Falcon and Fox

SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base at 8:15 am. It had been scheduled and postponed the previous two days but was able to lift off this morning.

 

 

This afternoon I caught sight of the fox watching me. I had just put all the animals to bed and was leaving the pen. Tenacious little stalker.

Last August I found a heap of Riley's black feathers - no body, no blood -  just outside the pen where the chickens enjoyed taking a dust bath. We searched the property in case she got away but we found more feathers on the "road" leading down the steep hillside.

From then on the fox returned often and stalked the remaining three chickens, either I saw it or the Ladies loudly let me know it was near. After nearly ten years of free-ranging chickens - such a joy to watch them walk across the driveway - we had to curtail their wanderings. Now they spend their days locked in the pen, safely I hope.

Riley and Sage vying for the same nesting box

Old Mac

The Man's 2014 iMac is on it's way out, yup dying.

We took a drive to the Apple Store in downtown SLO and then over to Best Buy. Since Apple has done away with the 27" computer we went to check out monitors to add to a Mac mini.

 

Sock Balls

Here is how I split a 100 gram skein of Sock yarn into two balls in order to knit a pair of socks at the same time and have the striping and/or patterning match up.

 

 

Weigh the skein without the ballband. Divide the skein weight in half (48 grams).

 

 

Find both yarn ends. Pull out the inside yarn end and create "yarn barf" by pulling out half of the skein ~ 48 grams. Try not to handle this mess too much so it doesn't tangle around itself.

 

 

Take the outside tail from the original skein and the middle-ish yarn connecting both "balls" and find a section where colors and patterning match up. Take your time it's a bit confusing. Cut and separate the skein.

Since I knit from the outside of the skein I keep the matched up colors on the outside of the ball.

Create two center-pull balls and remember to wrap the yarn very loosely so the yarn isn't being stretched.

 

So Green

 

In the Works

Today the first Tree Trimmer (Arborist) came by to give us an estimate. The recent storms brought with it southerly gusts blowing 60-65 mph and sustained winds in the 30-40's. It made us very nervous.

Yesterday The Man and I walked around the house and flagged the trees and Oak limbs that would cause mighty damage if they fell.

 

Another egg from Sage today.

 

A woven square on the Zoom Loom (Pin Loom).

Another long term project in the works. I'm spinning the yarn and weaving concurrently. The tiny balls of handspun yarn makes about three 4x4 woven squares. I'm aiming to make a blanket.

 

Appendix A: Zen Moments

 "The Zen nun Jiko Yasutani once told me in a dream that you can't understand what it means to be alive on this earth until you understand the time being, and in order to understand the time being, she said, you have to understand what a moment is.

In my dream, I asked her, What on earth is a moment?

A moment is a very small particle of time. It is so small that one day is made of 6,400,099,980 moments.

When I looked it up afterward, I discovered that this was the exact number cited by Zen Master Dōgen in his masterwork, the Shōbōgenzō (The Treasury of the True Dharma Eye).

Numerals resist the eye, so let me spell it out in words: six billion, four hundred million, ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and eighty. That's how many moments Zen Master Dōgen posited are in one day, and after she rattled off the number, old Jiko snapped her fingers. Her fingers were crazily bent and twisted with arthritis, so she wasn't very good at snapping, but somehow she got her point across.

Please try it, she said. Did you snap? Because if you did, that snap equals sixty-five moments.

The granularity of the Zen view of time becomes clear if you do the math, or you can just take Jiko's word for it. She leaned forward, adjusting her black-framed glasses on her nose and peering through the thick, murky lenses, and then she spoke once more.

If you start snapping your fingers now and continue snapping 98,463,077 times without stopping, the sun will rise and the sun will set, and the sky will grow dark and the night will deepen, and everyone will sleep while you are still snapping, until finally, sometime after daybreak, when you finish up your 98,463,077th snap, you will experience the truly intimate awareness of knowing exactly how you spent every single moment of a single day of your life.

She sat back on her heels and nodded. The thought experiment she proposed was certainly odd, but her point was simple. Everything in the universe is constantly changing, and nothing stays the same, and we must understand how quickly time flows by if we are to wake up and truly live our lives.

That's what it means to be a time being, old Jiko told me, and then she snapped her crooked fingers again.

And just like that, you die."

 A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki, 2013

 ~  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

January 26, 2023 Today's Moments

The Man on another ladder, on the other side of the house,

 

 

and two weeks ago,

 

and here's the first egg of 2023 (courtesy of Sage).