WHERE DOES THE TIME GO?

 Two weeks without a post- sorry – not sure how they went past unnoticed.  Husband has had me busy working on projects.  

My husband and are - in addition to our professions – professional craft artists.  We have each worked in an assortment of media over the decades – husband, a larger assortment than me.  Currently husband is working at weaving.  

Our living room serves as a “loom room” from around mid January to mid December.  (I get the room back for remaining month to decorate for Christmas.)  He recently bought a smallish big screen TV which is also in the living room – due to lack of anywhere else to put it.  

Our reenactment unit has two events coming up in the next couple of months which are more of craft demonstrations than correct 18th century reenactments, so he can bring his loom to those to those 2 events and can sell items he has woven.  (It is a modern type of smaller loom and he has an even smaller version to take to events such as these.)  So he is working on weaving some additional items to bring along.  (I demonstrate embroidery – much easier to set up and needs much less room to work.)

When he sets up a project to weave (called warping the loom) we have to run the yarn which will be woven on across the length of our living room to have enough room – and now we (I) have to be careful not to knock into the TV and throw it over.  So, warping the loom now involves moving things so they are not in the way – which things never would have been in the way before.  

The process for each piece takes an afternoon for the part that I have to help him with (he then has to do additional things to finish the setup – but I only have to come in for a few minutes to check that the warp threads are evenly and sufficiently stretched.

We have done this process twice in the past 2 weeks – each one, an afternoon gone.  Now I will have time to myself as he is working on weaving this piece for a few days.  

So in between working at accomplishing my normal daily, weekly, monthly chores, I have been losing time to helping him warp his loom and posting to all of you was not done.  

ADDITION TO AUGUST 11 POST

 Still have not found the missing items - really, house is not THAT disorganized, they have to be here somewhere logical - right?

EVEN IN A PANDEMIC - THINGS BREAK AND NEED TO BE REPLACED

 The time had come – we had to replace one of our toilet seats – the one in the upstairs bathroom.  We have been in the house for about 33 years.  We have 2 bathrooms and have replaced each of the toilet seats at least once.  The upstairs toilet seat apparently had a plastic film seal over the seat and the hole that had suddenly appeared in the film was getting too big to ignore, so a new one was needed.  (I am a big believer in “whenever you can ignore a problem – do so”.)  I had not actually completely ignored the problem  - I had given a bit of a pull to the edge of the hole to see if it would expand...

Now a toilet seat might seem a generic item and replaceable with no thought, but having grown up in a home where the bathroom was alternatively referred to as “the reading room” and “daddy's office”, I can assure you it does take some thought – especially when one is on a budget.  First I read up on toilet seats as I knew that these days there are different shapes and though there might even be different sizes – only different shapes.  I was pretty sure ours was a “round” as opposed to an “elongated” - the latter being a newer style of toilet than ours – which predates our buying the house.  I was right.  So size was determined – round.  Price is always a factor and we did not something fancy – so next question was plastic or (not, not paper) wood?  We have one of each (our half bath in our kitchen* has a wood seat).  Husband studied the seats in both bathrooms and decided on plastic.

Then the hard question – Home Depot or Lowes?  I noticed that Home Depot had a lot more choices than Lowes, but husband had to go to both stores.  He bought the plastic, round seat, near, but not at the bottom of the price range, we had figured would be good for us and we took it home.  

At home  - after it sat around for a few days, of course, he opened the box and took the seat to the bathroom to see how it would be.  He then went to the Home Depot website and decided that maybe we should have a more substantial seat and found one.  Back to Home Depot and bought that seat.  We had not returned the original so we could think about it.  

He decided the new one was more substantial and decided to put it in.  It was another manufacturer and had a more complicated installation than the other (and our old) seat – involving putting in the hinge and then pushing the seat connectors into the hinge.  When he took the seat out of the box it had several large scratches on it.  Back to thinking.  One thing he mentioned that was that the scratched one was slightly, but measurably thicker - “Does that matter?”  My first response was “no”, but then I thought about it.  This toilet is somehow taller than the one downstairs (which should be the same size) and the downstairs one is a slightly more comfortable height for me  so I changed my response to “yes” and explained this to him.  We decided to go with the first seat.  

We went to install the first seat we bought.  We took off the old one – cleaned the toilet well (my job) and went to install the new seat.  Unfortunately no one thought that one have the toilet sitting almost against the side wall.  (I often joke that we should take out the toilet paper and find someplace else to put it so my leg does not touch it when using the toilet – it is that close a space.)  Installing the left side of the seat was complicated by this problem, but we managed to get installed.  Well, that's something accomplished.  

The seat does have a new feature – s l o w  c l o s i n g.  I am used to holding the end of the seat to keep it from falling too quickly and have to learn to let go and let it fall.