Update in the midst of the work hurricane

Life continues to be rich and full here in Enoughsville.  I'm about halfway through what I'm thinking of as a two-week hurricane of activities, and being halfway through the storm is kind of exciting!

Even with work buffeting me side-to-side, I've gotten to have some good family time.  Robert Grudin, in his marvelous little book of meditations on time, wrote about shooting an arrow into the future and then arriving at the landing point, and that's a bit of what my family interactions have been.  That is, a while ago I aimed at a Wednesday-night grandchild evening, and a Valen-dinner on Friday the 17th, and then -- in spite of being up to my ears in campus-based stuff, somehow the grandchild/Valen-dinner events just magically arrived and swooped me up with them.  

Bchild and I played with cars, and ate muffins, 
and drew on the chalkboard.

My tickler file reminded me, "make a heart-shaped pizza", 
and so I did.

Then Inkling and I had a lovely Valen-dinner together.
The cherry cobbler (not shown here) was super delicious.

I love it when the Swamped-Me gets to reap all the rewards that the Quiet-Planning-Time-Me had set in motion.

Inkling, by the way, was taken by surprise this week in Sock Madness, when the qualifying round pattern "dropped" on February 16, a date which is (checks calendar) not yet March.  Nonetheless, she showed me her impressive start, a sock that has an intarsia image of a young woman holding dozens of colors of balloons (and her sock-in-progress dangled dozens of ends of different colors of yarn needing still to be woven in -- it looked like a spaghetti alien had invaded her sock).  

Further away, in Minnesota, Nelson had his head rearranged, thusly.  

I love this pattern.  I want to start talking about
tessellations and Euler's formula,
but perhaps you don't need to hear about that.

He's been helping to coach a middle school basketball season, and his team made it all the way to the final game of the playoffs -- huzzah for them! -- but didn't quite eke out that final win.  

Nelson:  I love this team so much

Nelson is a bit heartbroken, both by that final loss and also by having to say good-bye to the team.  But I, as his mom, am just super proud that he got to connect so deeply and that the team did so well.  As I tell OfSnough when he's feeling low about coming in 20th in a bike race, "you only have eyes in the front of your head".  It's easy to see the people who beat you, but all the by-standers get to see the bikers in places 21 through 60, the racers who were looking at the underside of your shoes, wishing they could catch you.  

And where is OfSnough?  At the top of Europe.  

At the lab at the top of Jungfraujoch, Switzerland . Almost 12,000 feet.

Two trains, a cable car, an underground train and an elevator to get here!

Gosling:  What do they study there?

OfSnough: Climate science. Cosmic radiation

Gosling:  Dad, do the employees at the lab stay for rotations? Like a week or month at a time. It would seem like quite a daily commute.

OfSnough: Yes. Some for weeks and months

Gosling: How many hours a day and how many days a week do they work?

OfSnough: Long days depending on the project

And "long days" brings us back to my hurricane.  I thought I'd do a quick update on a project I started in January to give me something mindless (but not internet-surfing-mindless) to do as a way to re-center myself in otherwise busy times: weaving a yoga mat. 

My sister gave me a large box of used jeans, too holey to wear or to repair further. 

The box is labeled, "yoga mat to be"

I built a frame from scraps of wood scavenged from a bed frame that had gotten damaged in Nelson's former apartment, and tore up old sheets to make the "warp" (up-and-down) strips.  Then I started tearing the jeans into strips, and those are becoming the "weft".  

You can see the completed part at 
the bottom, about 16 inches of yoga mat
done, so far.  

I have no idea if this will come out serviceable, but it's a good meditative activity, and I thought I'd start documenting it so I can come back and look at how this came together, in case it works out so spectacularly I decide to repeat the project in future years.  

And that's the latest news from our family, which continues to be wealthy in our adventures.  May you and yours be similarly prosperous.