Altivo

Again. It's getting very dry here, grass is starting to turn brown. Rain was predicted for last night and this morning, but nothing happened. There were a few clouds, but it cleared up. The temperature dropped, though. Highs around 90F the last couple of days dropped back to 70 or so today.

Busy weekend on the horizon, with handspinning demos both days, one at a fair on Saturday and the other a sort of historical recreation at a heritage farm on Sunday.

Pulled out a stalled project (Tom Baker's Dr Who scarf) that was in my closet for years. Fortunately it was acrylic washable yarn, so no moths. Unfortunately, mice had chewed a couple of small holes at some point. Started wondering when and... By my calculation, this project was started between 27 and 28 years ago. It was about 75% complete and got interrupted. I think the interruption was our move from an apartment building where we had two apartments facing each other across the hall to our first house. That was 1985. Anyway, the mouse damage is repairable, and the scarf will be done soon as I'm a much faster knitter than I was in 1985. It's based on a pattern distributed by the BBC back in 1982, so it's the same huge long colorful thing that Baker used to wear. It was supposed to be for Gary, and will be. I'm just going to borrow it for a couple of days to use at IFC in August. :D

And overloaded servers it seems.

Nonetheless, tomorrow will come and we must sleep.

The bizarre weather just won't quit. Another inch of rain overnight. We have no flooding, fortunately, but mud is soft and ankle deep all over the place. It's like late March rather than late October, which is usually pretty dry here. It has also been fairly warm. This morning at dawn it was well over 60F here, and 100% humidity so that I got soaked with sweat just doing feed and water chores. Rain continued much of the day, but not really heavy. Now much cooler and getting pretty windy.

Installed replacement hard drive in the public internet server, reinstalled software, and it came up just fine. Why their tech support kept asking me to try yet another time to reinstall the software onto the dead hard drive, I have no idea. They've been silent since I told them I was ordering the replacement drive anyway. Fortunately, I didn't need them to get things running again, but we could have saved two days of outage if I had ordered the drive Monday rather than late Tuesday. Certainly it wasn't the fact that a replacement drive would be costly. It's a Western Digital 80GB IDE/ATA100 and it cost me all of $49.95. The hardware was out of warranty anyway, so they weren't going to have to pay for it. The outage time and my wasted hours were worth a heck of lot more than a measly $50. And this happens just a week after spending an hour on the phone with the manager of their tech support explaining to her why I think they are doing a poor job...

Argos is beaming a warp using sectional techniques. This is a procedure designed to make it much easier for a weaver working alone to get a wide and possibly long warp onto the loom with little waste and the same tension all the way across. It's pretty clever but looks Rube Goldbergish. I hope tomorrow to have some natural light to photograph a bit of the process so Argos can post to his journal.

For those who will begin the NaNo on Sunday, remember not to cross the starting line until Saturday Midnight your local time.

Speaking of time, daylight "saving" ends at 2 am on Sunday in the US. Clocks go back an hour then, which is going to make sunset ridiculously early here. I'll be driving home in the dark now until some time in March. When I came to Illinois for graduate school in 1971, it took me forever to get used to the early dusk. Actually, Illinois (or at least, the Chicago meridian) has a normal time of sunset. The thing is that I was accustomed to Michigan, which is in the Eastern Standard zone for no particularly good reason, so it's on a sort of daylight saving all year round. When daylight saving is applied on top of that, the state is almost two hours ahead of its correct local time. Summer sunsets come very late at night.