Winter Aliens Part II

Some winter landscapes from the last alien expedition.

 The road goes ever on and on...

 ...down from the door where it began,

 Now far ahead the Road has gone,

And I must follow, if I can,

  Pursuing it with eager feet,

 Until it joins some larger way

 Where many paths and errands meet.

 And whither then? I cannot say.*

Still round the corner there may wait

A new road or a secret gate,

And though I oft have passed them by,

A day will come at last when I

Shall take the hidden paths that run

West of the Moon, East of the Sun.**

 

 

 

* & ** From The Lord Of The Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. 

Winter Aliens Part I

Nothing like going out to inspect aliens in the dead of winter.

Snow

But plowed roads. Mostly.

One field had cows, horses, turkey and ...

Deer. Who didn't take kindly to my stopping to photograph them. 

 They ran in front of the truck and sprang oh so gracefully over the fences.

Did I mention the turkeys? They didn't care what I was doing as long as I didn't get too close. 

Of course there was Devils Tower in all its misty glory.

Where the deer couldn't find hay on the ground, they took to the stacks. 

The road goes ever on and on...

Until the next ranch.

Part II - More winter landscapes.

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

One of the things I did with my suddenly copious free time was teach myself how to card and spin wool. Why? Because I obviously don't have enough hobbies to occupy the two to five free minutes in my life . . .

39 gallon trash bag with an Icelandic sheep fleece

It's Linda's fault. She taught me how to knit. Being an enabler, she also turned me into a yarn snob. If all that wasn't bad enough, she left a 39 gallon trash bag full of an Icelandic sheep fleece in my garage. It was intended to be washed and felted, perhaps made into boots. That was the plan, which, as all good plans sometimes do, it fell by the wayside.

Raw fleece

I opened the bag, got a whiff of sheepy goodness (dung, sheep, vegetable matter) and it was like fiber crack. I took a small amount of the fleece - several ounces of white and a few of brown, washed it, and got rid of the little twigs and grass bits, not to mention that farm fresh smell.

Washed and fresh smelling fleece parts.

Since I wasn't sure if I was going to make this a full time hobby (more than 30 minutes worth of time), and I didn't want to invest money in something I may actually come to hate, I purloined the dog's brushes to act as wool carders.

Max and Merlin's brushes (shh, don't tell)

Since I know enough about processing wool to fill a Dixie cup, I called Linda to ask, "What now?" After receiving instructions via cell phone, I proceeded to card my washed wool. And card. And card. It was sorta like teasing the hair up for a very resilient sheep.

Rolags

For such a small piece of fleece, I ended up with bags full of rolags. (the rolled fiber pulled from the carders) About four bags of white, and four of brown . . . and I hadn't washed even an eighth of the whole fleece.

Gallon bags full of rolags

Now on to the fun part, spinning. I had a drop spindle I bought over a year ago - yes, there was forethought and premeditation. But procrastination delayed me. Until now. I played with the spindle, and some roving I bought at the same time, read about how to spin, watched a few YouTube videos, then set out to conquer my rolags.

Ashford drop spindle

It was a disaster. I was getting thick and thin yarn, inconsistent enough to frustrate me into thinking of wearing polyester. I called Linda and whined. We determined the spindle was all wrong for what I wanted to do. Much too heavy. A trip to Hobby Lobby (280 miles. Talk about suffering for your art.) and I had several wooden car wheels, some doweling, and eye hooks, enough to make myself four drop spindles.

Homemade Drop Spindles

I sanded everything, stained three of them (the fourth was already in use) and all of the sudden the spinning was smoother, easier, and more consistent.

Drop spindle with CD add-on

Me, being me, couldn't leave well enough alone. I played with the parameters of my spindles, securing a cd to the bottom in hopes of increasing the amount of time my spindle spun. (I sacrificed an old, self burned copy of Pink Floyd's A Momentary Lapse of Reason. I think Roger Waters would approve . . . .)

25gm balls of homespun Icelandic wool yarn

I'm getting better at drafting the wool and pulling some consistent yarn. Linda has threatened to teach me how to use a spinning wheel. But for now creating my own yarn from sheep to finish has been a fun project. I'm trying to keep it from becoming an obsession. It may already be too late. I've brushed the dogs and gathered up a LOT of undercoat. After I wash it, I'll card Max and Merlin fur into the wool, and spin it up. One of these days I'll be posting pictures of my very own Corgi-wool chapeau. And you know what? When it's all blended together, nobody can tell what part of the dog it came from, although referring to it as my bunny butt fur hat might be a dead giveaway.

South end of Corgis going north

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Weekend Wandering

I'm venturing outside the Periphery for a few days. Been a while since I escaped the cozy confines of my square state. (I don't count slipping over the border into Montana or South Dakota to buy yarn as being 'outside' the Periphery, since it involves sheep.)

Everyone have a good weekend, and try to stay out of trouble - I'm looking at you, Anonymous.

My Memorial Day will be spent here:


Watching this:




I know, I know, I haven't blogged much on my baseball obsession - consider yourselves informed. Or shocked and appalled. Or indifferent and waiting for football season.

Someday we'll explore my rather weighty baseball card collection, and all the reasons wearing a N.Y. Yankees hat in Wyoming is

Not A Good Idea.

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What A Difference A Week Makes

In case anyone was wondering when winter started... it was yesterday. Wyoming got hammered over the weekend with some nice, heavy, wet snow. A foot or more in places, six inches or so in my neck of the woods. Heavy enough to break limbs off my poor trees. Compare this to last Sunday, when I went hiking at a friend's place near Devils Tower.

Blue skies, temp about in the mid-sixties, a nice breeze blowing...

Well, blowing is an understatement. The breeze came howling down the canyon with enough force to make my sitting-on-top-of-the-canyon-wall meditation a bit nerve-wracking. There were enough downed and precariously perched trees from a fire a few years back that the creaking grew rather ominous. I retreated to the relative safety of a spot further up the canyon, out of the direct line of the wind.



See that tree leaning to the left in the left half of the picture? That was my perch until the wind threatened to rip my ears off my head. Lots of little birds flitting about, bluebirds, a chickadee that serenaded me with a three note rendition of "Stupid Human Tricks". So I gave up on the meditation, and went exploring. I found live deer, a fawn skull and bones, and more evidence of things passed -


Apparently a coyote snacked on a turkey, and left only the bones, feet and feathers. I picked up a few feathers, but declined bringing home gnarly turkey feet for posterity.



I also passed on the snake skeleton. Not sure what it was, bullsnake or rattler, but no rattles I could find, and no head. Better a dead snake than a live one. (And there was a live rattlesnake sighting about an hour before I got there.) The wind picked up yet again, and this time, it was pushing a thunderstorm before it. Rain, a welcome change from the dry. So here we are, a week later, and I have all the anti-dry I could wish for.


Some of us don't seem to mind, however...

Big Horn Expedition

Because I'm too lazy to actually write something this week, I thought I'd inflict some pictures from my Sunday hike in the Big Horn National Forest on you. This was me time, no dogs, just the mountains, the lake, the trees, and one brain-numb city escapee.


The goal - Tie Hack Reservoir. One of numerous little lakes tucked in the Big Horns, and easily accessible after a small hike. Good for when you need some nature, but don't want to actually work real hard at it. Since putting one foot in front of the other was all I was capable of that day, it was the ideal destination.


I intended to sketch and paint, but just hanging out was far more attractive, and required little brain power. Note to self: Self, remember to find a lighter sketchbook, preferably one without a hardcover so the day pack doesn't gain weight with every step...


Water. Lots of water. Pretty blue water, with lots of fish in it, at least where I was sitting. I could see the trout pop to the surface to snatch bugs. The fisherman a few hundred yards to my right wasn't having much luck. Maybe he should have used granola instead of worms.

The rock on top looked interestingly enough like a mountain lion head. The chipmunks that came around to beg for some trail mix didn't seem very intimidated though...


I heard elk somewhere in the vicinity, but never saw any. There was a lot of tracks and droppings everywhere, which lead to the Corgis sniffing my boots thoroughly once I got home, and giving me dirty looks for not taking them to smell the smells firsthand.


A nice piece of level ground to traverse. I enjoyed it while it lasted, which wasn't long.


I forgot one thing about hiking. When you hike in, you also have to hike out again. I don't remember a big downhill on the way in, but the uphill on the way out about kicked my butt. I was glad to see my poor car waiting patiently for me at the end of the trail, not to mention my extra water and my "No service in this area" cell phone.


Yes, that's snow on the mountains. I didn't go that far up into the Big Horns, I was only at 7500 feet (2286m), it was warm with just a bit of a nip in the air, a promise of things to come. Hopefully, I can get a few more hikes in before what's on the mountains ends up on the roads, and my communing with nature comes to an end - for a while.

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