (barely) under warranty so they sent us a new cooling unit. Rob called a couple of guys; one had no interest and the other said he'd come but didn't - twice. So we watched the 15 minute video showing how to do it - it looked not so difficult. It shows the use of "thermal mastic" so then we tried to find that in town, failed, ordered it online. Once it arrived, we started in on the dirty deed - only to find some thermal mastic in an interior box (but it would have needed a caulking gun while ours was in toothpaste tubes).

Anyway, we spent Tuesday night (after buying more ice and doing the cat sitting gig) taking the fridge apart:

The shelves are out, the doors are off.

Lay it down and start taking off the old cooling unit.

The burner assembly - note how much paint has burned off the tube to the left (up when standing).

Hacking at the foam seal behind the freezer.

I can see floor!

Next we brought up the new unit and tried to line things up. We gave up after midnight, saving it for a fresh attack. Back at it Wednesday (after cat sitting):

It's together again, for better or worse.

Note the bulged out back plate - the new one isn't exactly the same model. Also, there were very few screw holes so Rob had to make some new ones. We went through an entire can of spray foam filling in the gap where we'd carved out more foam than strictly necessary. Buying drill bits and spray foam happened during the day on Wednesday.

We got it back up, doors on, lit the burner - and watched smoke come out from burning paint. Now the new pipe should match the old one.

It's working and we can stop buying ice. All that remains is to claim our frozen food from a neighbor's house. Our feeling is that next time, we'll just buy a new fridge and stick to software.

2 AM

The other night I had a hot flash at 2 AM. I got up to do a few exercises and this was the view:

Note that this was just after solar midnight. The sun is shining on the virga off to the east.