Dream: Queen Dad

I dreamt about the British royal family. Earlier there was a long sequence involving Prince William, which I do not remember clearly. The dream took the form of a role-playing game in which the world was overlaid with game hexes several acres in size. The latter parts took place in high rocky mountains where each mountain roughly corresponded to one hex. Prince Philip lived in a castle on top of a mountain. He was not the Queen's husband but her dad, thought of as the "Queen Father". I was an innkeeper who kept an inn on the side of another mountain below. I looked up at the bright castle (red and gold pennants fluttering in the breeze) and wondered how it felt to live so remotely from humanity. The royal family was constantly under threat of assassination. And as the old Queen Father had lost his vigilance, it was considered safer to keep him far away from contact with anyone except his trusted servants. I had just begun to interview the Prince about this predicament telepathically from a distance when I woke up.

Doctors

I finally received results from the sleep study. I have moderate sleep apnea. I had sufficient deep sleep and REM sleep during the study but stopped breathing on average 22 times per hour.

Now I have to go back for another sleep study to check the pressure for a CPAP machine, which I will bring home in May if I'm lucky. The sleep doctor also wants me to lose weight and use a saline rinse in my nose before bed.

I heard back from the stomach doctor last week and he recommended staying on the gluten-free diet because he is more concerned about looking at reflux issues. I didn't know what to make of that, but now that I have another sleep study booked two days before the gastroscopy, I'll take his advice. The sleep study is important so there's no point in making myself sick.

Many factors are pushing me toward regular exercise. Do you feel my enthusiasm?

Exhileration

After lunch I finished warping the loom and began weaving the first "Garden diamonds" scarf. That's what I call this pattern because it sets off the silky glow of the variegated Noro Silk Garden weft so nicely. I posted samples a couple weeks ago.

I am so in love with this project, with weaving, with this old loom and with the whole process. I spent weeks designing the draft, weaving samples, wavering over what yarns to use, working out how big I wanted the scarf to be and how much material was needed, and in the end decided it would make sense to make three scarves on the same warp. The actual weaving goes so quickly it's economical timewise to make multiples, so I can give extras away or maybe start an etsy store if they turn out nicely.

I'm not normally a fastidious or fussy person. When I find something that inspires me to obsess over details, it's a rare experience and I absolutely love it. Many weavers just throw a warp on the loom without measuring, but I have already learned that weaving rewards good planning. Just making those samples taught me so much about so many things (colour, patterns, different kinds of fibre), I can hardly contain it.

I do love to plan; came by that honestly from my mother, who was so concerned with planning she never really learned to live in the moment until she met cancer, the Teacher.

Once you warp the loom, the weaving goes quickly. It took me about an hour today to get 3/8 of the way through the first of the three scarves. Many people who love planning have trouble finishing things (raising hand timidly), but not so for me with weaving. And it helps to work with some pretty thing like Noro that enchants you as you go.

By next week I should be finished and begin shaping threads of the experience into a new idea.