The local guild

I finally managed to make it to a local hand weaving and spinning guild meeting. I've only been trying to make it to a meeting for a year now. Since the meetings are only once a month and are on Thursday nights, getting there has not been particularly easy. I either completely forget until the week after, or I'm so tired that I can't even think of going out. I was extremely tired on Thursday, but I made myself go anyway, since it was the last meeting before the summer break.

It's the Victoria Handweavers' and Spinners' Guild, and they are a very friendly group. I also made it to a spinning group last night, so I managed to get some spinning done.

I'm trying to design a runner with a block weave, and having trouble wrapping my head around how to use one set of shafts to tie down the weave. I think I need to do something different with the tie up, but haven't quite figured it out. I really need to sit and play on Fiberworks PCW, but I haven't managed to dredge up the patience.

I did find a set of very interesting articles about the latest in evolutionary biology and developmental biology research that are in the NY Times. It's stuff that I was peripherally aware of, since much of it had started back when I was doing my research, but I hadn't been paying much attention for the last few years. It's a nice summary of the latest thinking in evolutionary biology and how advances in the study of developmental biology have fueled the new thinking. I actually think it puts some of the creation 'science' arguments to bed, since it explains how you can get relatively radical differences rather quickly.

And work seems to be finally calming down a bit. After switching roles, I felt like I was playing catch up, since the whole reason for switching was because there was only one person doing the definition work and he was totally swamped trying to do it alone. I think we're almost to the point of being far enough ahead that we can breathe. I'm certainly feeling like we've finally figured out the way to get the functionality that's needed without killing ourselves or producing something that's completely unusable.