And I wasn’t able to actually sleep in.
I was pretty happy with yesterday. The piano tuner came on time for a change, and we talked a bit, and now my piano is in tune again which is great. The tuner also told me that I should install a ‚Lifesaver‘, something that regulates moisture inside the piano because where the piano is standing both temperature and moisture are constantly going up and down. And that will damage the piano in the long run.
At first I was a little shocked, especially when he told me about the cost (around 800 Euros) but then I realized that that is what emergency funds are for. I talked to my husband and I guess I’ll have that thing installed some time next year. And then the piano will not go out of tune every few months. As an added bonus. Or be broken in twenty years.
Going out for Chinese for lunch was really great, the food was good, we talked and had enough time to get back home in time for teaching.
I taught all the students, and only practiced a little, and afterwards I had dinner with only my husband because the boy was eating pumpkin soup with his grandmother. Then I managed to find the very thin wrench that I can use on the spinning wheel (and I have now put it in the bag with all the other spinning wheel tools) and I put some oil on the screw that holds the drive wheel and managed to set it up so that the annoying squeaking is gone. Also treadling is much easier now. Phew.
I watched a lecture about „Carving time out for writing“ by Dean Wesley Smith (that you can still get for free until some time in January) that I found very motivating, and then I wrote less than 500 words and went to bed real early. Which was nice.
Unfortunately I have been up since five in the morning now, and I’m basically waiting until it’s late enough that I can have breakfast.
Not quite how I wanted to spend the first morning of Christmas break.
Today I want to run, and write, and maybe sew a little, and play piano, and watch something with the boy, and spin. Two more days in the advent calendar, and then I will be able to ply the yarn and make socks out of it.
I’m feeling that that’s both very slow and rather fast for a spinning project. Of course, if I spin all the time, several hours a day, I can get sock yarn done in a few days but then I don’t ever do that. There was one weekend where I spun a hundred grams of cabled sock yarn but that was a weekend where we were doing nothing else but spinning all day and evening, and in the end it turned out that the yarn I had spun was way too thick for socks, and not enough yardage.
On the other hand there are people who can spin a kilometer of yarn a day, and that would be almost enough for a pair of socks. So if one could spin that kilometer one day, and spin a bit more the next, and then ply everything one would be able to churn out a skein of sock yarn in a weekend, and then one could knit the socks during the week, Knitting a pair of socks takes about sixteen hours for me which if spread out over five days would be a lot of knitting but doable.
But I don’t think I’ll try that next week. I’d like to focus on writing. I did set myself the goal of writing 5,000 words this week, and so far I only did less than 2,000 of them. So it would be great if I managed to write 1,500 words a day today and tomorrow. Though tomorrow will probably be a day where not a lot gets done because we’ll be celebrating Christmas.