Camp Loopy August

Are you doing Camp Loopy? Even if you didn’t do June or July, you can still do August! Camp Week is happening now.

This has been the most challenging of all the Camp Loopy challenges for me. The challenge is: “Pick a pattern or yarn or fabric that goes with a western movie, or a western song, or a western TV show or a western book.”  This was all posted the day I felt so bad and stayed in bed. I am not a TV or movie fan but I do like to read and listen to music and probably about 90% of those old songs, I know the songs! I read through them. The tunes played in my head. I fell asleep. I read more. Nothing said “Pick me”.

I kept thinking . . western movie . . my life should be a western movie. There is not a single day that goes by that I think about the pioneer women heading west in a stagecoach or worse. Many of them passed right near here. Why did they keep going? Why did they stay? Why am I here? Snakes. Spiders. Drought. Dust. Dirt. Grasshoppers. Fire ants. We have modern conveniences – air conditioning, refrigeration, running water . . and it’s a hard place to live. I just cannot imagine people coming from the east and passing through here and staying. I’m not being mean or ugly. Part of me loves it here but back in those days . . those people had more fortitude than most of us have today.

Anyway, my life is not a movie or a book but . . it is a blog. That should count, right? But that wasn’t an option. Then, just for the heck of it, or out of desperation, I began to read through the TV shows. As a kid, my dad watched Gunsmoke and Bonanza but Vince watched Longmire and there’s something about a cowboy . . jeans and boots . . ok . . we’re not going there. But, I also watched some of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman and one of the designers whose patterns I’m particularly drawn to is Casapinka and . . she’s a doctor. Connection! The other day a friend sent me a link to Mixology and I was thinking . . I’m going to be traveling a good bit in August and that looks like a pretty forgiving, easy pattern so I went with that.

Then came the job of deciding on yarn. Remember . . pain meds, muscle relaxer, sleep, prednisone, sleep . . frustration! Finding five skeins of yarn that I wanted to use took forever. I probably had 10 different combinations in my planner.

I think these will be pretty. What’s really weird is that I was just looking at colors that I liked and not paying attention to the names but after I ordered all the yarn, it struck me as funny. Think how many of these fit my life in Texas.

• Jaded Dreams – I’m not going to say my dream of this being our retirement location is jaded. We may stay here forever. When we moved here, it was for a job and we would do it all over again. The lack of rain and having insufficient water to keep the grass growing bothers me. I’m a gardener at heart and my garden requires more water than I’m afraid my well can safely produce so we will either have a very small garden from now on or no garden at all. Otherwise, I love my friends here, more so than anywhere we’ve lived. Not really that I love my friends more but I have more interaction with them and I have more people that I feel I could call and get instant help if I needed it.
• Harvest – Well . . one tomato here and there is a harvest, right?
• Patagonia – Wikipedia calls Patagonia “a sparsely populated area” . . that fits.
• Antler – The people who built this house had about 25 antlers hanging over a tree limb and left them. For seven years I’ve walked by them and thought . . why are they there? Friends have taken a few, some have fallen down, been picked up and placed other places. Most are small . . not the size you’d find hanging on a wall . . but they’re out there and I pass them every day going to the chicken coop or the garden.
• Snake – Need I say more?

How funny is all that? Those colors really made me smile after I’d checked out and realized the color names probably have more western theme than my pattern association.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to the third month of Camp Loopy but I must get busy with the second month and get that project finished!