Disturbed Sleep...or just ordinarily disturbed

I'm not normally a morbid or superstitious person, but have you ever had occasion to glance at the clock, and the time is 3:33 (AM or PM)? This happens to me when someone I know is close to dying. It never used to happen to me before. But when I started getting older...about 48...I started seeing it, not just occasionally, but nearly EVERY DAY. Then, after about a month of this, my husband's best friend died.

Now "the grim" is back. And right after a nightmare, too! So I am awake, and blogging, trying to clear my head and shake the fear. It's all compounded by the fact that my mother is ill with a deep chest cold. Obviously, I can't call her at 4AM--so I have to wait until a more appropriate time. My son lives with her, and they take care of each other, but he is still young enough that "nobody dies". He's going to have a really rude awakening one of these days--my mother is in her 70's.

The picture above is my stash of woolen roving. I have all sorts of wool to spin into yarn--Shetland, Border Leister, Romney, Jacob, Tunis, and some beast (which is mixtures of goodness knows what). I also have some Alpaca, and of course the chiengora that I'm working on now. So you see, I am not some "fly by night" spinner.

Recently, our spin group had a class about braided shepard rugs. The teacher taught us how to make them, and sold us her book. (I looked for it on Amazon, in case one of my readers might like to review it, but Alas, it's not there! I'll take a pic in the daylight and post it later...in the meantime...) This is one of the projects I plan to make out of some of my wool roving to help pare it down. I have a great supply of roving, as you can see, but this is only the most organized bunch of roving. Anyway, I digress. The teacher, Ann Brown, had some beautiful wares, and nice throw rugs of braided, felted wool. Some she had used commercial acid dyes to give the rug a little more color, some she used natural dyes, and some she left just grey and white, but all of them were just works of art. In the class, we each made a small chair cushion, and it turned out well, if I do say so myself. Unfortunately, I had to put my chair cushion on the "back burner" so to speak, so it's waiting for me in the closet to be finished into a rug. It's a project that you can stop and go on, and not have to worry that things don't quite match up--it's a project that you can literally "take with you", because you can braid a batch of roving almost anywhere. It was an interesting class, and the teacher was quite knowledgable about her craft. It was a lovely day. If you have the chance to take the class at a fiber festival, I recommend it.

Yesterday, at band practice, I started to learn a song on my bagpipe chanter. I'm getting better at reading music, too. Then, we all rounded up to play instruments and prepare for a performance on Sunday next week. On Saturday, I'll be at the Detroit Highland Games. So my weekend next week is another busy one. After practice, it was a long ride home. It seems like I did nothing after that, but I think I read email most of the evening, and then more spinning, and then early to bed, only to have my sleep disturbed. It's going to be a long day at the office.

Tarot card for the day is Justice. This card is one you pull when the world is in harmony with life--perhaps not fairly so in YOUR estimation, but at the very least, JUST. It usually means that things will go according to HOYLE, you'll be treated justly in a court case (for instance, if you're being tried for murder, and you really are the murderer, you'll get life, no question about it). Justice means the world spins and the sun comes up in the morning, and life goes on, even if someone dies in the mix. So this card was a good card for me to pull this morning. It means that everything is going to keep on keepin' on, just as it should. Yes, quite a calming card. Perhaps I can go back to sleep now.