Getting out of New York, Dec 27 or 28 and 29th.

So New York:

And a Flickr gallery
Well, Ellie and I went to Battery Park, where she said to the unresponding crowd that whatever they were waiting in line for, it COULDN'T be worth it (the ferry). We had done lines the day before.

So we went to the New York branch of the Museum of the American Indian. It is set in the old Customs house, from an architecture of a triumphalist, solid, beautiful bygone day. We visited an exhibit on the Indians of the Northwest Pacific Coast. We enjoyed it (even though it was not Roman and was, I suppose, modern. But not modern rubbish one bit). It displayed beautiful, useful, and interesting objects softly lit, very well labelled, not crowded, and FREE: it was very good. As was the gift shop, where I only bought three books, a t-shirt, and a mola for Doug.

Before we had much trouble with the feet as bleeding stumps, and because I wanted to encourage my polite but not necessarily a wild fan companion to continue being so courteous as to not sulk and to ask interesting, solidly ethnological questions --basically, because she wasn't bored yet and I figure she'll let me come back if we ever do this again-- we left for lunch at the Cozy Burger and Doughnut

, where we had egg salad and chocolate milkshakes (I had mine malted). After that we did not need to eat again the whole day. We went in search of Kate's Paperie, which is near the hotel, apparently, not where it was on our map; of a shop rhapsodized by the NYT, which we did find, and it was okay; of an additional bag, which I did not get the most practical one ever. We had ended up with the Daughter not carrying a purse or backpack, which would have been fine except that I ended up with her wallet and her water-bottle and the guidebook and the subway and bus maps, as well as the camera, my wallet, my knitting, and my water-bottle, some emergency food, the kleenex, the sudafed, the pocketknife, just a few things to make life more civilized... anyway,it was heavy and I wanted to split it up. The bag is a lovely red linen with one pouch (not enough) and no structure and the strap was so long the bag hit Ellie in the back of the knee. It is, however, very beautiful and one can carry a lot in it. We managed a more equal distribution of luggage.
I bought it from a very nice man who spoke perfect English. He was from Tibet but lived in Nepal. Some people have less luck with governments than we do.

While searching fruitlessly for Kate's, largely because we were around there, so we thought, we came across Pearl River, the place where everyone in New York can buy their Chinoiserie (and a certain amount of Japonaiserie). It was huge, two stories with a loft, and full of things in bright colors: clothing, slippers, wall scrolls, Chinese New Year's decorations, and everything you need for a fairly nice Chinese restaurant. It made me happy. I wanted to wander. The daughter followed me silently, keeping me from buying things I didn't need like a visible superego. I had assumed the daughter was being polite, when she announced that she liked this store and the tea sets were remarkably inexpensive... It wouldn't have been the suspicion of anyone I know that it would be she, not I who came out of New York with a teaset, yet there it was. They wrapped it securely in ethnic newspaper and it survived all the way here (and I hope will make it back to Northampton).

We staggered back to the hotel and went to bed.

The next day was our last in New York. So we had to check out by eleven, and I had thought we should leave not before five pm. So we had the damned luggage. So we thought to return to the Met and check it. Wrong. The Met doesn't check suitcases, unlike the Museum of Natural History (where they are used to elephants packing their trunks, perhaps...). It was chilly but a sunny morning. After some discussion I established a secure beachhead with the luggage and my knitting and my Sansa not-an-iPod and NPR, and sent Ellie inside, where she found another whole room of Roman. She came outside to make sure how I was doing and we ate the lunch we had prudently bought at a deli on the way. I pointed out that if I were at home I would very likely have been knitting and listening to NPR, and it was nice there. She want back inside. Those socks got a lot done. Eventually she came out again, and gave me a chance to go look at the line to the bathroom, and also some very nice Egyptian paintings, and we were both happy. We headed to Penn Station, a little late to be as early as Ellie would have liked, but the train was an hour late getting in and by then we had had enough of being there early. It did not hurt, however, as the train was fully booked and we were able to get seats together.


I had a wonderful time. I liked travelling on the bus, where you could see everything, like the Chrysler Building and the New York Times Building and as much as I wanted of Ground Zero, and the names of all the places in songs (Seventh Avenue, Broadway, Herald Square, Uptown (with Billy Joel's Girl), Downtown (with Petula Clark), 42nd Street, and on and on). I liked travelling on the subway, which was fast and mixed modern mosaics with the original station decoration. There is food everywhere.
I would like to go back to everywhere I went. Only in better shoes, and not the week after Christmas. Conspicuous absence of fiber shops on this tour (daughter and I trying successfully not to test one another to destruction). I gather there are several other places I might enjoy going, as well.

An important critic raises a question, Coriolis problems

My father points out that I haven't blogged in a while. This is indeed the case. Now, while he is important to me in a narrow biological and a much wider social emotional way, he has a certain objective importance. In despair at the kind of handbasket we are all riding in, and because there is less and less review of books in the print media (and somehow Oprah never covers scholarly works), he has started The Internet Review of Books, q. you should v. And if you have expertise in anything and would like to review books, you might drop him a line. He has been enjoying (in the sense of surfing a small, not terribly destructive tidal wave) making the contacts to get the books and to review the books and editing the reviews and Getting It Out On Time. I think one of his first real jobs was as a reporter for the Dallas Times-Herald of blessed memory, so it is kind of cool for him to be getting it and writing it and putting a headline on it (albeit in a wholly other medium. Or not -- it's still written words) like he was maybe 60 years ago.

I am coughing much less. I have not needed to kill my boss at all lately; it is very pleasant feeling we are on the same side. The number of snow days has not been a bad thing, either. I had the Miraculous Conjunction of Taking Minutes for Two Board Meetings in One Day again last week. I realized that if I hadn't been taking minutes I would have been completely unable to pay any attention to the proceedings whatever (for I am a weak mortal damaged by original sin, or maybe just an uncaring dilettante with a taste for cafe life instead. Or both.)

I am having a weird desire (not unaffected by meeting a OneLaptopPerChild laptop) to learn Linux. Mostly I have hate and fear and love Microsoft; I am getting good at Word and although I want to leave him, I still think maybe if I love him enough he will quite acting like a vicious, kludgy monopoly....

I have finished a pair of adult-size Coriolis socks. I think the pattern might work better if you were using fewer than five stitches per inch, as the sexy band might not interact with the heel the way it did in my socks and the way it didn't in Sarah's.I was going to write about the almost unruffled calm joy I was getting from making them (though this was also due to the lovely soft green Jager Sock yarn, over to whose proprietors I may have to deed my house next festival. Then I had a Little Problem with the second heel. Like six times? I don't blame the pattern, although you can get really tired of flipping pages (Go to heels, p. 120. Do Step Four. But if you're doing the reinforced heel, go to p 124. Where it says, "Step Four (same as in Plain heel.")). While you are doing this, don't skip a step. It shows.
Sarah, however, reports, that her Coriolis socks, despite their beauty and perfectly distributed band, twist on her feet like tube socks and don't act like they have a heel. I haven't worn mine yet.

Now I am making a hat for me mum. I also had an epochal experience on the sewing machine -- I didn't want to throw it out the window even once!!! This is a first. It does not hurt that I had found the manual for the machine, that I was well rested (this was last Monday's snow day), and that I had good stuff (I had the brainwave of asking Sarah if she had a cloth-scrap stash. She does. It contains stash she stole in her infancy from her mother's stash, and scraps from her grandmother's, so although it is confined demurely to one plastic bin, there was a lot of stuff. Some of it's mine now, NOM NOM NOM. Now I have a start on a decorated shirt and two tea cozies (and I also cut out the lining for a felted wool vest (June 5, 2005, you don't want to hurry these things)). I promised to make an embroidered tea cosy for Alice, for whose mother I made one in 1997. I have also just bought a book on Beaded Embellishment, because although I don't have enough books I do have almost enough beads, and Sarah is having The Joy Of Almost-Instant Gratification making beaded stitch markers. It is fairly obvious from this post alone that Effectively Blogless Sarah and I are co-enablers of the worst kind.

It was delightful to have scraps and feel all Craft-Magazine and cheap and not have to buy stuff to do all this (though I did buy the yard of batik I used for lining last fall because it was beautiful, and I was right; there was a use for it eventually). Now all I have to do is sew the patches onto Doug's shirt, sew the lining into the vest (I bought seam binding and the right color thread. Isn't that the same as doing the actual work?), and embellish the tea cozies. And get the pins out of one of them, it keeps biting.

Dec 27, and I mean it.

So we went to the Met. Even through Ellie's fog, she managed to have a good time, and I was very very pleased to see things of the Ancient World again. There is no doubt that the OBD is the Top Classicist in the house, knowing more Latin and probably more Greek than I did in my prime, but my blood still stirs. There are the wall paintings form Boscoreale , there are gold coins, there are carved gem seals, there are exquisite painted vases





This is the vase featured in Elizabeth Wayland Barber's _Women's Work, the First 20,000 Years_, to which some of you may have heard me refer once or twice. It's less than 10" tall.

there are bronzes


there is the Etruscan chariot I had never ever heard of and it's really good (my pictures are all details, not very useful.

You can see the ivory tusks in the boar's head. This was a classy vehicle.



We eventually ate in the basement cafeteria, which my aunt had warned us against for reasons of her own. It was crowded, but at least there was room to sit and the entrees were under $17. There were small children there, including two brothers of five and three, whose mother had brought them (really just the older one, but the smaller one was part of the package and she had managed to hand off the 16-month old to her mom at home)to an educational undertaking about mummies (get it?), actually ancient Egypt. I have no idea what the kid got out of the presentation, but he and his brother _loved_ the yellow cardboard taxis the French fries were served in. They want to crash them into one another (which I thought was natural NY taxi behavior) but she wouldn't let them. So the eldest made his into a rocket and counted it down and blasted it off. It was pretty good for luncheon theater.

I did go to the gift shop, but there was nothing I could afford/carry that I wanted.

We did not last anywhere near closing time. We folded, and went to stand in line for cheap tickets at TKTS. I am told we were there, on already scandalized feet, for two and half hours. Fortunately I had a couple of socks to knit. Ellie got tea and cash (they do not take credit cards). We had hoped to see a musical, but ended up with Kevin Kline (and Jennifer Garner and the evil prince Humperdinck, or at least the same actor playing much the same role) in Cyrano do Bergerac. The play was translated from the French by Anthony Burgess (Clockwork Orange et al)into mostly blank verse, and the actors did it well. The first three scenes were funny and the last was just so sad, I wanted to swat Cyrano up the head. Kevin Kline is delightful even with nose.

Between waiting for tickets and going to the show we ate cheap, tasty Mexican. Times Square was just as crowded (very, very, very) at 11:30 pm as it was at 5 p.m., which was sort of interesting. City that never sleeps is right.

Saturday and Sunday and I think Thursday

I am indeed partial to mice, particularly ones who live where they should (outside), although the one who lived in my fridge eating tortillas was very dear (he grew a long, shaggy coat...tusks for scraping through the frost....).

I started this on Saturday Jan 5 and now it's the 6th. So glad I did not have to go to work to sit in front of a computer and find it hard to remember what I am doing (blogging is easier; if I forget what I'm doing I can always look at yarn or something till I remember). I haven't slept very well lately either, so it's quite surreal.

Anyway. I still have the cold that foundered Atlantis (it now comes with a cough that rocks Knossos) and have spent Saturday sleeping late, redoing the second Little Coriolis sock so it works, and taking a nap.

Hey, does it mean I have FOUR finished objects for 2008 so far? Two Little Sky socks and two Little Coriolis, one in each direction? I can tell you that the directions are good. I can imagine that someday I would know what I am doing. But right now I am just mouth-breathing through Cat Bordhi's belief that her Left-Leaning Increase is not of itself increase+do the rest of the stitch. You do the increase, and she says K2, and she means K the 'daughter' stitch whose hopes have got up since you were increasing its 'mother',which you were certainly going to anyway, and then another stitch. It is possible that everyone calls the increase and the next K 2 stitches rather than one action, but it has been awhile since I tried to do anything much with directions. Anyway, not much in the way of intellect; it is good she has very solid directions. I have to remember to eat and drink all my own. Even in this state I am tired of the color of yarn I am using. It looked lovely in the skein and ...eh in the ball or the FO. Now that I have finished the two pairs of baby socks (anyone know any babies?) I am thinking of essaying a grown-up Coriolis Sock. I even decided I would use the Icelandic I think Too Much Wool made me buy at the MA Sheep&wool in 'o6, although now I am looking at this ball of sock yarn...Anyway, Saturday's big exertion was untangling several different up-market yarns with or without attached, vestigial UFO's, which took a while and must have involved cats at some point to get to that point...and another pair of nearly finished fingerless gloves, apparently made by a fingerless glove maniac with ADD who was here last year.

For complicated reasons having to do with NPR I am reading the very funny blog of a British/Egyptian woman,.

Right then. I think we were up to Dec. 27. We went to The Met. By this time Ellie had decided she would master the subways, which are much faster as well as much cheaper than the taxi. There is less scenic to enjoy, however. We had much less luggage and we were mentally prepared for the huge numbers of people, and to tell the truth, the heaving throngs weren't so bad once we left the outer portals of the ancient world. Ellie had a cold and was somewhat vague, but she managed, after a very pleasant half-hour, to suggest that we go look at Roman antiquities while she still had some brain cells, before her feet started to hurt. I am told it is a new wing. It was splendid.

I still haven't said anything about Dec. 27 and now it's Monday. I was just short of useless at work today. I have now spent the available time tonight trying to learn how the cool people use Flickr to illustrate their blogs, and it looks like you have to upload all the pictures and then write the blog around them. I don't think I can think that far ahead. So I will continue to use Photobucket and also have a Flickr gallery. Or something. But now I have to post this and go to bed. I have up to the heel of a Laura-sized Coriolis Sock and a chunk of instep of the second one on the needles (unless thye have fallen off)made out of the allegedly khaki Jager Farms yarn, and I have to vote tomorrow.

The OBD is immersed in Trying to Decide and though I advise her not to worry too much she is doing research and can't find any one candidate whose views she entirely agrees with. Was I raised more pragmatic? Yes. Am I also old and jaded? Definitely. I realized that my mother was only 33 in 1968, which of course from 51 looks like the bloom of youthful early maturity. No wonder she worries about people getting shot. I worry too. Trauma, the gift that goes on giving....but I am so grateful that we don't seem, yet, to have tanks in the streets.

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Coughing (Boxing Day)

I was supposed to go back to work yesterday. I knew I felt much too awful, and it was a good call. By the end of the day I felt reasonable. Whether my boss believed me then I am pretty sure he will after he hears me. This cold does not give you a fresh new feeling in the morning, though, and I AM going back to work today (obviously. I need to be there in less than two hours, so I am blogging). I'd prefer to get better without using antibiotics. It would be nice if I had a PCP in this state (my own choice, completely). Also if I knew for sure which antibiotic made me come out in whole-body hives the last time (I think it was erythromycin. Damn sure not taking ampicillin again. Or Bactrim.)

Meanwhile: On the Feast of Stephen, the daughter and I arrived in New York at about 11 AM. There is very good pizza near Penn Station (name and address to be posted later, because I am getting dressed and can't go find the menu). It had a banner proclaiming it to be one of the ten best pizzas in New York, according to "You've heard of Zagat? It's like Zagat, only for pizzerias." This made us wonder what it was like to be a pizza critic for a living. Do you only eat them when you are on the clock? The rest of the time, do you only eat things with a fork and and a nice cloth napkin?

Like everywhere else we ate in New York, the pizzeria was scrupulously clean (I really mean this) and I might as well say from the outset that every single person we spoke to was friendly and helpful and spoke adequate English. I love New York. It is so big.

Our hotel, the Park Savoy, did not want us to check in until 3 pm.


and what holiday is the dinosaur celebrating,anyway? "Five Million Years and Still No Comet"?

We decided to go the American Museum of Natural History, as it was not that far from the hotel as the taxi flies (my mother is deeply into taxis)(everything is far, in New York).
When I lived in greater Boston, I made a thing of never going to a museum during school vacation. Life in rural NH had made me forget this. The AMNH was FULL of people of various heights, mostly behaving quite well. But it was hard to walk. Anywhere. Let alone back and forth through various lines to the check room, and then to the line to the secondary checkroom, which was staffed by nice people whose usual job this was not, being yelled at by unkind patrons. It was also very hot. We managed to check my wheelie, her backpack, our coats, but it was already obvious we were not at the top of our form. Then we waited in the line for the bathroom. I had come down with the Painful Polygons in Stomach disease, which might have been a bug or might have been way too much rich food the two days before. I waited in the line for I believe every Ladies' Room in the AMNH, and they all moved relatively quickly. I felt for my daughter, in a strange city with someone who moaned and occasionally said she thought she might die. I am used more to nauseated stomachs than nauseated with PAIN.

The purpose of the trip was to give Ellie enough time to spend in the Met with someone whom she would not feel her Roman interests imposed upon. We had chosen this museum because it would be acceptable and I could go check out the American Indian cases. These were good purposes but the press of people and the beaten condition of our bodies compelled us to take what we could get relatively easily.

We went to a very fine all about water life, and then to a hall of meteorites, and a very good exhibit of pre-homo sapiens persons. It was very heartening to see how many people there were interested enough to be reading the labels. All of these were good, only our feet hurt and we were toast from Christmas and neither of us does well in crowds. I was in such low shape I did not care to check out the gift shop. I did have the first CocaCola in several years and even without cocaine it's a good stomachic, and I felt less like I was going to die, heave, explode.... but it is a sad thing to be in New York and want to hurl when you see a menu.

We had a cultural divide. She thought the big panoramas of African Veldt or PaleArctic were dull. I had loved them when I was tiny (we lived in New Jersey from the time I was six till I was 13, so I used to go the NYC more often). I thought the Ocean thing was okay but maybe a bit much; she liked the 'something going on where ever you look' aspect. I did like the clouds scudding across the ceiling. And we had one of those milestone mother-daughter talks where she said, "Mom, what's the deal with mangroves?" and I was able to impart to her my knowledge of the red and the black and brackish and to dwell, as we had never had a chance to chat before, on the importance of coastal marshes. It was good.

At last it was late enough to try to spring our possessions and go to the hotel. It was, as we had been warned, small, but it had entirely adequate furniture and a bed and an amazingly clean bathroom--actually, it had a shower. The only time I can recall really wanting a whirlpool bath in a hotel where I was staying for non-amatory reasons, and alas, it was not to be. The hotel is cheap. Only less so the week between Christmas and New Year's.

We slept for three hours.

We went out for food. Even though it was dark, in a Big City, and in fact was doing a nice line in cold driving rain. Angela's Rock Star Delicatessen provided food, a comfortable place to sit, not-loud ambient music. I asked Ellie if she wanted to go clubbing. Oddly, she refused.

I am hoping she will come back to NH tomorrow and I will have access to our photographs.

New Year's Day (Christmas Day)

I am Joe's Kleenex. Or actually, I have borrowed Joe's Kleenex and he won't want it back. But I don't ache all over any more. Doug and I made it to about 11 pm and folded, although, it being New Hampshire, someone not far set off fireworks so I gathered midnight must have taken place locally. It is certainly 2008 today.

Do you know, it SNOWED today! Only about four more inches. Making maybe a foot on the ground. I filled the birdfeeders because we are getting mixed flocks of about 50 Redpolls (as charming a bird as anyone could want)and about forty Evening Grosbeaks( who wear white shoes and belts after Labor Day, but are basically all right). Marten helped me. He waded in snow up to his armpits and did not think much good of it.

Christmas Day went pleasantly, although I failed to set fire to the oven while making Yorkshire pudding and disappointed people for the second or third year running. The plum pudding came out very well; too well, I had two helpings and did not feel right for the next 48 hours. I think we had a good time, our immediate family enlivened by the addition of Doug and Lisa. We did not get a picture of the family all together because Sam was late arriving and Ellie had gone off to be with her boyfriend. Lively was the to-ing and fro-ing with cars, as Doug went back to NH, taking Ellie's and my spoils; Ellie took my car to Woburn. I was Sam's passenger in a car that I think belonged to one of Kimberly's friends (My parents left a bit earlier). I went back to their house to ponder my indigestion and yearn for sleep. Ellie arrived there about 10 pm. The next day my parents took my car back to the ex's for free parking. Ellie and I had not enough sleep, as we arose at 5:00 to catch the 6:10 to Penn Station.

I am folding for the day myself now, so New York will have wait yet another day. I gave Sarah the Cat Bordhi book of which Everyone is Talking. Ellie thoughtfully gave me a copy, so we cast on about the same time. Sarah is diving in with the Coriolis; I have spent today making nearly all of the Little Sky sock. I didn't start till late; it is not impossible. There is an errata page on her website as well as links to her YouTube, which I recommend if you are as slow as I am to figure out the Magic Cast-On of Judy Becker, or for reassurance in the LIttle Sky sock generally. The Cast-on one is quite funny. I am happy to know I am not the only one who makes her needles and stitches talk in little voices.

New Year's Eve (Christmas Eve)

I am not having any angst; I have a head cold, which reduces my brain activity to a tape loop (am I hungry? am I thirsty? can I go back to sleep yet?). I was away from home from about noon on Christmas Eve until yesterday about 6 pm. It was good.

Christmas Eve, I needed to meet Sarah before I went down Boston-ward, as she had left her cell phone here. This was a very good thing, as it got me moving. I made a plum pudding, as I have every year since my father was diagnosed as celiac. I have made some weird ones, particularly the one with a base of grated carrot and potato. Actually, with enough bourbon, sugar, and butter you could probably use shredded newspaper. I have never had one of the ones you make a year in advance, but I usually try to have a bit longer lead time. I looked at the usual recipes and growled. The time I made a recipe that produced about ten pounds of pudding, haunting my fridge until March... No. And nothing with suet.

I realized it was not rocket science; it was indeed, very like a fruit cake, except it was to be steamed, not baked. I took a bowl that was roughly the size I thought the pudding ought to be (I think it was about two and a half quarts), and put raisins, figs (you HAVE to have figs, or the song won't come true), currants, a few dates, some dried apricots, and half a can of chunk pineapple (drained), enough to mostly fill the bowl. I poured bourbon over them, about half a cup, and a little water, and I microwaved it for five minutes to plump the fruit.

I took two cups of gluten free flour (I used 1/2 cornstarch, 3/8 tapioca flour, and 1/8 part fava bean flour), a half- t of salt, 2 t of baking powder, about 2/3 T cinnamon, some grated ginger until I ran out, 2 ground cloves... I had used up all the cardamom already and I forgot all about buying allspice) and ran it in the food processor with the steel blade, adding nearly 2 sticks of butter gradually.

Then I poured the fruit mixture into the dry ingredients, buttered the bowl I wanted to cook the pudding in (one of those medium blue Pyrex jobs), and stirred madly. The baking powder would begin to lose CO2 as soon as the liquid hit it, so the faster I could get it blended I hoped the lighter the result.

I poured it into the blue bowl, covered it with well-crimped tin foil, and set it on a dishtowel into a pressure cooker half-full of water. The dishtowel acted as a trivet, so the rolling bubbles wouldn't knock the bowl over and make noise. With the ends of the towel lapped over the tinfoil I had handles, so that I could gingerly pick the bowl out of the pressure cooker when it was done.

Brought it to a boil, put the lightest weight on the stem, and pressure-cooked it for 20 minutes. I would have preferred longer (30?) but I had to get to Concord to meet Sarah, who called and reminded me to bring her cell phone... And I washed the dishes and packed my bag for 5 days and put the presents in the car, and zoomed off for Concord, returning after a mile or so to pick the pudding up and put in the back of the car.

I reached Boston about four. Both my kids, my daughter's boyfriend, and my ex and I had Christmas Eve at my parents' (with my parents). I spent some time in the bedroom wrapping frantically. We met my son's OTHER girlfriend (he has one his own species, the estimable Kimberly), which I had thought was funny thing to call his iPhone, only apparently Kimberley thought it was his other girlfriend too. I knew it was a meaningful relationship and Lord, what a cute gadget.

My father makes a bean thing involving sausage (except for the vegetarian's portion) and gluten-free bread crumbs. It is delicious, and he has made it enough years now that the smell of cassoulet and salad dressing mean Christmas Eve to me. I ate too much and then we had Marron glacee puree in chocolate shells. I ate too much and then we opened some presents, because my father's father was a newspaperman who had to work on Christmas, and in his house people opened their gifts the night before so he could be with them.

My father had ordered an iPod Nano for my mother from my son, who is an Apple maniac and salesman. Sam had had it engraved for her (ask YOUR Apple retailer...) and the present I had for her was a little speaker from ThinkGeek.com. It is amazingly good for its size (a golf-ball). My mother's requested gift from her grandson was that he teach her how to use it. He was momentarily flustered to hear she had no music on her computer, but recovered from the shock quickly. It was fun watching them figure it all out. We were all pleased with our gifts, although Ellie decided that it would be the better part of valor not to put the Colosseufrom m that her boyfriend gave her together just yet. She did assemble a troop of Roman soldiers, who spent Christmas dinner attacking the roast beast.

Then Ellie and I went to her father's and my son went back to his and Kimberly's digs and my parents tried to get their apartment back together.

And my wishes for all of you to have a happy, interesting, secure, healthy, solvent,amusing New Year.

More tomorrow, when maybe I'll be able to breathe.

Not too bad really

Here are this year's knitting project, according to this blog:

My father's socks (April to Dec)

toe of Trekking socks.

Latvian mitten (in progress, honest) Frog Tree Alpaca

Ellie's sweater (needs fulling) Noro Silver Thaw)

Ellie's Twizzle glittens (nearly done)

Mountain Goat socks for me in honor of Jessica (2 weeks maybe from cast-on to on-foot)

My mother's socks, from May to October, Lorna's Laces

Kimono sweater (in progress, really), multi-multi-color Noro

felted, needlefelted, embroidered tea cozy (roughly November through November)

magenta grayish socks for me, Mountain Goat (really lovely. One is missing).

about five duckies (the most fun ever)

soft baby-colored wristlets for Ellie, and most of a second pair for me, finished and worn and the second set found in debris in living room, Angora Seacoast Hand-dyed.

Cascade vest with Valley yarn stripes, finished, needs armscyes redone

pair of Road to China wristlets for my mom, finished, appreciated

one very large baby bootie (lost interest)

false entrelac alpaca scarf for Doug (Dec.- Jan) Rittrata

The glittens I am making for Ellie? I decided to do the mittenish overbit in twined knitting. Feels wonderful, fun to do, takes forever. Could be worse.

well past Late Advent

Doug has gone to be with New Girlfriend (I really like her, she seems fond of him and of me and my cats and not to be appalled by the fact that my house looks like something you might call DYS about, except there are no children trying to live here. As far as I know). I got Doug a decent Christmas present.

Ellie was here for some days and left this morning to be with her boyfriend's family for awhile. She wrapped many of the presents that I have not bought enough of, even though I am on speaking terms (so far as I know) with everyone in my family, which is not something to take for granted. I have made MUCH fruitcake and yes, you can use masa harina, just use less than 2 cups, as it soaks up too much of the sweetness. Fruitcake with peanut butter is so tasty. I am not sure if I have got her a decent Christmas present.

Lisa is here. She is the DVM/ThD hard-drinking, hard-rockin' friend from div school who comes for Christmas, thank God, and we all like her. (She drinks like an archaeologist, which explains why I looked tired so much of last week). Lisa is selfishly leaving to visit her grandmother. I got her a decent Christmas present.

I will see all of them again in the coming week. Tonight, though, to prevent me from having alcohol-and-humans withdrawal, Sarah is coming over to encourage me to wrap presents or put away laundry. I suspect knitting or spinning will take place instead. I already gave her a decent Christmas present. She also gave me one, a really nice bowl she made in ceramics that enhances any eating experience with which it is involved.

I need to go to Concord and see if I can get my father a decent Christmas present. I really like him, but he is difficult to buy for. He is getting Socks, thank the warm footed-knitting Goddess, as is my mother. My mother, whom I also really like, is easier to buy for and is getting a decent present, but not as exciting as I would like. I also like my aunt, who is not getting much in the way of decent Christmas presents. My son and his girlfriend are getting all right Christmas presents but I don't know if they will like them.

I am very fortunate in having this many people I like and getting to see several of them fairly often.

There are a couple of people in the world whom I would like to give indecent Christmas presents, but their wives would object. Neither they nor I can have everything.

Is it me or has it not snowed this many times before Christmas in about 30 years?

so very fine

Go look at these weavers! Really, not just the textile freaks, all of you: http://www.inhabitat.com/2007/09/13/design-for-the-other-90-portable-light/

Fruitcake weather

Of course, some places it's ALWAYS fruitcake weather. And none the worse for it. I stayed in my warm bed watching it snow a LOT (say 18"?) all day and finishing, God help us, my shopping, except for last minute guilt and ideas and oh yeah, I was going to make some silver things...

Sarah came on Saturday and we did not make fruitcake or decorate the tree.
I did finish my father's socks!!!!! We also took the sweetly non-materialist, Wal-Mart-rejecting Sarah to The Shopping Center ten days or so before Christmas. I had suggested she might find it a Bit Much but she had not thought what I might mean.

We went to Target and bought MORE plastic boxes to organize the loom room (which is getting so I am more familiar with my stash and less ashamed, even if it is an awful lot), and she got a fluffy blanket because the peer pressure was so intense. Only hers is brown. Mine is red. I got it because Heather (none of you know Heather, she is at Beloit and one of the best-loved people in New England archaeology) waxed so poetic about hers I could hardly help myself. Viral blanket memes. Willow says I must take her picture on it soon, perhaps after her belly fur grows back after the spay.

Sarah had a touch of the vapours from the crowds and sheer pressure of plastic and Chinese imports, but we made our escape. I still love Target's lack of Muzak, and they had plenty of cashiers.

Then we went to the supermarket, the beadstore for findings for Doug, the Co-op, and finally the Elegant Ewe, where I bought Sarah and me some Noro sock yarn because it is so exciting that it exists. Only I think it may be splitty. And I had vowed that I would do more more Size One needles knitting. Well, except for what's in my stash. And what I can't resist.

Last week (exactly, on Saturday, when Doug was letting his pack sniff approvingly at his new girlfriend, confusingly named Sarah C) Sarah (D) washed up here without a project and I offered her yarn. She looked at what I was willing to offer her and asked why one EARTH I had chosen this color, or THIS. At first the colors horrified her. Then she decided to make me socks and became quite reconciled to the colors as she realized they matched our drink of choice. She is really fast; here they are (there may be one more, or not):
. They are pleasantly warm and I think they look like Christmas house-elf socks.

Today,as I said, I stayed in bed for long time, fiddling with my computer and stimulating the economy. Doug brought me slices of warm quiche and disappeared to shovel. I spent money I do not have and hope I have fun in New York (I need to get out of town. New York is out of town, all right. Three nights in Manhattan is not cheap).

Eventually I hauled my lazy carcass out of the Amazon website and made fruitcake, which I will need to do again tomorrow, particularly if I eat all of them tonight.


Gluten-free, sugar free Delicious Fruitcake. Makes ten little foil loaf pans.

Set oven to 300.
Chop up 8 oz of apricots, 4 oz of dates, add a pound of raisins
and another 4 oz of whatever fruit – dried cherries are good, or dried pineapple, possibly crystallized ginger, or more raisins, or dried currants.

Grate as much fresh ginger as you like, if you haven’t used it as fruit (probably you should stop at a T, and use less if you’re using dried powdered), 1 T ground cinnamon, maybe some ground cloves (go lightly here) and nutmeg, maybe some cardamom.

Microwave these all in LARGE bowl for 5 minutes with the contents of one can of concentrated apple juice, reconstituted to 4 ½ cups. Or more juice and less water if you like. Maybe use some bourbon. One of the reasons one uses alcohol in things like this is that it frees up the volatile oils in the spices. Another is to share in the bootlegger mystique of Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory.

Some might say you should let this sit overnight. Probably not necessary. Allow to cool a little before you add four eggs (beaten, ideally) and ¾ c of vegetable oil (I wouldn’t recommend olive).

Food-process 8 oz of almonds until very fine (builder’s sand or better). This will make about 3 c of almond meal.

Take 2 cups of your favorite gluten-free flour (say 1 ½ c of corn starch and ½ c of tapioca and maybe some bean, or GF mix, or if gluten is not a concern you could use whole wheat. One of these days I will use masa harina.

Add a T of baking powder to the dry ingredients and stir them well. Combine with the wet ingredients.

Stir in 2 cups of walnuts and one of pecans, according to taste. For it is written ‘nutty as a fruitcake,’ and who are we to gainsay it?

Stir dry ingredients into wet. It will be gooey. Add more liquid if it is not. Try to distribute the nuts/fruits and the relatively liquid batter evenly among your pans. You can also make cupcakes or proper loaves, but you will have to adjust the cooking time accordingly.

Top each cake with a perfect pecan or walnut or candied cherry, and bake for 20 minutes and then look at them. Maybe another 20 minutes; they will shrink from the sides and bounce slightly back in the center if you touch them. You might add a t of bourbon or whiskey on each when they are hot out of the oven.

White, quite white

If you drive on an unplowed road behind someone who may be running out of gas, have ice on the wipers, be very scared (charitable thoughts supplied by my mother) and is taking caution beyond practicality (20 is not too fast, and many would consider even 25 quite responsible, so 10? TEN?) and it is dark and the flakes are flying hard
you eventually start wondering is you aren't supposed to be driving THAT way and feel vertiginously as though you are falling into the sky.

Or it may just remind you of an occasion when the Millennium Falcon succeeded in jumping light-speed (oooh this one is even better, though not like snow very much).

Subarus RULE. New Hampshire State Bird. No problems with my driveway.

While worrying about Terry Pratchett, I found my way to Neil Gaiman's blog, and somewhere he found out about reviews for some of the more obscure Amazon offerings. We all knew people had too much time on their hands, but actually I would rather they wrote reviews than bought the inflatable sheep.

I am having Stockholm syndrome with my father's socks. The mini cables (2 per sock) have four untwisted knit stitches and they are the BEST. I daydream about 4wpi stockinette and the k2b, p1 ribbing of the maybe 18 wpi very beautiful and no, I can't find the yarn on the WEBS website, grows slowly. Someday I may finish these.

Terry Pratchett seems to have a rare form of early onset Alzheimer's.

Since I have been rereading all of his books as a way to cope with life in Novemeber and December of 2007, I'm not happy at having the prospect of somethign else to be philosophical about. And I can't imagine how I would take such a diagnosis; we were ruling out hang-gliding only this evening at lab.

The closest thing I had to a spiritual thought about Asterix's death was that he had no doubts about loving the world and therefore trying to do one's ecological best was something one could do for him. I think with luck and perhaps good drugs, I will have more Pratchett to use to help me cherish people with, but it would be nice to have some good news.

Catch-up Saturday?

It has been a long week. Asterix died on Tuesday.

He had been very old for quite a while: I think he quit going for walks in the woods in the fall of 2006. Being stone-deaf for probably the same length of time cannot have been much fun, and he had cataracts, too. He had an excellent Thanksgiving mugging my mother for smoked oysters, and the week after he assaulted an innocent endtable (or possibly, saved its life) extracting a shrimp-tail armed with weapons of mass destruction (he ate it for all of us). After that he lost his appetite, except for a chicken liver or so.
When he stopped wanting to eat even them, or cream, or cottage cheese, I knew the end was coming. Friday I did take him to the vet who charged me $90 for blood tests they have still not called to tell me about (they will hear about this), and he was so far out of his depth I realized again he could not last long. He had increasing trouble walking, but apart from being irritated about this he was not in distress. So we followed him around the house and stroked him, and he walked fewer places and said Yarp, and on Tuesday morning he nestled his head in my hand for a while and then I had to go to work. He was quite cold by the time Doug got home, so I think he passed very soon.

Doug and I cremated him in the firepit with more wood than you would think and a lot of olive oil. I don't recommend this for the faint-hearted (start with really a LOT more wood than you think will be needed, on all sides of your corpse). I cried a lot. My grief much better now that he has finished dying; although it reminded me of my (good) home-birth experiences, the same open-endedness was wearing. Now I just miss him.

We have lost Mena in April or May, Digger in June? and now Asterix. Compared to a woman on the Council of Churches whose house has burned down, been hospitalized for a near-by lightning strike, and just lost her brother, it's not been too bad (insert your favorite story about Iraq here).

We have three cats now, all under four. Toby just turned a year, Marten is probably now two and a half, and Willow is somewhere around two. I wish Willow would stop stalking the boys; they are terrified of her. I have acquired one of the diffusers of calming pheromones some blogger I trust and my daughter recommended, but the house is too scattered to know where I should put it. I would need about five and between Christmas and all (taxes, the 108K-mile car tune-up,spaying, $90 of USELESS BLOODWORK, taxes,and wild living) even one seemed expensive. (My bedroom just won the toss. I gave Toby and Willow crunchy treats and plugged it in next to them (maybe I should have bought the spray and just poured it over their heads in violation of the federal usage guidelines). Willow relaxed but then Marten came in and war broke out.)

The snow is beautiful and it is really cold. I could put one of the 2005 photos in for snow but it's pretty much white, with decorative edging on the trees. Sometimes the sun comes out and it is so lovely it's trite.

Do none of these women (Harlot, Juno, TooMuchWool, Julia, Norma, just look at my links in past posts, you know who they are) I admire do anything but knit? I know they don't, they travel, and cook, and go to work, and so forth. Some of them tidy their houses. I do go to work (my boss is away. I am a calmer, gentler, less productive, much happier person)but I also sometimes read and apparently fritter my life away, or I would not be worried about finishing one pair of socks (and a glitten or mlove). DOOMED.

Snowing like mad

We have about 6" on the ground and it's very pretty. Sadly, when the Concord schools close so does my place of work, so I am home enjoying the peace and quiet and working on my father's socks. If I finish them I shall be probably be as pleased as my father will be; I look at the Yarn Harlot's Christmas knitting list and am astonished and perhaps horrified. But then, she's dedicated, and perhaps she doesn't allow her friends to strong-arm her into teaching a needlefelt class like Sarah did me and Doug yesterday.

Actually, and not surprisingly, I had a great time. We had four students, who behaved well, did not stick the needles into themselves (or worse, one another), and to my surprise a four-hour workshop was pretty good. We had a lunch break and everyone had time to make something and get ideas to take home with their felt and needles and a bit of roving. Doug is much better at some practical things, like bringing scissors, and he also could be firm. I was the good cop and kept telling them not to worry. I was pleased because I managed to write a relatively informative handout and to remember to bring the silk spacedyed roving, which looks very very nice on wool.

Afterwards Sarah took us back to her home for soup. She needs an orange hat so she won't be mistaken for a deer in the woods (deer wear other colors, maybe they are Republic-of-Irish?)



You may not be able to tell, but she is making the same hat as the one she is wearing. It will be superb. And Bright enough, I hope.


What we made in felting class
The bluish donut-shaped thing on the left is a base for embroidery and looked exactly like the picture the student wanted to make.

The water wasn't too cold, once Sarah threw me in.

Adopt a sheep.

I want one.

http://www.laportadeiparchi.it/contratto_en.htm

Or, if the sheep is too much: an olive tree:http://www.nudo-italia.com/what_is_nudo

Thanksgiving is not one of our best holidays, since there is nothing to do but eat and watch TV, and I have no TV. Also some of us should not drink wine before 6pm, or if we do we should just be honest and go nap.



The food was delicious and made by the daughter, everyone pitched in with the dishes and the general tidying. I reckon I am the Luckiest Thanksgiving Girl in the World because I had leftovers and no piles of dead dishes. (Or relatives). The daughter had some weird (probably Smith-influenced, commie) idea we should all eat the same food. Since she is a vegetarian, her father avoids tomatoes, my mother eschews fowl, eggs, and milk products (though not cream), and my father is thorough-going celiac, this was not easy. She made delicious vegetable soup, mashed potatoes, and re-invented empanadas. They were a tamale dough pockets, fried then baked, filled with a mixture of summer squashes, onions, garlic, and walnuts. Oh, my goodness. There were five pies (my parents and the housemate) and the daughter made pumpkin cheesecake. The wine was Acorn Medley (which is delicious, unfortunately; it's well out of my usual budget) and my father brought a wonderful salad.



We spoke to geographically distant relatives on the phone and made remarks about what people were requesting for Christmas presents. No ne wants anything the others describe as exciting.

But it is obvious my life needs more excitement or I would not have been wistful listening to the ex and the daughter plan a trip to England (well, actually, it would sound pretty good anytime; I miss some aspects of being part of a family). Then the daughter and her friend took off for New York, and I should have stowed away, though it being her father's Beetle they might have noticed.



The weather didn't make us any livelier.

I have been working on my Latvian mitten, my father's socks, my ex's tea-cozy, and rereading all of Patrick O'Brian. Next week Doug and I are supposed to be leading a needle-felting workshop. Oh God.

In other news

Last winter I made Ellie a sweater, mailed it to Italy... she reported that despite swatching and measuring and everything it was somewhat large. We consider shrinking it. We are scared. It fits me fine, although it's more her colors than mine. Rueful. Warm.

My class with Beth-Brown-Reisel, whom I liked very much (she put up with someone in the room pontificating about pre-Columbian civilization the Americas and she is a good, light-hearted, informative-without-being-imperative type of teacher) did not address aging cats who don't want you to do intarsia, or people who get home from work and crawl into AubreyandMaturin and macaroni and wine.

Splendid Japanese English (much better than my Japanese), and a nice product.

Dick is doing very well and has permission to drive. Mostly I was happy to hear, since he is sleeping some 15 hours a day, that it doesn't hurt when he turns over anymore.

Autumn is pretty much named Willow, particularly when she jumps Toby. Doug swears her eyeballs turn black (I cannot find a picture to link to, but MANY people have named their pets after characters on Buffy). She turns out not to be either pregnant or spayed, the latter condition both a)proving she is not Keet-sue (Did I tell you Miss Tucker turned up uninjured in the barn next door to her home?)and b)subject to change after Thanksgiving.

Asterix is apparently feeling Just Great, even if he is bony. He has taken to jumping up to my windowsill to sit on the microwave to persuade me to give him milk, or he will deep-six the teapot.

It got cold. It's mid-November, it has permission. Today is, in fact, the 28th anniversary of my marriage (and about the ninth anniversary of its breakup). We're still speaking. Kids are healthy. Could have been much, much worse.

Nice piece of work.

Watch this. It is way cool.

Well, I had good intentions, kind of like putting my head in a blender for the Greater Good: two people I like very much were to visit this weekend, bringing their OCD to bear on certain intractable areas of my house. Their arrival would precipitate severe tidying in the relatively malleable parts of my house, leading to an overall improvement for Thanksgiving.

In pursuit of this, did I clean off the coffeetable? No, I spent $260 at Target. New spare pillows, new sheets, new blanket for the guest futon in the loom room (as well as Grace and Dahlia, my ex-spouse or a friend of the daughter will be out there for Thanksgiving and Lisa for Christmas); curtains rods for the already bought curtains for the loom room, a clock radio/cd player for the loom room because the lack of music, NPR, and timepiece has been making me insane. While it will never be Grace and Dahlia's spare room (their hobbies are not stash-involved. They have _space_ in their kitchen cabinets. And yet they are lovable), I wanted it to be more welcoming and the sort of place I would be happy to find after 16 oz of wine.

I hate all window treatments, but you can see the BTU's beating their tiny fists against the insulated glass and sneaking through eventually. Many people are disturbed by the prying glances of bears and chickens before they dress (the people. Our bears and chickens are always perfectly dressed)(one way or another). I got the plain white cotton tabbed curtains and am contemplating a swarm of potato block-prints. How to avoid pointless busyness in a room with a wool stash and a bookshelf without just having boring white curtains? The pointless dreaded pelmet? And I may have to hem them...

Last night I put up a set of curtains (insert moan about inability to use electric tools on viciously-designed curtain rod holders and incorrect placement of electric outlets), and realized that my intuition that neither the LONG nor the short curtain rods were the right length for three of the windows was spot on. One can, however, take half a long rod and half a short rod and achieve medium. Go me.

I also moved the bookshelf. Most of you will be at peace with the idea that one MUST unload the shelves. This is not necessarily the case, but it is wise not to stack the books in the turning radius through which the bookshelf (half-full? half-emptied?) is intended to pass.

Stacks of books are no more stable than glaciers.

Willow thinks I am eccentric. She kept me company, leaving only long enough to beat the crap out of one of the boys.

The loom room is not at the moment a tranquil place, but I had some idea it could be made habitable in a few more hours. But Grace called and Dahlia's mother has just had a metastatic malignant mass removed from her back and they won't be coming anytime soon. I wish it had been for happier reason, like winning a weekend at the Balsams.

sailing nicely

The cardiac-patient archaeologist is doing very well and back home. The cat is also back home, terrorizing the other cats when she gets the chance (not that that takes much effort, in Toby's case) and being the picture of affectionate and generally sweet catness to people. She may possibly be a Willow rather than an Autumn. Alyson Hannigan would be proud.

I am in Lovely Burlington, VT, at a an archaeology conference. It was a reason to get out of town. I had not really understood, Google Maps notwithstanding, that it was three hours' ride, and leaving here on Sunday morning in time to get to a knitting class back in Concord at 10 may be a bit unpleasant (at least for the people sharing my room).

pretty well, actually

My friend is back at home. We knew he was doing well when he was discussing the difference between mastodons and mammoths on November 2.

And here's the latest on the AUtumn cat.

When last we saw Autumn, we were wondering if she might be pregnant. Then someone decided she was their cat (the third brown female tabby to be missing in Canterbury), about two miles from the village where the cat had turned up. Sarah was unsure about the whole scene: the cat alleged to be Autumn's brother didn't seem to recognize her, they hissed a lot, and the owner said Autumn was mostly feral and lived in the back yard(which was not much like the cat who had been sitting on my lap). But she was sure this her cat, probably. Autumn rushed off and hid behind the person's barn. I think saying "Sarah was unimpressed" would be putting it diffidently enough. She left and felt bad. I don't know what I would have done either, but Sarah was not happy, Doug and I were sad, and Sarah's boyfriend put forth some larcenous ideas that sounded fine to me.

So this evening Sarah heard meowing at her door and it was not Abbey. It was Autumn, who had figured out where Sarah's door was by being carried (in a carrier) to it from the village across the road and from it to the car, several times. So Autumn is coming back here tomorrow and anyone claiming her can just produce kitten pictures and come to see her in Henniker.

SIgh of relief

My friend made it through his bypass surgery. I'll feel better when I know he's awake, which at the rate the hospital is communicating may take some time. His wife was sitting in the hospital _with_ the liaison person who was trying to get information, but the hospital wouldn't give the liaison any information and instead, called the patient and (his wife)'s home and left reassuring messages on the answering machine.

I imagine the dog was glad to hear things had gone well, though.

Sunny with cold breeze

My father usually asks me how I am and I usually tell him what the weather is like. I have known women whom you would ask the same thing and they would tell you how the kids were. Both of these seem to me to make perfect sense. I think I am fighting a cold but basically I am fine. It's fifty F and blue of sky with a few puffy white clouds. Yesterday it rained a lot.

Doug (who has another job interview coming up, although at the moment he doesn't seem terribly desirous of a different job and is treating the interviews as interesting sources of things to ask people _he_ has to interview) is away for the weekend. I am glad it's cleared up today.

Autumn is back in the Loom(less) Room. Only one more person lately has been sure she was her cat, and then realized Autumn was not the right brown tabby. I do wonder what's happening to brown tabbies in Canterbury. Sarah wondered yesterday if Autumn had been dumped for being pregnant, but since other than eating really a LOT she has no sign of such an alarming condition, I doubt this (and people are more accepting of unplanned kittens nowadays, aren't they?). Next week we will go and get tested for kitty diseases and establish whether or not she has been spayed. It would be a welcome savings, and being a cat if she hasn't been spayed she probably is pregnant. God forbid.

Friday we had a big workshop at work,for 'prophetic preachers.' My life and Div. school experiences suggest the best preachers are always trying to get better and the woman from Yale sounded excellent. I was doing hospitality and trying to keep the potato chips flowing, which was quite satisfying. Throughout this, it was Jessica's-down-the-hall's last day on the job. We had a trip to the Elegant Ewe and beer and dinner to look forward to. At 10 a.m. she had wondered if it was a bad sign that she wanted the beer THEN, and her day, of course, became more irritating. She said she was going to march down to the yarn store and give them her checkbook.

We both survived until then. Our friendship survived the even more perilous moment when Kelly and I Confronted her and said she should not be wearing ice blue and periwinkle when wearing nice reds and russets made her look _wonderful._ And the yarn she bought to make the Kimono Sweater was lovely enough to eat or roll in, and at least the rolling will be much easier when she has knit it up.

I committed a skein of Red Willow Mountain Goat because it is finally cold enough to think realistically of warm socks. I am poised to make a pair of Monkey out of what I am pretty sure is Wild Raspberry Twizzle, but that will require attention and my brain is not at home these days (or many others, actually).

On Saturday, Sarah came over to knit and hold a gun to my head. As a result of her efforts, I tidied (and she tidied) my bedroom down to floor in several places, and I started some needle-felted stars for the workshop she has, ah, persuaded, Doug and me to do for Shaker Village. Needle felting is one of the best crafts I know, in that to be vaguely competent you don't need much tuition, a fortunate thing for any students of mine (only you need not to bleed on your creation, which is less of an issue in knitting). The equipment is cheap and you get to play with colors. She left to go make scary noises for Haunted Village Tours and I watched a curiously sweet movie called "Fido," which is well worth a viewing. It's about love and fidelity and the Meaning of Life as movies usually are. Religion and ethics make brief, dignified, and appropriate appearances. And it has Billy Connelly making Lurch noises.

Why trusting the universe gives me such a headache

'When the student is ready, the teacher will arrive' and all those trusting remarks about synchronicity. I want to be that kind of person. So I say, look, universe, I have a place in my life for a cat. Nothing happens. In true American style, I haul myself to animal shelters, undertake Marten and Toby, lovely cats both with some quirks and incredibly effective bloodlust (house full of Mafia-style warnings like chipmunk head in the living room, leg in the far kitchen....). Excellent cats. I still want a nice sane kitten, preferably a queen.

The universe, doing rather badly by some of my friends --last summer's woman with lumpectomy has just finished radiation, doing fine, now her husband is having bypass surgery on Halloween; you wonder if the fun ever stops and then you hope not, to say nothing of all of Southern California) does not have time to cough up a kitten.

A sweet cat shows up in Canterbury Shaker Village, whom Sarah feeds and cultivates. After some days and some discussion, the cat strolled into the cat carrier (! ?? !!!!) herself on Monday and began to spend a quiet few days in quarantine here, provisionally named Autumn. Sarah put up a poster.

We had the slightly weird, mostly okay last archaeology lab before said cardiac patient's surgery last night. Sarah appeared and said the cat's distraught owner had turned up, clutching the poster and saying "Miss Tucker ran away just after I moved here, I'm so glad you found her, her brother misses her so much!" Sarah drove to my house and picked up the cat and I reflected how tired I am of loving beings that are not mine to love. (You can insert the appropriate Christian, Buddhist, fatalist remarks about how _everyone/everything_ is on loan, etc, but some beings are on even less of a loan than others.)

Turns out the cat I have been calling Autumn is not Miss Tucker at all. So Autumn is going to spend the next few days in Sarah's bedroom in Canterbury, not amusing her two queen kitties one little bit. Doug and I are trying to remain open to either bonding with Autumn or being delighted her people have her back (this cat has been deeply loved, unless she is a Bodhisattva cat). We have two brown female tabbies lost in the Canterbury area in the last couple of weeks, God knows where Miss Tucker is, and her brother still misses her.

I wish I weren't thinking about this. All the time.

It's Blog Action Day (it will be on Monday, anyhow) and the theme is the environment. At the very least, both the goldfinches (and the other passeriforms and aves in general, and in fact life on Earth) and the fiber bearers (sheeps and camelids mostly, most of whom are domesticated) need fairly specific ones. I had not realized that the two in my title were so opposed, one being wild and one being mostly domesticated. One being part of the ecology and largely dependent, one being a part of the ecology that gets really a lot of technological help and, given enough, will degrade the environment in which it lives well beyond the area's capacity to carry it.

I love a good polarization.

People are part of nature. We are a reflective part of nature, which allows us to do things to our environment ("I could farm here if there weren't so many trees"), and eventually to consider what it is we are doing ("I can't farm here now that it doesn't rain... I wonder if it has something to do with the lack of trees?"). The latter has only become widespread as people have spread into all the habitable ground and the effects of intense exploitation have become unavoidable. It is only a recent part of human life to HAVE TO consider ourselves part of our environment; most of the human experience has been about most becoming part of the humic layer real soon.

I like people, many in particular and quite a lot of things about us in general. We are learning so very much about how it all works as we realize how easily it can all stop 'working,' in the sense of 'working the way we like it, with food, air, water, charismatic fauna and flora,not too much dengue, a good place for Moore's Law to operate.'

There probably need to be fewer of us and we really really must take Stuart Brand's words to heart: We are gods, and we may as well get good at it. There is nothing we can do that does not matter. (This is frankly a drag.)

I have been weirdly cheered by Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Maybe something will go better. The whole world situation suggests that none of the Marvel superheroes (or the DC ones), the Mission:Impossible team, UNCLE, or the Avengers are answering their calls (go Google them yourself if you're so young you don't know).

If I have a talent other than ineffective kindness and grammar-fascism (I rather like this link but the site may be crap)it is biblography. Not much idea how you should live, but lots on what you might read:

Historical and relevant (and not terribly encouraging):

The Long Summer, By Brian Fagan. You settle, you get used to the climate, you grow, the climate changes. Most of you die or migrate. Repeat.

Collapse
by Jared Diamond. Do trees prefer totalitarians?

A Forest Journeyby John Perlin -- really brought home to me that you have to burn something.

1491 by Charles Mann. What was my face before my great-grandparents immigrated? The only book on American history I have really been excited by.

Pretty good fiction:

Forty Signs of Rain
Fifty Degrees Below
Sixty Days and Counting, all by Kim Stanley Robinson.


Link to a list of links for Blog Action Day.

Well, it's still raining

And I suppose I can't protest much, but I will if it rains all week and all weekend, too. The leaves up north were lovely, and they aren't bad down here, but it's the kind of gloomy weather that makes you not care, even if you can see the leaves. I did, however, get the Octoberfest blog entry up, once the State remembered to bring the chip into work. I hope to get a better link but the generic site one will have to do.

Sarah and I met and knit for an hour after work since I am having social withdrawal after all the people last weekend. I know, if I were sensible I would go to Rhinebeck, but the house might fall down and I would be really, really broke, and even more overstashed than I already am.

My cat thinks it's time for me to go to bed and he is probably right.

In the works

I am back from a really lovely long weekend in the White Mountains digging holes and taking pictures of dirt and rocks (soil profiles and artifacts). I have most of an entry written and I hope to get it up at the NH Underground blog this evening (no link until there's something to see), after I have retrieved the pictures I want from the State, Whose camera I was using (the rocks and dirt belong to all of NH, after all).

I have finished my mother's socks.

My milk stout, upon mature consideration, is undrinkable.

Corned beef hash is unknown in France and not widely known in Quebec. It's very tasty.

Keum Boo is not all that much fun if you are not an abstract person and keep trying to make _things_ with scraps of non-adhering gold leaf.

Hold a good thought for Doug the housemate, who has an interview possibility.

Deep breath

I made spaghetti sauce before work. I stayed calm at work (so did my boss, even though he had forgotten I was leaving for an early weekend) and I am told the #10 envelopes will work fine. DEEP BREATH.

Jessica at the end of the hall has a new job, so she will be LEAVING ME ALL ALONE THERE in early November. But I'll be fine, sitting there in the dark.

I punted lab and went to the supermarket to get healthy snacks and the cocoa Dick forgot. And cat food and Kitty Litter (not the TM kind)and Asterix's drugs and a bottle of propane for the Tripod of Orodruin, which boils one's tea water real quick of a frosty morning. And some of it all is in the car and soon, honestly, I will get the rest.

Probably not much updating will take place in the next four or five days. Some knitting, with luck.

Better

I am still employed and my boss is uninjured. The poor man wasted a ream of 11x17 paper (one side had one orientation, the other had another; America is not ready for this)and said he felt sick, and I thanked him for making me feel better. We also had a tacit truce because he has not figured out Microsoft Publisher and I have (to some extent).

I am not ready for Octoberfest and not really happy with the gold on the ring I am Keum-booing (a Keum Boo-boo?) but life is okay.

Here is a really spectacular hummingbird picture. I didn't take it but it lifts my heart.
And Here. The photographer is a firespotter and there's a story about him in the newly-free New York Times.

Perhaps it will get better

Okay. The weekend was great. I also acquired gingko leaves to play with in the silver clay. I returned home and went to work to find that the 200 envelopes I ran through the magic mail function had the wrong return address on them. My boss, already unhappy because it took me so damn long to generate the list he said I ought to have been able to make in a few minutes, got to stick 200 return address labels over them on Friday night.

He also found we had roughly 10% of the envelopes you put in when you send an appeal out. This resulted directly in my printing and stickering 2000 self-addressed envelopes yesterday. Even 500 is a lot. I called to find out what size envelopes the mailer wanted. She said bigger was better, 9's would do. Staples does not have 9's, so I got 10's. 4/5 of the way through the boss suggested the 10's would stick out of the mailer. I said she said bigger was better, and Staples had no 9's. He said I ought to have gone somewhere else and not assumed (he barely managed not to make his usual remark about how assuming "makes an 'ass' of 'u' and 'me,' " which I didn't find endearing the first time). I don't think there is anywhere else in Concord.

If the 10's don't work I am going to offer to resign. I can't stand much more. We communicate badly; he can't believe I don't think and remember everything the same way he does. Much of the time, he knows a lot more about running a non-profit (not surprisingly). I am also doing things like forgetting how to do weird things in Word in less than six months. Some of this may relate to a certain amount of stress, since we are running on the boredom-punctuated-by-panic business model.

He is right, we ought to have had more envelopes on hand. If there were anything to say on my side, it would be that he has been saying we would be sending out a mailing since the beginning of August, and as of yesterday at 5 pm, he had not yet written the copy. The inelasticity of my brain has not allowed me to make it automatic that the word "Mass mailing" should lead to a nice complete list of useful stationery, since I tend to think "Oh God, ACCESS," even though Access is behaving a bit better for me (after nearly 2 years, we are beginning to get along better).

He also wants me to be responsible for tidying the supply room, which is unfortunate because he has a much lower threshold of messy and if he didn't go in and tidy it I would know what we had on hand. The disposition of the boxes changes daily and not always in a useful way. I think it is nice for him to have something concrete to do and if he wants to disarrange the supply room it's fine with me, although I wish he would not hide things.

I had planned to leave work at two, go to the grocery store, the bank, and pick up some more fresh silver clay,get the cat's prescription, then go home, make spaghetti sauce to freeze for the archaeological weekend, use the gingko leaves in the clay before they dry out, and do a major kiln firing, as well as cut an intricate piece of gold foil for the class tomorrow (today).

I left work at about 5:00, reached the bead store at quarter past five (it closes at five, I thought it was six, but not always true...), but the nice woman had already let a family in and we all promised to leave quickly and we were all cheery and happy. I drove to the bank, endorsed my checks, and found I still hadn't got my ATM card back in my wallet. I drove to the vet, who closed at six, arriving at five past. I went to the small local grocery store which has a poster of the local buffalo it sells, perfect for dig spaghetti sauce, only it is usually out of buffalo, it turns out, which makes the times I have bought it there before relatively unusual. I bought cholesterol-laden, ecologically unsound ground cow and went home. It was 6:30 and I didn't actually do anything productive except help Doug throw back the tide of dangerously full wine bottles in central New Hampshire.

Mittension of Rovaniemi

Actually, it was a fairly laid-back class; we were quiet because we were _busy_, thank you.



Susanna Hansson is a good teacher and a fun and pleasant person, as well as one of the most astoundingly fluent non-native English-speakers I've ever encountered. I was happy that she has encountered and used correctly the fine word schlep, which my years at Brandeis taught me was best translated (when used as a noun) as 'A steamer trunk full of rocks.' She did have a good deal of stuff with her.

And though the room (rather harshly lit) was full of knitting teachers there was a familiar face who picked out a familiar colorway:



I don't seem to knit as loose as I once did, as 000 needles turned out to be unnecessary and 1's were fine. I think either I am growing up or my drugs are perfectly balanced because I restarted once because I screwed up the first row and ruined the cast-on, at least once; then I learned I hope for the last time that if you're knitting in the _round_ you read the chart normally (like a typewriter, for you antiquaries) instead of boustrophedon;then I just plain read the chart wrong and skipped a color repeat: and yet I was not crazed or suicidal, or even the least complete in the class by the time we gave up and shopped, being at WEBS after all. I'd have a picture of my partial cuff but I pulled it out again this afternoon because I would really like to do it right. But I may try it again in sport instead of fingering and with a whole line of different colors because I managed to get the first and second and third pale greens mixed up.

One particular thing struck me: Susanna was discussing Saami weaving and one thing led to another and there I was talking about Women's Work, the First 20,00 Years,which some of you may recall my mentioning other times. Anyway, one of the WEBS employee-students went and fetched the four copies in the store and people bought three of them. My kind of fanatics.

Susanna and Lene will have a article in PieceWork this coming winter sometime and The Secret of the ColorChange Will Be Out. It will still be a lot easier to learn with kindly human tuition. I can't show you over lunch. It is really absorbing and those folk (you know, folk tradition) were awfully clever.



Everyone picked colors that went with what she was wearing.

I behaved fairly well at WEBS except for the five skeins of sportweight alpaca... And I have almost finished my mom's second sock!

I am about to go to WEBS (slightly more than halfway down) and be out of my depth, but I am sure I will have a good time anyway.

Here is how I've been: As the week went on, I became more and more impatient with Being at Work. Usually it's just a dull throb but this week it became acute, until by Friday I wanted to snap "Oh, get a HOBBY! and stop talking about things I already know and just LET me ALONE so I can DO my JOB!" The boss is in one of his slightly manic moods where the forest is thick and he is concentrating on teeny little leaves, while complaing that we must make it through to the other side in the next ten minutes. It makes me anxious.

Down the hall, Saisquoi did her job in seraphic calm. It is a comfort when you know someone understands why you're making Igor "The-Marsther-ith-MAD! MAD, I tell you!" faces and full-body gestures all the way to the bathroom.

The weather decided to be strange. Along with peri-menopause and heat sensitivity from SSRIs and being fat, I hate high humidity. I hate all of these things and all of them are active in my life. So it was 65 degrees F (usually a well-enough behaved temperature, if not clammy)with about 90% humidity and my knees were sweating. This was toward the end of the week; it had been 90 F+ and broken records on Wednesday, not your dry heat either. It's better now; I am wearing wool socks for the first time since about March.

On Tuesday I had a pleasant but not very productive silver class. On Wednesday I had a fine time at lab, where we gave Dick an atlatl for his birthday because I was tired of listening to him try to explain how they work. The atlatl is the way most of the projectile points were are occasionally lucky enough to find were used to kill food
or in other parts of the ancient world, food. His wife won't let him hang it up over the mantelpiece with the little brackets made of dead deer-hooves. I can't really blame her.

Thursday they had promised the weather would break, but it did not. I went to tea at the home of friend's mother, and it could not have been nicer. The most English home I have seen in the New World, with (honestly) horse brasses and blue-and-white ware on the walls. And zucchini bread, which was a nice touch of inculturation (I suppose they might have zucchini bread in England, but I rather doubt it).

When I got home I found Effectively Blogless Sarah had, as she promised, come to visit. And tidied the whole downstairs. I kiss her feet. I said I would make us something to eat and she pulled the quiche out of the oven. Sarah is welcome to raid my stash anytime (which she has only done with encouragement, I hasten to add. As far as I know. The stash is such that quite a number of things might be disappeared before I notice. But don't get any ideas, I am going to do the Ravelry penance/inventory soon, I mean next week, I mean in mid-October...).

I have finished one of my mother's socks. Taking a class is hardly the same as starting another project, is it? I mean, I have no choice about the timing. Or buying supplies...

The Kool-Aid is tasty

In particular, I finally Did Something with my Ravelry invitation (Jess told me I must have signed up for a beta tester several years ago. I have only the vaguest of memeories of doing so). Just ankle-deep, of course. I joined Facebook last week; it has been great for being in touch with my friends of the later generations. Like, I hear 40% of Facebook are over 35, but I haven't run into anyone my age. My father is 80 and possibly the oldest person on it; one of his friends invited him.

Both of these are addictive timesinks. At least Ravelry has the prospect of doing me some good; my stash is bigger than I am and some kind of fearless exploration would be a good thing. I wish there were some kind of book thing (any suggestions?) I could add to this blog; Facebook has an 'I'm Reading' app that ties into Amazon, which I would feel guiltier about if I were not one of their frequent flyers.

I forgot to mention I bought just a very small Icelandic fleece at Wool Day. Moorit. I would enjoy it just for the pulling-into tog and thel goodness.

Honestly, I will take some pictures soon.

Pictures? Why would I have taken pictures?

A delightful note on boredom as an anthropological item.

I figure I am reasonably contented these days but the fact is I am reading way too much and the house has descended from barbarism through savagery and is dipping into chaos. One reason to find solace in Robin McKinley is that the space inside a book is tidy, and also not my problem.

Except that we are in a drought, the weather lately has had some perfect days. It managed to be pleasant for the Canterbury Shaker Village Wool Day, where Doug and I go and spin. This is a very small atypical wool festival, in that the demonstrators far outnumber the vendors, and the visitors often know _nothing_ ("Is that a spinning wheel? Do all spinning wheels look like that?").

I am finally beginning to recognize some of the people I don't know from blogging, like the woman whom I taught to spin four Wool Days ago. She would pop up and say "Hi! Remember me?" and I would gulp and say, "Um, no...." She managed to imprint on my adamantium skull at Spa and even though I couldn't recall her name I knew who she was. Hi, Pam! Maybe we'll get solid on your name next.

My parents came up from Boston and enjoyed the sheep. I dragged them the extra hundred yards to see Gina Gerhardt (whom I just Googled and ended up with my own blog entry (down a ways) as the top pick. Gina, your profile is TOO LOW)'s flax braking setup. I take spinning and even weaving pretty much for granted (unlike most of the visitors, which is why they are at Wool Day), but flax processing is rare. My parents were gracious enough to be actually interested, and Gina was gracious enough to let me play with her stuff and demo it for them. She was a hoot, actually, and yelled at me for not remembering _everything_ she had taught me a year ago. Since I failed to remember _her_ when I saw her at Fiber Revival (you would have thought the hank of flax on her wheel would have been a hint) this was particularly funny. (I do usually recognize my parents.)

I have roughly enough silver equipment to furnish a small craft fair, and no apparent time, no apparent space, and a tendency to freeze. I am taking a Keum-Boo on Argentium class and messing around in Keum-Boo with silver clay and it's _magic_.

I will post this and go to work and hope to update more soon. But this weekend, because I need another project, I am going to Northampton to visit the daughter and take the Rovaniemi Mittens workshop at Webs. Why, given that I have maybe 12 projects ongoing and am not that great a knitter in the first place? I blame the Harlot. Show me a lost art and I am anybody's. (Raider of the Lost Art...)

Art and fear and housework and !@#$% global warming

Finally, something to which I can find washing catfood cans preferable. I blame Sara Lamb for starting me down the silver clay road to ruin. Sending me back to hang with the vicious, friendly, vegetarian bead store owner, who happened to have classes... chainlink jewelry with beads. Doug, my so-called friend, dragging me with him to a wirework class (at the Fiber Studio! Even in a warm fuzzy place full of fiber, the sultry gleam of brass and copper and silver. Carol is giving another class there Nov. 11). There are books on enamelling out there and I already have a small kiln.

Sadly, as the equipment and materials and books piles rise, so does my apprehension. I know, this is neurotic. But I really needed to clean the kitchen up last night, and I am really happy I did, and I still managed to go play a bit. I am making a cross for my ex (I know, the ex has me, who needs another cross?), whose birthday is Monday. I want it to be nice. The design options are vague: no stones. "Make it look maybe like a tree." What, it's a cross, and it's teeny, and it's silver. And I am not rich in technique or experience. I am trying a couple of things involving carving a Sculpey mold. As always the work was not nearly so intimidating as the anticipation. It may not be what the ex wants, but it will be small enough to put in a drawer if necessary. And I _will_ finish the tea cosy by Christmas.

Imagine how hard it would be to start if I were an industrial-size metal sculptor.

Meanwhile, we are having a drought. Two months and counting since there was any significant rain. I top up the frog ponds from the well, wondering how the aquifer is holding out. NPR woke me up with a cheery tale from the BBC about rising sea-levels in Bangla Desh leading to refugees in Assam. Assam is where the tea I like best comes from. AND the human suffering, yes. As good as the wakeup last week about the Huichol being done out of their peyote by drug tourists (one of whom didn't sound completely evil, either).

On the plus side: the mozzerella recipe from the Kingsolver website works, if you have a source for rennet (Sarah, in my case). With tomatoes from the farmers' market and olive oil from the daughter's sojourn in Italy on the homemade bread. Yum. I nearly want to eat more healthy.

The hummingbirds left after Labor Day. They were insane, and like Etherknitter, I miss them. I would not have believed how noisy they are.

Reading: Janet Evanovich (Stephanie Plum, not the stuff with cars, and not for the first time; brain candy), The First Fossil Hunters(brain whole-wheat bread).