Scenery, Fiber, Books, & Occasional Philosophy

As usually happens sooner or later, the goats discovered the other day that they had a magnificent, huge, tasty pumpkin patch growing right in their own backyard.

They started chomping down on my best one (foreground above), the very day after I said to myself “I should harvest that one this weekend.” So I saved the next two best ones, even though they were still very pale. Here’s the big ‘un:

I’ve pretty much stopped reading national news except for science news. I just look at nature and remember what’s real.

Breakin’ Da Rules!

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The colors that will be going into my next yarn.  I am liking that melon in the upper right and I think I’ll do it as a solid after this.

I’m breaking Deb Menz’ rules a little bit, in that the two colors on the bottom were two of the ingredients in the blend, and now I’m going to use them on their own as well.  She always wanted to us to pick different colors,  never the same one twice.  Again, she provided a lot more to choose from than I have.

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Floating Coast by Bathsheba Demuth

I am so glad I read this. I don’t have any particular interest in the Bering Strait, but this wasn’t a typical history. Demuth is an exquisitely thoughtful writer. Her “environmental history” is what I would call spiritual.

The book is not devoid of historical facts and narratives. Frankly, much of it could even be a bit of a slog. In chronicling “Beringia”, the land masses which border the Bering Strait, Demuth covers both USA and USSR history. After a while, reading about the fox farming and reindeer farming booming, then crashing, then booming; the quotas on whales being this high, then that low, then this high again… put me into a lull.

But when Demuth is poetic, she is sublime. Most of these moments came towards the beginning and towards the end. Tastes:

“[T]he world is not what we make of it; it is part of what makes us: our flesh and bones, and also our inclinations and hopes.”

“An ecosystem is the aggregate of many species’ habits of transformation, their ways of moving energy from its origin in the sun across space & condensing it over time. To be alive is to take a place in a chain of conversions.”

“We all live in more than one time… The evidence is all around us, in the layered world: a mossy, decaying mission store in Gambell, built near an ancient whale-butchering place, across from a row of tidy new homes… [A] house with Soviet concrete walls, but a roof made of walrus hide so fresh, it smelled.”

Finally:

“Fossil fuels freed the use of energy from human toil, allowing human history to seem separate from the rest of time… This made possible a new idea of liberty, released from the constraints of the matter that made us, and from the precariousness of being.”

That does sum up for me where we find ourselves. (  )

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First: Sandra Day O’Connor

You know when there is no Book Corner for a while, I’m reading something heavy.  Either that, or sampling around and unable to settle on anything.  This time it was was something relatively heavy.

I’m afraid the first half of her life dragged for me – too much detail. And Thomas seems to emphasize especially in the first half her conservative, “Junior League,” “family-first” demeanor; when I looked up an interview with her on You Tube to remind myself how she really looked and talked, her directness and sharpness came as a stark contrast to the Sandra he had depicted for me.

The book picked up and things started swinging when she joined the Supremes. The copious detail was now welcome rather than tedious.

I already knew the sad ending to her story, having read Jeffrey Toobin’s THE NINE years ago, but it was even more heart-wrenching to read here. In short, O’Connor left the court while still in her prime, with her husband succumbing to Alzheimer’s, for both love of and duty towards him. Within months, he sunk lower than what she could deal with alone. She had to put him in a home. Top it off, her longtime friend (and sometime college boyfriend!), Chief Justice William Rehnquist, passed away around the same time.

While she would never again be as powerful a figure, in such a challenging and rewarding and influential a role, as she was as an active SCOTUS Justice, O’Connor succeeded for a while in finding true fulfilment spearheading efforts to teach civics to middle school children. You can still see the fruits of her labor online at http://www.icivics.org Today, Justice O’Connor is still with us, 90 years old as of this writing (born 1930), but suffering dementia herself.

Sad all around. But admire her for her never-ending drive and her pragmatic jurisprudence. In stark contrast to Justices Scalia and Alito, who believed that law should be treated like a catechism, O’Connor seemed to realize that we are all “just muddling along,” in the words of one of her clerks quoted here. “It was, wait a minute, we’re not doing this as an intellectual exercise. We’re doing this to run society. It’s just us people running things.”

Try to take heart that we had people like Sandra Day O’Connor “running things” for a while, and could one day again. (  )

Jewel Tones Part Roman Numeral Three

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And here are the batts being semi-blended.  Thanx @sarajane0714 for the compliments on the green.  It may be getting a little bit lost among the dominant amethyst & garnet.  Of course it’s not coming out anything like I first pictured.  And of course, I only had the 18 colors I made this year to choose from.  That’s a severely limited palette.  In one of Deb Menz’ color in spinning workshops, which are the inspiration for all that I do in this domain, she brought in 84 (!) different colors of Merino roving.  We all marveled at the choices before us.  And she said, “It won’t be enough.”  We looked at her like we must have misheard.  “It won’t be enough,” she repeated.  “You’ll see.”  Doggone it, she was right, it wasn’t enough.  We all had to blend further to get exactly what we wanted.  I’ve always had this little fantasy of someday having in my little “studio” 84 different colors of roving.  The things I could do!  After first blending some of them all into what I REALLY wanted, of course.