Words & Wool

The cold is back. After a few days of sunshine and highs nearly into the forties we are back to nights in the single digits and midnight runs to the wood stoves to keep the home fires burning. I just finished up my first week of being back into my writer's schedule with the new book, and it is making me realize a few things about myself. The most prominent being that I have a seemingly endless well of energy when it comes to the farm and animals, but creative energy, the stuff of blog posts and books....that has a glass ceiling. I find that I can write in the mornings post-chores for the book and then I need to reload myself with inspiration. I can't go from book-to-blog unless I am copying and pasting content. (Which isn't fair to book or blog reader, honestly.) So I get my word count in every morning and then spend some time doing something outside or totally mindless. I do some groundwork with Merlin (by the by, I need the farrier back here soon...) or I make a cup of coffee and sit down to watch something on Hulu or Youtube to get me excited again. The first week of farm book writing was padded by The Walking Dead. I could watch a new episode every 500 words. If that sounds like bribing myself, it is. And it was somewhat hilarious to go from writing about the sunshine in a spring garden to little Sophia shambling out of the barn...

Point is, I got through my first week. And writing feels natural in this cold spell of winter weather. I find myself being torn between the blog and the book, and you'll know who won that day by how much I wrote to you here. I guess I'm trying to explain that some days content here will be light and others I will let out a landslide of falconry, farm, and garden-planning stories. Please be patient.

Next weekend is Words & Wool, a two-day workshop on all things fiber. It'll be a full house and I am excited about it. I have the spinning instructor coming up from NYC and plans to hop over the fence and sheer some wool right off a sheep for the wool-cleaning and preparing demonstration. I want folks to see wool go from sheep to being spun and knit, all in one weekend. I've been in a knitting slump so I think this weekend of women and wool will be a power punch right in the ol' yarn stash.