Bye For Now...

I'm afraid I'm going to run out of yarn for the "Fusion" pullover -- since the yarn's still for sale, and since it changes color in fairly large sections, I think I'll just buy more if I need it -- no need to go on eBay looking for the exact dye lot.

Cold and rainy here.

Will be back Monday evening, after long day of travel, and the toting around of various Things Which Can Only Be Bought in San Francisco. Luckily, I left lots of room in the luggage.

Soon, then...

Pies! Lots of Pies!

Quick and dirty posting today: I'm on a VERY SLOW dialup, from which I'm getting constantly thrown off, Blogger has become unrecognizeable, and I've got no digital camera.

And if I had one, it wouldn't plug into this machine, I believe.

BUT. I have advice: if, like me, you ever think that it's a good idea to fly into San Francisco late at night and then drive to the East Bay, assume that you won't actually pull into the driveway untl 3:00 AM. West Coast time. Which isn't what your biological clock will be on.

Have somewhat recovered today, and am cheered by the sight of all these pies. The kids have indeed planned a traditional feast -- not sushi, which I thought it might be -- and it's like no other traditional feast I've ever seen and apparently involves three pounds of butter and three desserts.

Must go for a walk.

Luckily, am in the Oakland hills and there's lots of walking, up and down and up and down and up and down...

Am working on the mohair Fusion pullover, to which I apparently can't link on Blogger today, don't know why -- scroll down for picture.

It's going well -- a good travel companion if what you're being is the mother/stepmother/grandmother/ and everybody else is doing the cooking and you're sitting at the kitchen table dispensing advice.

Now, let's see if this'll post....

Vintage Cardigan and Plane Plans

Oooh, lookie!

Here's what you can do if you don't have to do any pesky work:

finish the vintage cardigan!



And!

You can also work on the Ironstone "Paris Nights" shell which you bought on sale over at Pittsburgh Knit and Bead:



which, because it has a gauge of 11 sts. to 4", could conceivably get done before you get on the plane to go visit the kids and grandkids.

Somebody set the plane tickets up some weeks ago, and doesn't remember why she thought it was a good idea to leave Pittsburgh at about 8:00 PM, arrive in San Francisco about midnight (that would be 3:00 AM according to our bodily time clocks, which will still be set on Pittsburgh time), rent a car, and drive to the East Bay.

At least somebody lived in the Bay Area for 16 years, and does know her way around -- unless in her absence further pieces of the freeway have gotten lost -- so if Sam drives the car, somebody thinks she can get us into Oakland.

Somebody will find out tonight.

Or, rather, tomorrow morning.

I'm taking socks for the plane and airport knitting, and the lovely Reynold's "Fusion" pullover for sitting around with friends and family over the (USA) Thanksgiving holiday.

Blogging will be light, but I intend to borrow computers and check in -- indeed, some of my students may be using the comment function to ask questions about the papers which are coming in next week -- so if they start turning up all of a sudden, don't be alarmed. This blog will soon return to what passes for normal functioning.

Surprise Ending Revealed

Well, it's cold and rainy NOW -- it's supposed to drop 40 degrees today, and it's doing its best at this very moment.

Poor Sam. No leaf-raking for him. I think he's upstairs with the cat on his lap, reading. Gee, darn.

Various things to be addressed today --

For one thing, Ryan, the surprise ending of The Flying Dutchman turned out to concern the manner in which Senta met her death. You could see it coming -- for one thing, it was obvious that the staging didn't allow for Senta's traditional leap off the set into the ocean, and for another, Erik, the distraught Former Boyfriend, started walking around with a double-barreled shotgun, pointing it at various people on stage, but mostly at The Portrait of the Flying Dutchman (not the Dutchman himself, even though he was actually on the stage; just as well, he's not really Amongst the Living), and so when Senta grabbed the portrait SO THAT she would get shot, thereby freeing the Flying Dutchman from his Heretofore Endless Hell, it was not really a surprise when she DID get shot. No mess, though -- should have been LOT of mess, with that double barreled shotgun. The Surprise Ending solved a couple of problems -- easier staging, and easier on the poor soprano (sopranos must get awfully tired of flinging themselves off balconies) but added a new one: Now what? Does Erik get hauled off to jail? Does he escape the death sentence, on account of his clearly Diminished Responsibility? One wonders.

It was a fantastic production, though. One does not usually expect QUITE so much excitement in a Wagnerian production -- this one was full of stuff. The very chairs were Fraught with Meaning. Fraught, I say. I still haven't figured out why the townspeople dressed up for a St. Pat's day party in the last scene -- I understand why they weren't wearing their traditional bunads (here's what mine would look like, if I had one), since they were being Early 20th Century Victims of Capitalism and Fascism, but all those green sashes and scarves I don't get.

Who cares. It was a hoot. I adored it. I've never laughed so much at a Wagnerian opera. Well, I've never laughed at a Wagnerian opera ever, now that I think about it. I'd see it again. I hope I DO see it again. I wish I owned a video of it.

If the company decides to do "Parsifal" I only hope they can make it half so entertaining.

Other news: I did indeed arrive at Pittsburgh Knit and Bead, over where Gwen works, and I spent a lot of money -- the fruits of which I'll show tomorrow; no pictures today. It's such a treat to have an excellent LYS -- we've been missing such a one for a while now. And Gwen is Just Darling and knows a bunch of dead languages, which is always a plus in my book. So I'm happy. Always good to have Knitting Blogger Cohorts, especially when they're so charming.

Saturday I'll be elsewhere, and am scheduled to have breakfast with another Knitting Blogger Cohort -- darling thing, she suggested Mama's Royal Cafe. Part of my enjoyment of her blog -- besides the writing, which you could eat with a spoon -- is that she's broadcasting from the Bay Area, and I love it when she mentions my old haunts. The Royal Cafe was one of them -- if we're really lucky we'll get snarled at; she tells me the staff is just as touchy as it ever was. Oh, be still, my heart. Old home week.

And finally, I must address the Knitting Tarot, which is marching on without me on account of I got stuck on the Princes because, having an Issue With Knights, I couldn't remember what the hell they were. I think I gave Amber quite a turn when I finally broke down and asked. It's a sort of basic thing. But I really do have an issue with knights -- they make me nuts. And I have to deal with them a lot. All that starting things up and running off here and there -- way too much adrenaline.

However.

In the Knitting Tarot, they've become princes, which is a bit calmer, but still embody that beginning energy.

The Prince of Skeins -- lovely. A focus on knitting for the ages, and having too many expectations. So the lesson, then, is about letting go. We can't MAKE things be heirlooms. We can't MAKE our gifts be adored. Sometimes this happens, and we can do our best and most loving work, to help the process along. But we have to give the gift, walk away, and not look back. Hanging over the gift will poison it.

And The Prince of Spindles -- attention to details. And, often, way too much attention to details. So, for those of us who are too exacting, the card tells us to calm down and ease up. And for those of use who get too harum-scarum, it tells us to shape up.

Then, on the other hand, if we're working on our Master's Certification, it's just exactly who we need to be.

And freebie gift: another major, and an easy one at that: The Magician needs no translation. Some pointy sticks, some thread, and step back! Matter, transformed. That's why we do it, that's why we love it. Magic.

That's why the fairies love it too -- now where the hell did they put that shiny stuff I bought yesterday...

Sam Discusses Neil Diamond

Oh, we're happy today. We're just as busy as we usually would be on a Saturday -- maybe more so -- but we FEEL like we're not busy, because I'm not going to work on Monday, so we don't have to make sure to rest. Odd, how resting up on the weekends uses up so much precious time. Sam's out fixing the birdfeeder, which once again the squirrels, who are wily in the short run ("look, food! let's get it at any cost!") but dumb in the long run ("oops, broke the feeder again!"), have squashed into oblivion, and then he's going to finish raking leaves. The child, who's not generally allowed to watch a lot of TV, is dutifully sitting in front of it, rotting his much-too-fertile-brain with cartoons, as his mother told him she watched cartoons every Saturday of her childhood and it clearly hadn't done enough damage to her (I gather he thinks that somehow watching LooneyTunes causes one to learn Latin and Anglo-Saxon). And I am killing dust mites in the washing machine, and getting ready to go meet my local knitting blogger cohort, and buy yarn, knitting books, and needles from her at my Local Yarn Shop.

Yep, nice day, and it's not cold or rainy either. Blessings on whoever thought this up.

Got home the other day and Sam, who's generally extremely busy with reading Trollope and teaching the child to play poker, had clearly spent way too much time listening to WJAS, as he announced that Neil Diamond's lovers sleep in weird places.

His example:

She was morning
And I was night time
I one day woke up
To find her lying
Beside my bed. ("Play Me")

Why is she lying beside the bed? he wanted to know. Is she on the floor? Is there some kind of blanket? A rug, even? And what, he asked, about this:

Then come, and as we lay
Beside this sleepy glade
There I will sing to you
My Longfellow serenade. ("Longfellow Serenade")

What exactly, Sam asked, does it mean to lie beside a sleepy glade? Where are they? In the woods? In the lake? On the road way?

Well.

Here's what I want to know: Should I worry about this? Not Neil Diamond, I mean, who's beyond hope, but Sam? Should I buy him some more volumes of Trollope for Christmas? Cause I can't help but feel that applying the tools of literary criticism to Neil Diamond lyrics isn't going to take him very far....

Dragging Around Fusion

Well, you know how it is. You need a Lot of projects on the needles at one time, so as to minister to different moods and venues. At the VERY least, I require two: there's the difficult pattern that has to be followed row by row, and can only be done while sitting on the sofa after work; and then there's the mindless project that's excellent for dragging to meetings and colloquia, cause it doesn't require attention.

Well, I was doing fine; had the "Margaret Tudor" panels I'm working on (or, at least, have lying on the coffee table, where it LOOKS like I'm working on them, which is, to my mind, the same thing), and the vintage cardigan, for the mindless work.

But now that I'm near the end of the vintage cardi, I can't drag it around; I'm working on the buttonhole band, and there's a lot of pin-finding and fiddling around, and it won't travel.

So I had the very bright idea of starting a mohair pullover -- in Reynold's "Fusion":



I don't think I've mentioned this before, but next to sequins, I like mohair. Every one in a while I just HAVE to have another fluffy sweater. So here's one, and it's fun -- love the color changes, love the yarn, easy pattern, blah blah blah.

But can it be dragged around? No, it cannot. Because it's not only intarsia, but intarsia requiring giant balls of mohair that I don't feel like making into smaller balls of mohair, and easy though the pattern is, it requires fiddling around, four times every row, when you twist the yarns together.

So I started more socks.

But! Though I've got two meetings and a dissertation defense and a graduate student workshop today, after that, I'm free! Free, I tell you, for a week.

My plan?

Knit.

(Hang on, Ryan -- we go to the Sunday matinees -- so I'll Reveal The New Surprise Ending of The Flying Dutchman then. Also. Though I'd love to know if you can actually survive knitting a Teletubby, I can't bear to think of the lovely K. being tortured by it later. So, no. No challenge from me, in the interest of your domestic harmony.)

Surprise Endings

I'm sitting in my office, in between one meeting and another (students! don't worry! I will grade your papers! really! no kidding!), and The Flying Dutchman is playing, as that's what we're going to go see on Sunday. I'm looking forward to this, cause I read the review of this production in the paper, and it sounds Vastly Entertaining. There was a picture of the set, which was Highly Innovative and involved Several Levels, all of which Had Meaning. Also, the review mentioned that this production has a Surprise Ending.

Oh, really.

I've been trying, ever since, to figure out a surprise ending for The Flying Dutchman. Senta doesn't die, maybe, and the Flying Dutchman sails off, doomed to another seven years of ghostly sailing until he can find some other wacky girl to devote her whole life to him even though he's dead, and his crew scares Even Norwegians, which is, in my experience, hard to do?

Or maybe there's some deus ex machina moment, and the Dutchman is released from the curse, on account of some technicality and the paperwork has only just caught up with him, since nobody could find him till he pulled into port, and then he and Senta get to go off and live in a little cottage, where, giving up the sea, of which he is heartily sick, he becomes a low-level civil servant?

Or maybe -- I'd like this -- the Entire Town dies, inundated by a giant wave. Yes, I'd like that. I admire death at the ends of operas -- especially if the singers are continuing to sing as they go under -- and I'd REALLY enjoy it if the entire town died. "Flying Dutchman! We all love you! We'll remain faithful unto death, just like that insane Senta! Even though we're Norwegian, and genetically less likely to be wackos than the entire rest of Western Europe!" After which, God, annoyed, sends a wave. Big wave. I'd like to see this done on stage, really.

No, I can't imagine, actually, how they're going to tack a surprise ending onto The Flying Dutchman. If you know, please do NOT abuse my comment function, oh so recently added for your reading benefit, by telling me what it is. If I'm going to stay awake throughout the entire opera, I want to know what the surprise ending is by being surprised by it.

Senta becomes sane all of a sudden, throws out her picture of the Dead Guy, and marries Eric, the boring but faithful guy down the street?

Actually, I might enjoy that as much as Mass Singing Death.

Singing Sanity. Now, there's an idea. SO non-operatic.

Oh, and by the way -- since, at the end of the opera, Senta and The Dutchman (does he HAVE a name?) rise up into heaven, represented by the catwalk, this is technically a comedy, as that's a happy ending.

Surprise!

Christmas Knitting

At this point, Teresa, Deb, and Wendy have collected enough money from the KnitBloggers for 6 "Knitting Baskets" -- that's 2 llamas and 2 sheep each. I expected a high turnout for their project, but I'm happily surprised by their success, which has been even greater than I thought it would be.

I'm hoping we get them up to 10 knitting baskets -- that would be a nice round number.


I'm in the process of knitting up an "Eros" scarf in teal, for a work buddy. As invented by Plymouth, it had a lovely openwork pattern. I hated it. It didn't show off the properties of the mesh ladder as much as I like, so I'm redoing the thing in seed stitch, which makes the square "jewels" pop, as they don't in the openwork.

All of which means I'm not going to get it done as quickly as I'd like, alas. We're headed into the end of the semester -- we'll all disappear for Thanksgiving, and then we only have one week left of classes, and then we've got finals, and parties, and various Christmasy sorts of things, and then we all go to San Diego to look for new professors, and then we come back for the new semester and have more interviews of prospective new professors -- excuse me, have to go lie down now for a minute.

Ok, I'm back. I'm all right with the schedule if I don't look ahead. Start planning and it's too much. Just slog through, that's my idea.

Anyway, where was I...oh yes. Time running out.

I've been reading around the blogs about the Christmas rush, but see, here's what I'm doing -- I'm Not Knitting For Christmas. Nope. Everybody's getting Baked Goods. Or better yet, UnBaked Goods -- pleasant-looking layered cookie mixes in jars. Even better yet -- no jars; clear plastic cones. That's what sort of year it is.

So I have to get this scarf done, before it turns into a Christmas present, since it isn't -- it's an UnBirthday Present, which, as Humpty-Dumpty points out, you can have 364 of a year.

There's glory for you!

Golden Gate

I think this might be my favorite sweater of all the ones I've got:



It's Starmore's "Golden Gate," Pacific Coast Highway (Unicorn Books and Crafts, 1997). One could make it in any color, but brick red helps out the bridge illusion:



The pattern calls for Starmore's "Bainin." Yeah, right. Like THAT'S gonna happen. I believe I made mine in Dale's "Freestyle" -- I like the feel of it, and it holds stitches well. Good definition. And you'd HATE to lose definition on this pattern.

So. I like it because it evokes the Golden Gate, and I like the color, and it's very comfortable, and it's impressive. A difficult pattern, in that it requires twisting of stitches on the wrong side as well as the right, and you can't see what you're doing so well. That kind of thing takes me a while to get through.

"Golden Gate" got finished last year, but I really have been knitting lately, no kidding -- am done with my leper bandages (for which I'm grateful, as they are BORING as all get-out), and am whipping through a pair of socks:



I'll go for months without making socks, and then all of a sudden do some -- they're so mindless and quick -- I'm using, as I usually do, some Brunswick sock leaflet from what appears to be the 60's. No frills. Socks in 2 sizes, 2 styles. Oh, I see that there's an argyle pattern too. Yeah, well, I don't use it. I just whip out socks.

I do have, stashed away, the materials for a pair of Jean Newsted's lovely "Pearls of Wisdom" socks, with the last stanza from Pablo Neruda's poem to his socks on them in stranded knitting -- the pattern I've got's in Socks, Socks, Socks, edited by Elaine Rowley (XRX Books, 1999). I'll get to them someday, but I'm not holding my breath, and you shouldn't either, as that were foolish.

But here, in case you haven't run across it someplace else, is Robert Bly's translation of the poem:


Ode to my Socks

Maru Mori brought me
a pair
of socks
which she knitted herself
with her sheep-herder's hands,
two socks as soft
as rabbits.
I slipped my feet
into them
as though into
two
cases
knitted
with threads of
twilight
and goatskin.
Violent socks,
my feet were
two fish made
of wool,
two long sharks
seablue, shot
through
by one golden thread,
two immense blackbirds,
two cannons,
my feet
were honored
in this way
by
these
heavenly
socks.
They were
so handsome
for the first time
my feet seemed to me
unacceptable
like two decrepit
firemen, firemen
unworthy
of that woven
fire,
of those glowing
socks.

Nevertheless
I resisted
the sharp temptation
to save them somewhere
as schoolboys
keep
fireflies,
as learned men
collect
sacred texts,
I resisted
the mad impulse
to put them
in a golden
cage
and each day give them
birdseed
and pieces of pink melon.
Like explorers
in the jungle who hand
over the very rare
green deer
to the spit
and eat it
with remorse,
I stretched out
my feet
and pulled on
the magnificent
socks
and then my shoes.

The moral
of my ode is this:
beauty is twice
beauty
and what is good is doubly
good
when it is a matter of two socks
made of wool
in winter.

Knitting Tarot Discussion

Sam thinks we should have more pictures, and I agree, but we'll have them tomorrow.

Today, let's play catch up with the Knitting Tarot, which has been speeding ahead while I was lollygagging around, doing, I gather, Not Much. Except that part about working, as I mentioned earlier. In case anybody asks.

I believe I've got one more court card at the moment, the Princess of Spindles: Ah. The recipient of knitting who's after my own heart (earth and fire, that's what I understand best) -- make it useful. Now, clearly, this is NOT the person to make the sequined scarves for. Unless this person is, at the moment, crafting some dramatic monologue during which she can actually USE sequins. Otherwise, they're a waste of time, and they're a waste of space. But. If you actually go to the trouble to figure out what the princess NEEDS, she'll use it, and she'll use it till it falls apart. I love that. I don't like it when people abuse my knitting, don't get me wrong -- but I do like it when, after I've spent a lot of time and trouble on some knitting, it gets used, and it gets used well, and lives its little knitted life to the full, until it's dead, stone dead, and I have to knit something else. (Sam! Time to get that llama-wool cardigan out of storage!) (Around here, Sam's the recipient of Useful Knitting. I know I've hit it when I see it a LOT.)

Reversed? Secretly, your princess would really like something she doesn't need, but which is absolutely stunning.

And two more court cards -- VIII, "Untangling," is the equivalent of "Strength." The project takes time, intelligence, and patience. I enjoy Amber pointing out that, even after that, it still might not work out ok. Alas. But if it's going to work out at all, it's going to require time, intelligence, and patience. Sometimes a LOT of time. Well, and a LOT of patience. And, occasionally, more intelligence than I have at my disposal. Nevertheless, the project is, apparently, worth working on unless it's:

Reversed? Throw it out. It's never going to work. Move on.

And -- ta-da! -- IX, "The Hermit." Which is standing in for "The Hermit." But there you are -- at the deep center of knitting, no matter how many buddies you've got, or how many groups you're in, or how often you're teaching classes, or even how many projects are on the needles, there's some time spent on knitting activities that don't show up directly. Amber writes of it as "thinking, mulling, studying." Sometimes it's sitting with The Principles of Knitting, practicing new techniques. Sometimes it's playing with yarn for a while, seeing what it will do. My favorite is when it's sitting in my knitting library, looking at LOTS of patterns, all day, and then putting all the books back without actually starting anything new. Time spent like that manifests itself later.

And I DON'T reverse the Hermit. As far as I'm concerned, reversed Hermit does not mean "get out more." It means "people need to leave you alone," or, more to the point, "put the phone down and pretend you're gone."

Write Like a Boy

Despite the fact that I have an enormous amount of work, and am indeed getting all that work done, if anybody asks, I occasionally find little bits of time here and there -- as for instance last night, when it was 5:30 or so and I was done with my VERY busy day -- during all of which I had indeed been working, as mentioned above -- and was waiting for Michelle to come pick me up so we could go to see the Globe Theatre's production of Twelfth Night (which turned out to be one of those events which make being alive absolutely worth it), and since I had that little bit of time on my hands, I thought I'd go on over to The Literature Network and check out the literary gender of an author or two.

My results: Jane Austen writes like a boy (first chunk of Emma). Faulkner writes like a boy. Flannery O'Connor writes like a girl, which I found startling till I remembered all those Southern women I know who SOUND really sweet, but then later you discover that you're bleeding all over the floor and have lost a rhetorical battle you didn't know you were in.

Dylan Thomas writes like a boy. Abelard writes like a boy, but so does Heloise. Christine de Pizan, on the other hand, writes like a girl. So does Chaucer.

Startlingly, Yeats writes like a boy, but Brendan Behan writes like a girl. Louisa May Alcott writes like a girl, and so does Jonathan Swift. So does Virginia Woolf, which I think would have pissed her off.

But Frances Hodgson Burnett writes like a girl, which I think she was trying for.

Dickens? Boy.

Lewis Carroll? Girl. (He'd have liked that.)

James Joyce writes like a girl for the 2nd chapter of Portrait of the Artist, at least (not the first -- I figured the moo-cow might mess things up), but for Ulysses he writes like a boy. I used the Buck Mulligan beginning.

My favorite of all: Oscar Wilde writes like a boy. You go, Oscar!

I'm going to stop now. I'm not sure what the Gender Genie tells us, but I figure it's Not Much.

Gender Genie

My success in life explained:

I write like a boy!

Yes!

I thought this was hilarious -- and wouldn't have guessed, myself.

Try it out -- you can specify your text as fiction, non-fiction, or blog entry.

I myself write my blog like a boy, I write research papers like a boy, hell I tried my poetry, and it was apparently Very Male.

What a hoot.

If any of this is true -- in case you haven't figured out from various clues sprinkled through the blog I am not actually male -- I figure I got this way from reading all those boys.

I'm going to have to demand that I be allowed to teach WAY more women's lit courses, cause clearly I am damaging my True Inner Self.

Please let me know the results, if you try this out. Just conducting my own little survey.

Addie Turbos! Replaceable!

Having finally broken down and installed a comment function (I blame this mostly on Sarah, but actually other people had complained, too -- oh, so genteelly, doncha know; nobody yelled at me or anything -- but she was the last in a line), I've been rewarded by a comment -- justly, from Sarah herself -- telling me something I did NOT know, which is that if indeed I mess up the Addi Turbos, I can turn them in to my local yarn shop and get new ones.

This is good news and bad news; good news cause it means that I never have to worry about my Addis; bad in that it means one less project for me to inflict on Carl Andy, and I really enjoy thinking up projects for Carl Andy.

Darn.

I'm tempted to send him some bent up needles anyway, just to see what happens, but if he's reading the blog, I guess he'll know I'm wasting his time. Which he doesn't have a lot of, on account of all those projects. (Check out his eBay sales.)

And on another front; despite being nearly blind with envy on account of Amber's museum quality hand printing press, which even if I had one of I couldn't fit it anywhere in the house, not that that helps with the envy or anything, I will continue to discuss her Knitting Tarot:

Princess of Gauge: The person you knit for who thinks about the knitting, and really notices it. A future knitter. You find yourself thinking about gifts, too, creating them because they showcase different techniques, creating them because they'll cause your recipient to desire the craft. Knitting seduction. But associated with mind, with technique, not with the sensuality of knitting.

When this person finally does pick up the needles, it's enchanting -- my favorite kind of student. This one sees how the stitches lie on the needle, notices how the fabric is constructed, and then asks, why don't we just knit backwards instead of turning the work around?

Carl Andy Explains How to Fix Needles

My brother Carl Andy, having read my earlier post concerning some bent knitting needles, sent me this email:

Hey Sis,

If you bend up some really expensive needles, you might take them by the machine shop and ask them to straighten them for you. The process is to first bend them in one direction to make them uniformly bent (like into a circle), and then bend them in the reverse direction.

This can be done to give pretty much perfect results. But if your bends go in two axes, they will have to rebend them twice (i.e. a total of four passes). The machine they use for this might be a wire bender.

It's nice, having such helpful relatives. As I've mentioned, I'm throwing the Susan Bates right out -- I'm NOT taking them down to the machine shop. Even if I knew where the machine shop is. Which I don't.

Here's what I wonder: how much does this cost? Exactly how do I know if the needle is bent in two axes? Once they get bent and rebent a total of four times, don't they break? Doesn't this whole process affect their slippery quality?

I'm tempted, actually, to ruin some more needles, just so I can try all this out. But then I'd have to go find the machine shop. Or should I just send my needles out to Seattle, and get Carl Andy to take them down to the machine shop? Or maybe he can do it himself. He fixed one of my winding watches once, after I made it stop on account of running too much magnetism (this is hereditary, and Not My Fault.) And also, he's making me some cool glass buttons for my Mendocino cardigan. I think he can probably fix needles himself. I think I'm agoin' (see earlier post for grammar discussion) to SEND him some bent up needles, so I can see what happens. Especially ones that are bent in two axes. If, as I say, I ever figure out what that is.

More fun with Carl Andy is available here: don't be intimidated! Even if you have NO IDEA what the hell that revolving thing is (the interactive crystal drawing program), click on some of the buttons; it'll change in ways which aren't obscure to Carl Andy, but are to me. And which, hey! you might understand.

And here: here's Carl Andy writing a paper which, he tells me, "is more readable than physics usually is." (I like best the section entitled "Some Difficulties in Understanding Reality." Yep. Got some of that around here.)

**************

Ok, other stuff; I'm falling behind on the Knitting Tarot commentary


The Princess of Skeins: Darlin' girl, for sure. Loves everything you knit for her. Even wears it. Cause she LOVES you, and therefore, de facto, without question, loves your knitting.

This gets problematic, I find. Cause you know, if you're not careful, you can end up foisting off your Dreadful Things on her, or not putting as much energy into working on things, cause you know she'll like them anyway.

So she's a call from the higher self. Just cause you're loved doesn't mean you can slough off.

Point of honor.

Vintage Directions: The Author's Dead.

As I have mentioned before, and as is evidenced by that vintage cardigan I'm slogging through, I just LOVE vintage skirt-and-sweater sets. They're just so darn cute.

However. They're not without their little problems.

The main one being that the people who put them together are dead, and the companies that they worked for are defunct, and there's no recourse for glitches.

Mostly I worry about the obvious -- will there be enough yarn? -- cause if there's not, there's no buying some more, even in the wrong dye lot. It's just not in existence on the planet, anywhere where it could possibly be located.

Well, I'm ok with the yarn on the cardi -- will certainly have enough. The "Country Life" company was generous in this kit, I'm happy to tell you; I'm done with the major pieces, and working on the front bands, and I've got a couple of skeins left. I'm fine.

What got me about this kit was hidden in the directions.

Here are the directions for shaping the armhole on the back:

Cast off 5 sts. at beg. of next 2 rows.
*Next row: K.2, k.2 tog., t.b.l., k. to last 4 sts., k.2 tog., k.2.
Next row: P.2, p.2 tog., p. to last 4 sts., p.2.tog. t.b.l., p.2.*
Rep. from * to * until 100 sts. remain.
**Next row: K.2, k.2 tog. t.b.l., k. to last 4 sts., k.2 tog., k. 2.
Next row: P.**
Rep from ** to ** until 38 sts. remain.
Cast off.

Ok, fine. Nice and clear. Great. Now, here are the instructions for shaping the armhole on the right front, which I got to whilst sitting in an airport waiting for a flight to Tulsa, and which I found a little disturbing, having already finished the back, according to the directions above:

Cast off 5 sts. at beg. of next row.
*Next row: Patt. 17, k. to last 4 sts., k.2 tog., k.2.
Next row: P. *
Rep. from * to * until 24 sts. remain.

Yes. Right. Well, if I do that, then the armholes aren't going to match, are they? Cause I worked the back first, as I usually do, not just cause the patterns are set up that way, but because I like it, and so I did, and I didn't read ahead, did I? Cause it's not like COOKING, where I might all of a sudden discover I need CAPERS! It's not like I'm going to be knitting along on some sweater for which I've got the yarn and the pattern all put together by somebody in Galashiels, Scotland, who, theoretically, READ the damn instructions at some point, or, hey, even got somebody to WORK them, and so theoretically would have discovered at SOME point, theoretically BEFORE the instructions got printed out, that the back raglan was decreasing on EVERY row for a little while (and I should admit here that I did sorta wonder about that at the time I was knitting it), but neither the front nor the sleeves did, DID THEY! And so they're not going to FIT!

And, as I mentioned earlier, all those people in Galashiels, Scotland, who originally put this thing together, are Not Available to Feel the Force of my Ire.

Luckily for me, they gave me way too much yarn. I intend to use a bunch of it after a little bout with Frogging.

Here's the worst part: is this going to teach me to read the directions all the way through, first, carefully checking to make sure everything makes sense?

Nope. I've met me. I have full and great confidence that I will learn NOTHING from this.

Broken Needles and the Princess

We had a visiting professor talking to us yesterday, so I took along my leper bandage to work on while I was listening -- and discovered, when I pulled the project out of my bag, that the needles were all bent out of shape.

I do NOT remember anything happening to that bag that would cause the needles to get all bent out of shape. Clearly, they had had a rough time of it, but I don't know when it was. I managed to straighten them out some, but I don't like them. As soon as I finish up this last leper bandage, I'm throwing them out.

No big loss, though -- they're just some Susan Bates that I picked up when I bought the Knit-Cro-Sheen for the leper bandages, cause all my #2 needles were involved in other projects. If they had been the beloved Addi Turbos, super slick needles for people who knit like bats out of hell, the Lamborghini needles of the knitting world, THEN I would have been perturbed. But hey, so what. They're cheap, they're mediocre, and apparently I sat on them when I wasn't looking, and they're outa here.

As I mentioned earlier, Amber and Megan have, in presenting the first batch of court cards, revealed the suits for the Knitting Tarot. But I couldn't write about this for a while cause I had to think it through. To my great glee -- my very great glee -- I successfully figured out their connections to the usual suits. I know I did cause I emailed Amber and she said so. They are: needles = fire (wands); skeins = water (cups); spindles = earth (pentacles); gauge = air (swords).

Armed with that info, I'll say, about the Princess of Needles:

All that passion! All that verve! A good person for whom to make the Scribble Lace shawl out of Debbie New's Unexpected Knitting, or pretty much anything made out of anything created by Colinette. You can't wear all that stuff yourself -- there's way too much around, and not enough days in the year. Great to have somebody to give it to. Also. I've noticed that this is especially true about sequins -- I've got a lot of sequined stuff around here, and I don't actually get to wear it much, on account of, oh, I don't know. What happened? Where are all those people I used to hang out with who regularly gave parties to which I could, with aplomb, wear sequins? Where am I? What year is this?

Oh, sorry, got a little off track there. Back now.

Reversed? Oh, hon, hold off on that Xmas present. What that girl really wants is a plain blue V-necked sweater. With, maybe, just maybe, if you didn't go overboard in picking out the shade of blue, a cable up the front.

A simple cable up the front.

Not, you know, those big ol' Celtic things that are going to cause complete strangers to stop her on the street and ask if she's wearing a Starmore.

Catholic Mom

Mention of knitting; not quite knitting content, but it's all I got at the moment: Amber and Megan have the first few court cards up for the knitting tarot, and I'm going to write about them, but I can't yet, cause I'm thinking them through. But they're there, and now we know the suits: needles, skeins, gauge, and spindles.

*******************************

The child's off on the bus now, all set for a field trip to the circus.

We knew about the field trip; we'd sent in the permission slip and the money. But still, we weren't quite prepared.

This happens to us a lot. There's some sort of agreed-upon reality that all the rest of the parents live in that we can't quite get into. It's an alternate reality, and occasionally we can see a little window into it, and a high proportion of the messages we get from the school come out of it, but we haven't found the door yet.

The part about wearing his uniform -- well that's sort of weird, but we could live with that. It's easier, in fact, than the Special Non-Uniform days which show up on the school calendar, and which we're never prepared for, and always involve wearing some special kind of clothing we don't own -- funny socks, or interesting hats, or team sweatshirts. I'm a little disturbed by the idea of all those Catholic school children sitting at the circus with their uniforms on (Why uniforms? Respect for the clowns? Keeping the kids separate from any neighboring public school children? Marking them out as special in case the elephants go mad and decide to smash somebody -- here! come get the Catholics! -- And if uniforms for the circus are in order, why not the ties, too? Let's go all the way here!) -- but I can deal with the uniform.

However, they didn't bother to tell us till last night, in a note sent home with the child, that he needed a brown bag lunch, with a drink in a disposable container.

Well.

We don't have any proper brown bags, though Sam found something like. And we don't have any drinks in disposable containers, cause we don't buy juice-in-a-bag, or canned soda, or anything like that. We did have some water in plastic bottles, though -- sent that. Sam made a cheese sandwich. Found an apple. Oh, yes, and there were some candy bars he got on Halloween. Great. That'll do.

But darn it all, if you want us to make bag lunches, ya gotta tell us, cause we don't stock up on supplies otherwise.

This sort of thing happens all the time to us. We're clueless. We feed the child oddly, we dress the child oddly, we read him bizarre books, we don't understand what kinds of presents we should buy for all those birthday parties which involve going to the bowling alley and which we don't give in return.

I have learned to keep brownie mix on hand, since occasionally I get little notes telling me that I'm supposed to bake NOW for bingo the next day. Great. Got that covered. (Though there's a whole nother conundrum. What the hell is Bingo about? Why do people go to Bingo? Why am I baking brownies for Bingo? The other altos in the choir told me that I should come to Bingo with them and they could teach me. I don't think so. I think it's probably like shopping -- one of those things that All The Other Ladies Get and I'll never understand. I told the child we just had to live with this. "I understand the Doctrine of Transubstantiation," I told him. "I don't HAVE to understand Bingo.")

I was responsible for snacks once, and showed up with grapes. "Oh, LOOK," some other woman said in one of those high, poisonously sweet voices. "She's brought GRAPES! That's so nice. The children aren't going to eat those, you know."

Apparently, the Proper Snacks are Oreos and Cheetos. Grapes are right out. Well, where the hell is the damn manual explaining this to me? I missed it. How does this knowledge get disseminated? Is there some Catholic Moms newsletter I'm missing out on?

I'm just sorry we didn't know about the Annual At-Home Dads' Convention in time to sign Sam up and get some tickets, cause he'd maybe pick up some pointers. And a manual.

The kids ate the grapes, by the way.

Remember, Remember

Remember, remember the fifth of November,
Gunpowder treason and plot.
We see no reason
Why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.


It's Guy Fawkes' Day today -- we never miss this. We're not having a bonfire in the backyard, though -- I'm pretty sure they're illegal in Pleasant Hills, and even if they weren't, I'm pretty sure we'd set something important on fire by mistake -- there's not a lot of room back there.

And this year, to our grief, we're not having Toad-in-the-Hole. This is a sad and pitiful thing, cause we all love Toad-in-the-Hole, and I am the Toad-in-the-Hole Queen of America, as long as Delia Smith's not visiting, in which case I am demoted to Toad-in-the-Hole Princess.

But we're not having it, cause we ate up all our British sausages, and nothing else will do. Nothing. Many sausages throughout the world are edible and even excellent, but for Toad-in-the-Hole one needs British sausages. Preferably those sage-and-onion ones.

We used to have some in the freezer -- we had a deal with a friend who's an English ex-pat, and we went halves on a box of frozen British-style sausages from North Carolina. Oh, they were good. They were very, very good. But they were extraordinarily, embarrassingly, expensive. Ours lasted about a year, I think -- we rationed them out for English holidays. Our friend ate his up in about a week. We're considering going in on another box. But what I'd really like is to find some British-style sausages in Pittsburgh, cause it was the shipping that killed us on that box we ordered. The sausages were wrapped up in bubble wrap, and loaded into a styrofoam container along with a bunch of dry ice, and shipped overnight, or by instant messaging, or something, and, well, it was expensive.

But those were some GOOD sausages.

Today, though, no sausages. So we decided to have as near to fish-and-chips as we can get. Not those lovely big planks of hot, crisp fried fish and fat and crispy french fries, all fried to a turn and wrapped up in a newspaper cone, nope, alas. We're using some frozen fish Sam found on sale one week, and a bag of Ore-Ida french fries. Then we said, oh, what the hell, and bought a can of Le Sueur peas.

Don't tell Delia, will ya?

Look Closer. Ah, C'mon....

It has come to my attention that some of you, God help you, actually read this blog for the knitting content.

Well bless your little hearts! That is SO SWEET!

I tell you what; let's just HAVE some damn knitting content, why don't we:



There! The current state of the vintage cardi, on the home stretch.

Just glorious, isn't it, the way that the pieces roll right up -- combination of the stockinette stitch, which would roll up under pretty much any circumstances before blocking, and the raglan design, which adds to the whole rolling-up scenario.

Well, here: this would be the front:



And here's the sleeve, where you can see the cable that decorates each side of the front, here running up the length of the raglan:



Oh, come on. You can, too see that. Ok, here, I'll help: here's a close-up of the front cables:



Well. I can see that this is getting nowhere. Maybe when the thing's done we'll take it out in the yard and see if we can get some light on it. The vintage hunter green Shetland wool seems to be eating up all light that approaches it, like a little black hole of sweaterdom. I worry sometimes that when I'm wearing it people are going to be getting REALLY CLOSE so they can see the cable decoration. Cause that's pretty much when you can see it. I know it's there. The rest of you are just going to have to use your imaginations.

This is why, oh dear souls, you haven't been getting any knitting pictures recently -- it was this or the leper bandages, which are wonderful useful things, and sort of good-looking in a pedestrian sort of way, but would cause you to fall asleep at your monitor.

So just hang on -- let me get this cardigan out of the way, and then I'll give you some more pictures of "Margaret Tudor."

All Souls' Day; Día de los Muertos

In case you're confused, yesterday was All Saints' Day; today is All Souls' Day.

Here's the scoop: All the dead people in heaven are saints. Naturally, there are whole lots of them, and we don't know all their names. If, through whatever process at whichever point in time, the Church decides that it knows of one of them, that person is canonized -- the person will have been a saint already; canonization just means they're recognized on earth for it. All through the year, there are saints' days, when we commemorate various dead people we believe to be in heaven. But all the dead in heaven don't have saints' days, on account of not being all recognized. So All Saints' Day is the day we celebrate ALL the saints, whether or not we know who they are.

This would include, presumably, some of our relatives. And also persons such as Flannery O'Connor, as far as I'm concerned. If we could just get enough of us to pray to St. Flannery, as I think of her, and get some miracles documented, we could get her canonized. That's one of my little projects. (I figure she can be the patron saint of sufferers from lupus, of course, since that's what she died of, and auto-immune diseases in general, and also writers' block, though I don't expect any documented miracles out of that last. Though I personally expect to get the most use out of it.)

So. That takes care of All Saints'. All Souls', on the other hand, is for all the dead who are not in hell (sorry -- they're beyond hope, I'm told), but aren't in heaven, either -- the ones who are sort of in the vestibule, getting the mud off their galoshes. So we pray for them, that they should get cleaned up soon and allowed into the feast.

I never did getting around to making sugar skulls this year, alas. But we are eating beans and rice tonight. Crucial to eat beans and rice. I'm cooking mine up with the last of the pesto I made this year.

Years ago I lived in a collective household in San Francisco (Avalon, oh, Avalon), where we called this the beginning of the Butter Festival. The Butter Festival lasts till about the 3rd of January, when one is finally so sick of eating rich foods that one starts eating fruits and vegetables and working out. But I am old with wandering through hollow lands and hilly lands, and now it's the start of the Reduced-Fat Margarine Festival, and the fruits and vegetables and working out lasts all year. And we didn't get a lot of desserts this weekend. And what's more, it doesn't actually make one's time in the vestibule shorter.

I gather that I'm missing the Butter Festival dreadfully. Better go bake something, before I get out of hand.

****************************

My dad, by the way, is all perturbed cause I pronounce "all y'all" incorrectly, and it should be pronounced "allay'all," as, he says, in the conjugation "I'm agoin', you're agoin', she's agoin'." Fine, fine, fine. I recognize him as the expert in these matters, but I'd just like to point out that if he wanted me to grow up and talk right, he shouldn't have dragged me out of the ancient homeland of our gun-toting ancestors.

No Time for Proust

Finished up War and Peace, thereby proving that it can be done. Sam said, "We should celebrate!" so we are -- we're having borscht tonight. We love borscht. We are glad to have an occasion to eat it. I've got pumpernickle bread in the bread machine, to go with it -- not, I suppose, Russian, but close enough.

Now! Back to the giant pile of books by my bed! They kept piling up all the time I was reading The Tome -- I kept buying them, and Tolstoy was clogging the drain, as it were, so there wasn't that sort of flowing rhythm I've come to expect from the books in my life.

This means, sorry to say to the person -- you know who you are -- who's been trying to talk me into reading Proust -- that I'm not going to do it this minute. Maybe later. But at some point I bought about three volumes of Edith Stein's works, and several current novels, and I got behind on Granta, and whatnot, and if this gets any worse, I'll have to crawl into bed from the foot of it, cause I won't be able to climb over the pile of books at the side.

(I don't know for sure who came by the page from an Albuquerque-registered site at about 5:00 AM Albuquerque time, but I've got a pretty good idea. Hi, Daddy! Found me again, did ya?)

Guardians of Obscure Bits of Cultural History

Another successful Halloween gone by. The child was quite pleased with his costume, and happy as well with the reception he got up and down the street, which was complete bemusement.

Sam and I expected the bemusement, though it turned out to be worse than we foresaw. We figured that people would recognize Medusa, but be unclear about Perseus. But even Medusa went right by them. "Oh, you're carrying your head around!" the neighbors said to the child, who was dressed in Classical armor (Roman; I couldn't find Greek and didn't feel like making it), and carrying around a head covered with snakes. (Hint for those of you who'd like to try this next year: the hot glue will stick very well to the wig, but the rubber snakes are going to fall right off. You're going to have to pin them into the styrofoam.)

But the child wasn't disappointed by this at all. He spent the evening explaining, "No, I'm Perseus carrying the head of Medusa," and apparently was as pleased by the opportunity to Explain Obscure Points of Cultural History as he was by the opportunity to Fill Up the Candy Bowl. Can't imagine how he comes by this.

He dragged his giant illustrated book of Myths of the World into bed with us this morning, cheerfully planning next Halloween. "I think I'll be Thor next year," he told us. "Or better yet, Loki!" Great. He can spend all next Halloween explaining "I'm the Norse trickster god!" to the neighbors, who at some point are going to get tired of this. Yeah, yeah, whatever. Have some Skittles.

Sam and I had our moment, though. We Impressed Some Teenagers.

A group came by and stood around looking at Sam's annual elaborate jack o'lantern before they knocked on the door. "Did you carve this yourself?" they asked. "My husband did," I said. "It took two days." (This was not really a lie, or even an exaggeration -- he really did take two days over it. But to be Completely Honest, he could have done it in one. He just didn't.) "Well, this is really great!" they told me. Thank you. Then, I commented on the costumes they'd put together, especially the long black thing one of the girls was wearing. "I'm a VAMP-yre," she told me. "Yep, I got that," I said. "Nicely done." They looked at me suspiciously. "Did you get that?" they asked. "Really? VAMP-yre?" "Yeah, I'm clear on puns," I said, "and the fishnet-stockings are a give-away." "Nobody else got it!" they said. "All up and down the street. They looked at us like we were nuts!"

Well, it was a very nice VAMP-yre costume, and I'm glad that the Guardians of Obscure Bits of Cultural History could help out there. Watch out for Perseus.