Honestly, it’s days like this that worry me. I woke up feeling fair to middling, did my morning chores feeding llamas and goats and even giving a shot to one of the llamas who has a swollen leg from some kind of injury he has given himself. Around noon I had finished up and my youngest daughter and I sat on the tractor bucket, and I told her some of the old stories of rounding up cows when I first came to visit Idaho, and how her oldest brother learned to ride from a champion barrel racer in Nevada.
Lunchtime came and I fixed up me some hotdogs and ate them. It was around that time I also started feeling quite poorly. It started like the old rheumatism in the hips and spread throughout my torso and arms. That finally got to the point I could no longer stay awake, so I went up to take a nap for more than an hour and a quarter on my bed. That is not right for me as I normally only nap for some twenty minutes or so. Now it is gone past seven in the evening an I am still feeling like Wile E. Coyote after the fall from the cliff and the huge boulder landing on me. With any luck, I will feel much better after tonight’s sleep and for all of tomorrow. I have an important errand I need to run as soon as I can.
The pain of it is debilitating and were I working a regular job that required reporting into some stuffy manager, I would have been in trouble for a day like today. That is not interesting to me. I don’t want to have to have my security and livelihood threatened over something beyond my control. I will try to report into myself in full health tomorrow.
I have just about finished a stand for Missus’ loom. She has an Ashford rigid heddle loom that is some 18 inches wide. She told me that a stand would cost us $175 or so, so I took some of the wood I milled and made her one for about $15 in parts. I *think* that saved us a few dollars. Perhaps you know the old meme that says “why buy it for $35 when I can make it myself with $97 in craft supplies?” I have spent well over that amount in supplies and tools and the mill and so on. Well, I have got to trim the tops of the legs and tighten a couple of bolts, then it is as done as can be. I more or less followed the specifications of the stand she does have, and replicated it as close as possible, except the type of wood and the thickness of my pieces. I think it came out pretty good, and I understand some of the things they did on their model to help it work better than the methods I might have chosen on my own. I also need only make one spare part, only longer, to make this stand fit a wider loom. Well, I am happy with it.
The ideal situation this year is to make anything like this that we can here on the farm. We’d like to give up on buying things as much as we can, buy quality when we do have to, and make quality when we don’t. I need to get the trailer fixed and start making trips down to get firewood and milling wood. The weather today was perfect for it. We have a bit more to come before it starts getting wet late this week or early next.
Off to an early night to bed tonight. I need to recover from this awful feeling. Best wishes reader.