Pick by Pick

 Well, Blogger seems to be having a problem today and won't let me load a photo, so it's all text today, I guess.

So here is a four shaft colour and weave pinwheel.

Yesterday I managed my goal of two towels.  A friend also acted as tech guinea pig so I could work through figuring out the white board option on Zoom.  I learned some stuff, as usual!  But it was an exercise in frustration again, so once we finished, I had to sit for a while with thoughts of 'what on earth do you think you are doing?'  And 'how much irritation are you willing to go through to learn more new tech stuff?'

With more and more North Americans beginning to engage in real life (as they say), how many are even going to be interested in learning on line?  Will everyone fling their on line Zoom meetings out the window and head for the nearest in person class?

On the other hand, travel is expensive and will remain problematic for a while, and for some of us?  We may never travel again, so...there is that.

What so many people really and truly do not understand is the shelf life of a virus.  In BC, we have just come through a third wave, and we hope like crazy that there will not be a fourth.  But you know what?  There could.  There really and truly could.  Because a virus will mutate.  And it will lodge in a warm body and grow and sometimes mutate into something quite different, and carry on.

There is nothing inherently 'evil' about a virus.  It just is.  Knowing how they work, more or less, we can take appropriate precautions to avoid them, but that relies on everyone understanding how they work, or at least take direction from others who do, and then follow those recommendations.

When I decided to 'retire' (for certain values of), one of the things I had to figure out was what that retirement was going to look like.  Into the midst of my trying to shape a future for myself, COVID appeared.  

Now, the influenza pandemic at the end of WWI isn't all that far ago, so I was pretty sure people would bear that disaster in mind and follow the best practices.  Isolate, mask, etc.  Unfortunately, I was wrong.

We have seen this dynamic play out in real time - denial, accusations, blame shifting, refusal to isolate/quarantine/mask.  

After 14 months of it, people are tired.  Everyone just wants their lives back.  Well, best remember how many people have died.  The 3.5 MILLION people who are no longer with us.   Who cannot get *their* lives back...because they DIED.

As I look at options for myself, I doubt very much I will be travelling anywhere very far.  So any options I have are all on line (unless people come here).

Olds College cancelled Fibre Week and all the master classes for this year and frankly I was relieved because Alberta is still dealing with the pandemic.  I would be very reluctant to go to Alberta right now given my compromised immune system.  I rarely leave the house here in my home town and only go to very specific places, for short periods of time.  Masked, of course.

As we wend our way through the pandemic, it is much like weaving.  Pick by pick, day by day, we keep on keeping on.

It was supposed to rain today, but so far it isn't.  I really need to get back to walking, I'm just not a fan of taking exercise in the rain.  So we'll see.

In the meantime, I have done four towels on the current warp, with two more scheduled to today.  If I then do two more tomorrow, I will have reached the half way mark of this warp.  It's looking quite nice - and if blogger would load photos, I could show you.  But it isn't, so I can't.

The weaving right now is going fairly smoothly, so I'm taking time to let my thoughts going forward simmer on the back burner.  While I *think* the short video clip idea is do-able, I really wonder how much more new tech I am willing to try and learn.  

Guess I'll find out...