Less Manic Work Day

When you are a One Armed Paper Hanger business, with the occasional hand from the spouse for Tech Stuff, it is good to have a butterfly/hummingbird way of working. I had to move the sticky note from the SIDE of my desktop screen to the FRONT and CENTER area because today was No Excuse, You Have To Create That Ad day.

Yes, this is what it really looks like, around here, when the hummingbird brain is in deadline mode, while still wanting to dye as many colors as I can, of the new SilkyWool yarn. This is the kind of day that makes me think of the cartoon by Hilary Price.

I am grateful for today’s heat but also grateful that here, on the north side of the hill, we are not ROASTING. It is just enough to make drying yarn a quick endeavor. It’s the only reason that I welcome hot days, simply because our heat is dry, not like the sweaty stuff of the east coast. Yarn and fiber dries in a short time.

Now, I need to go over to my spot on the brown couch, in the room with the art, and make a swatch with the first stuff that I dyed. I think that this is going to take the place of the Silk/Baby Camel, in the booth this year. The aforementioned yarn is in its Sundown time, since I knew, when 45 put the big tariffs on anything coming from the East, I would not be ordering any more yarn from the fabulous fine fiber yarn mill Over There. Sad, but this NEW yarn takes color in a MOST drool worthy manner. Stay tuned for The Swatching, since I am getting so much closer to being done with the open work shawl out of the Silk/BFL.

On to the reason for the day; as I said, earlier on social media, I will never forget out trip to France, Part II, when we sailed north and then took a bus to Normandy. Our guide was a small woman, of a certain age, who was a University Professor making extra money as a person who knew all about what we were to experience. She kept a running tutorial, along the way, until we got closer to Omaha Beach where we were divided up; Canadians, folks from the UK, and then people from the US. We actually took a tour and had a lecture at the British museum and then rambled along in the misty cold of the beach where so many “American” boys were mowed down.

The cemeteries were vast and overwhelming but when our little French guide, with the VERY French chic outfit, gathered the folks from the US into a circle, in front of the Wall of the Missing, above Omaha Beach, and had us be silent and then sing the Star Spangled Banner, I TOTALLY lost it. The tears came up from some guttural place, so deep that it all took me by surprise. The Wall of the MISSING. Seeing both the film 1917 and then The Long Engagement (French), yesterday, I can’t understand how any boy came back from war unscathed. We have so many Walking Wounded in the country, right now, and do not even realize how many men and women are ANGRY because of what they have seen and felt. While the horrors of war were different, each time, those who lost their lives were all someone’s child, sent to fight and die for the rich men of their perspective countries. The boys who died on Omaha Beach did not even have ONE CLUE about why what they did was so important and how the French love them, to this day. They did not know that there was a Holocaust, in US geographical terms, “just around the corner”. They, like all other soldiers, sailors and airmen, fought for their Brothers in Arms.

Rod’s dad drove a landing craft, in the Pacific theater. He would never discuss it; NEVER, except to talk about his pet monkey, on New Guinea. My stepfather was in the Navy but he had the light duty of an entertainer, playing the tuba and stand-up bass in a Navy band, in the Pacific. My dad was 4F, because of a childhood heart murmur. They were the men of the Greatest Generation, and are all gone, now.

Tonight, I will raise a glass to those who did not make it home and thank them for their sacrifices. Now, enough sad thoughts, it’s time to knit.