On 9/26/12 6:31 AM  Cooooooo-eeeeeeeee…. any one home?
Hiya Nora,

Haven’t heard from you in ages. Hope all is well and you’re busy doing fun things.

Amanda

On 9/26/12 12:15 PM
Dear Amanda,
I have been, I confess, turtling. Nothing bad. . . Actually doing fun things on the weekends at times—Misha, Soma, and I have been taking trecks into West Virginia. I find the landscape there fascinating. It’s an area that is currently being mined for natural gas. Here they call it fracking as they fracture the rock by forcing water into the earth. Fissures are created and they can capture the natural gas that is released. It’s pretty controversial, but a big boom there. We go to the State Parks, which are BEAUTIFUL! We went to one park called Babcock Park way West. 7 hours driving to get there.  Worth every hour. Rhododendrons way over your head. Great tumbles of rocks. West Virginia is known for caves because the tumbles of rocks create caverns underground.

We love staying in log cabins such as this one.

Hiking through the forests . . .

Very refreshing.

In Lost River Park, we hiked 15 out of the 25 miles of trails in 2 days–Soma was quite the little hiker!

I have a busy day here at the studio as I begin to prepare for the New York Sheep & Wool Festival, commonly known around here as Rhinebeck . . . more about this shortly, but I must get back to that at the moment.

I think perhaps the antidote to my silences is to write a bit more about the things that occupy my thoughts: I have lovely quiet things that happen, seeing the hummingbirds, building cairns with Soma . . .

. . . teaching Soma to knit (that truly has been a highlight in the last few weeks!

. . .teaching a great workshop, but then challenges and frustrations. I tend not to write about the challenges and frustrations and then I fall into silence because those are the things I chew on and think about long after the hummingbirds have gone.

Much much more to say. . .

Nora

On 9/27/12

Dear Nora,

Its great to hear from you! Busy doing fun things is always good. We’ve been doing a lot of that too.

We went to Andyfest, had a great time, spent far far too much, spent a bit more and then decided that since we’d been a bit reckless we might as well be really reckless so we left with an array of silk based yarns, some undyed yarn to dye ourselves… eventually…. quite a lot of laceweight in some incredibly soft colours, more than a bit of sock yarn and a 1kg cone of black coloured BlueFaced Leicester which was reduced in the sale from £110 to £10, well it would have been silly not to. Its more than perfect for the Noni Ribbed jumper 🙂

Whilst we were there a few of the spinners were kind enough to allow DD2 to try out their wheels. She was hooked.

A fortnight later we got a call to say our wheel was in Wales along with a niddynoddy, nostepinne, pair of carders, a drop spindle and a whole lot of roving with which to spin. A friend with far more confidence in me than I have sent me a bag of fluff to play with . . .

the end result was gobsmacking.

I’ve been dealing with my frustrations in a boringly practical way. The small child with her head permanently buried in my Kindle now has one of her own which means I no longer turn it on to find it half way through “The mouse who farted, look what he started”. Darryl is attempting to quit smoking, fortunately hes spending much of his time in the shed building a hovercraft so we’re saved the worst of it. The most frustrating thing at the mo, as always here, is the weather. We’ve had tempestuous deluges for days on end. The rivers have burst their banks, the roads and fields flooded but so far its not affected any of the houses which is v. good as they’re still drying out from Augusts flash floods which left us paddling knee deep at the bottom of the garden.

As always I’m on the verge of being late for work. Which isn’t good as I’m attempting to cram an extra 15 hours into my working week to cover absences and am failing miserably.

Hope to hear from you soon

Amanda