Illusions

Oh, what a difference a day makes. As soon as I learned the sound is more in my head, I've been hardly aware of it. It's there from time to time, but it's like a ghost in my closet or a monster under my bed; I can now tell which are the real noises and which are mine.

The audiologist (Gill in pink) loaned me this machine, which I understand is called a white noise machine. It has about 8 variety of water-related sounds, one of prairie evening sound with a chorus of crickets, and a train sound. Last night I thought I could have fallen asleep without it, but Beloved loves gadgets so we tried it. We didn't like the water sounds, and the crickets were too noisy so we settled on the train sound. Funny thing is, we grew up going everywhere on trains, so, A) it was unnatural to hear the train sound and not feel the motion; we even jiggled our limbs to create a bit of faux-train vibration, which made us laugh so hard we were wide awake; and B) if you're used to trains, you know that with every tiny curve or incline/decline, the sound changes, and there was none of that, which bothered me at 3AM. And, now that I'm not worried or bothered by the forklift, my regular anxieties started to come back a bit. There is just no pleasing some customers, ha ha ha!!

Still, it was a new experience, and while I don't know if I'll use it all the time, it's nice to have it as a backup when the ghost of forklift comes out from under my bed; I much prefer it to chemical inducements.

Golly, I remembered just as I was typing; when I was a baby and didn't sleep, Dad would take me on a train ride, I'm told! Talk about a full circle.

Another illusion. I long had difficulties "accepting" that diagonals and curvy twills were optical illusions. At the very beginning, I thought they were some kind of wired warp manipulation. Then when I understood the "theory", I began to see how it worked in drafts. But it took weaving over a dozen warps, and then explaining it to non-weavers, to slowly and reluctantly accept that diagonals and curves are like filling in squares on a graph paper, or pointillism.

And just when I thought the world was a safe place again, Deep End posts this!! I just had to borrow the pic, but since this is knitting, I'm going to enjoy it and not try to understand it.

Photo posted with permission.

SSVE opens at 7PM tonight NZ time. I don't know why but I always envisioned it opening in the evening, so if you came a little earlier, I apologize.