Monday is washing day.

And I do indeed tend to do my washing on a Monday. This is, of course, quite crazy. For most of my married life, I have had an automatic washing machine which in theory removes any particle of drudgery from the procedure. This isn't quite true in either fact or perception, but compared with heaving stuff out of a dolly tub or boiler, putting it through a mangle (which I have done in my extreme youth and tend to regard with the affection of hindsight) and then hanging it out on a line at the whim of the weather, well, comes close. Actually, I love to line dry laundry and one of the few minus points about living here is that there are so few days when it is a reasonable thing to do, and we have not yet quite reached the window.

I do wonder if labour saving devices are not something of a snare and delusion. I can't help feeling that ordinary women, rather than those with servants, those who did there own domestic work, probably didn't clean their houses as we think we should do with the benefit of vacuum cleaners and so forth.

Enough. Why am I blathering on about housework, fer......The same reasons as for why I do it at all, mostly. Displacement activity. I have no project twinkling at me at any stage that one might be. I am devoid of inspiration, and when that happens, the notion of domesticity always rears its ugly head. (Insert image of whole-body shudder, here.)

This is not to say that I have nothing on the go. Some soy silk is sitting in a Faustus debate even as I speak (but we won't go there, I have no even medium high hopes for this effort any more than the previous attempts.) I am still spinning the multi-brown-red-blue-whatever bat's. And I have cast on a shawl, from an idea being spread around by beryllium - I don't know if this is of her own devising, or whether she found it somewhere and liked it. But a neat shawl, anyway, which you start by casting on enough to sit comfortably across the back of your neck, and then increase two stitches either side of a single stitch at the ends of this section - so you end up with three triangular parts to the shawl which will then sit nicely around your shoulders. By golly, I explained that in a masterly fashion - not. Anyhow, I had some rather pleasant, cushy fawn yarn spun from some California Variegated Mutant roving (oh, how I love that name, sounds like something out of X-Files rather than a breed of sheep!) I bought the roving ages ago, spun it rather fewer ages ago and it needs using. It will make a good prototype. Did I just type that?? Obviously I do t some level have the intention of doing others, and I didn't know it! How clever and devious the subconscious is!



I suppose it is indeed not entirely accurate to say that I have no inklings about anything to do next. I doodled these



from some of the left-oversaw from the Colinette shawl, using the tapestry crochet technique. I quite fancy doing some more, but with handspun - I need to practice my fancy yarn spinning for some classes coming up, and they might be nice to do for a purpose rather than just doing any old how. I can at least mull that one over.

I also have another beading project coming up on the inside, hope to finish that today or tomorrow - another simple watch bracelet. Then I need to get cracking on a few things - another beaded thing as another gift, and some pieces for me to wear at a wedding....I don't need to worry about What To Do Next, do I!

gw