Finished plying the Shetland and now the wheel is empty. I started some of the merino silk blend, lovely violet color...but it breaks repeatedly. Even after adjusting the tension on the wheel multiple times, it is still breaking. I spun this blend on the drop spindle before....and I think I am going to go back to that. Handspinning should not be an exercise in frustration.

Thinking some more about the sheep shearing idea. How many years of really hard physical labor does my body have left in it? Twenty at best? After that I'll be wanting to slow down at least. Then what?

I'm scared....I've been working on my Associate's degree for about 4 years now. That's pathetic. If it weren't for the math class (that I've taken 6 times now), I'd be done and working on something else, but apparently knowing how to work with exponential and logarithmic functions is just essential in order to get a degree in just about any field. (sarcasm)

Speaking of such things....I went to the last segment of my neuro-psych eval yesterday, during which I was tested for learning disabilities. One of the questions: "How many different ways can you arrange four books on a shelf?" What kind of question is that????? Aside from the obvious (changing the sequence of books as they stand upright, side by side, on the shelf until you've exhausted unique options there) and the next most obvious (doing the same thing only now stacking them flat on the shelf and rearranging the sequence), you can then start separating them- two books on one side of the shelf, two on the other. Two vertical, two stacked. Three stacked, on vertical. All four vertical, not touching. etc, ad nauseum. I have no idea what the answer was, but obviously, I got it wrong. How could anyone know such a thing without trying it out for a few hours and keeping track of the results?

Then there was a section where I was given a story or picture and asked to deduce something that was not referred to directly, for example, what will Harry do next in a given scenario. I was completely lost on this. How am I supposed to know what Harry will do next? The answers were not obvious, either, as far as I could tell. Terrible.

The consolation is that I probably did well on things relating to vocabulary, etc.

I am still thinking about the headaches that no longer plague me. They were so bad. I used to always carry some analgesic along just in case I got a headache...and even then, timing was everything. Catch it too late and forget it...all the Tylenol in the world wouldn't help. Even hydrocodone wouldn't help at that point. Nothing would. My childhood memories of family outings include a migraine at virtually every get together...during school...so many headahces. An entire pregnancy of headaches.

And now they're just gone. Correlation doesn't equal causation, but it is still tempting to wonder whether going gluten free had anything to do with this. I've never been so headache-free in my life.

Then I think about how scientists think that autism has something to do with brain inflammation or vice versa. I don't know. It could be. Migraines are not said to be due to brain inflammation as far as I know. Tyramine is known to be a trigger for migraines, but wheat doesn't have high levels of tyramine and I am still eating lots of other foods that do. Odd.