subversive suburban

Golden girl

2010-12-21T20:24:00.001-05:00

Golden girl, originally uploaded by marj k.

Epic. The only word. Awesome, too.

The Coolest Octopus Ever

2010-10-21T21:45:00.001-04:00

Not strictly true. Every octopus is the coolest octopus ever. But this is pretty cool.

Happy Easter!

2010-03-30T20:53:00.000-04:00

When They Were Ankle-Biters

Happy Easter to all! To those who belong to the Christian tradition, He Is Risen! (Okay, now you're supposed to shout back, "He Is Risen, Indeed!")

I would insert a rant here on the order of No Bunnies, No Colored Eggs, No Rafts of Plastic Grass, Quit With The Commercialism, but I'm not going to go there.

Enjoy your Easter holiday, with or without chocolate and all the trimmings. Has anyone seen a butter lamb lately? I miss the butter lamb.

Art made by my kids, and my fabulous tripod

2010-03-17T16:32:00.001-04:00

I decorate not with Monet but with Child. As in kids. The wolf eye is my daughter's, the mice by my son, and the triple wolves again by daughter. I am so proud I could just burst.

Oh, and my tripod. We're high-tech around here. ;-)

thought for the day

2010-01-22T21:09:00.002-05:00

Honesty and tact are not mutually exclusive.

new year

2010-01-01T17:26:00.003-05:00

New Year resolutions, of course.

"Live in the present" is so cliched that I'm not sure I've ever thought about it more than a moment. Which is the crux, isn't it? The moment moves. I want to reach back to some of them, and erase others, like a living video machine. (With editing software. Okay, this metaphor is officially way over.)

Why does this moment seldom seem as good as my memory of ones gone by? Probably because I've edited and enhanced those over time. I doubt they were as good as they seem to me now, but "that way madness lies; let me shun that; No more of that" as a troubled man once said.

Some of those retreating moments aren't even mine. The picture I form for the word "happiness" is usually a retro photograph I remember seeing in a magazine, of the sun streaming down on the blonde hair of a young woman who is obviously delighted with her life in the Alps. It's not the blonde hair, as attractive as it is: a light, bright gold, perfectly styled in what is surely a wind-touched scene. It isn't the woman, particularly; she is generic enough to be a representation of whatever personality we want her to be. And the Alpine scene is perfect enough to be the subject of a paint-by-number masterpiece, with every color carefully chosen and placed.

It's the light. Sunlight streams onto her hair and face, her vivid red scarf (it contrasts so beautifully in the foreground of the photograph with the greens and blues in the background), so bright and encompassing that I don't remember what she is doing in the picture or how she is posed, beyond that face tipped towards the sun. Perhaps she's stopped during a glorious ski run. Or maybe she's just parked her automobile, brand new and gleaming in the sun, at just the right vantage point to admire the mountains. I don't remember.

Was the sun that much stronger back then, in the mid-twentieth century? I saw it in a photograph, a real picture of a real person in a real landscape. The photographer could have manipulated the image, brightening the colors or increasing the exposure. But in the fifties, before Photoshop, just how much magic could he work with his chemicals in the darkroom?

And I don't think it's the longing I feel, the desire to reach back to the sunshine and feel it streaming over my own hair, that makes the picture capture the light so strongly. I remember the photograph, its presence on a glossy page, and my wonderment at the sun's strength in the Bavarian mountains. There must be so much more sunlight on the other side of the world.

It is perhaps not coincidental that I'm thinking about this at the winter solstice, when the sun is at its lowest and weakest and the light barely trickles through the bare branches of the trees. But it isn't my brilliant sunshine I'm remembering. It's a picture of it, somewhere else in some other time. The closest I got to that moment of glorious light was looking at it in a picture in a magazine.

Maybe I should glory in the softness of my own winter sunlight. Sure, it looks different at this time of year and in this place. But it is the same sun, after all. And this pale sunbeam is shining on me now, in this moment, not in some imaginary, or even real, past.

Give Me the Damn Remote.

2009-11-17T11:11:00.006-05:00

photo by stevendepolo on flickr under a Creative Commons license

I feel like I have no control over my life. If I try to complete a simple task, I can't find the tools to do it. The job reaches a level of complexity, of twists and turns so byzantine, that my annoyance turns to wonder. How in the world can every single step have an obstacle?

Let's take an example. I have three freezers. (Don't even ask.) Food gets stuck in them willy-nilly. Whenever I try to organize them ("Look, guys, this is the meat shelf. There's meat on it. Nothing else. Keep it that way.") the order disintegrates within days. Boy wants a pot pie? Rummage, rummage, stuff all over. Husband picks up some frozen vegetables and ice cream on his way home from work? Let's see, it'll fit here . . . and here . . . and some over there . . . and that's why the ice cream is in two different freezers on four different shelves. Meanwhile, where's the spinach? I have no idea.

And what happens to the peas? I buy them every time I go to the grocery store. On any given night we are more likely than not to have peas on the menu because they're nutritious, quick to prepare, and inoffensive to all family members. Usually I can only find them if I dig deep to the back of the freezer (behind everything else, probably on the meat shelf) and realize that those little snowballs are not, in fact, snowballs, but frost-encrusted peas. And when I need corn? You guessed it. No corn, but an avalanche of peas.

One day I got the brilliant idea to make labels for the freezer shelves. Okay, this should be easy. Ready?

1. Mention casually to husband that I'm going to make freezer labels. The response is negative: that's too much work, it won't solve the problem (what problem?), they'll never stick to the shelves so they won't even be there when you want them. Deflate a bit at this barrage of reasoning. I have such stupid ideas.

2. Months go by. I can't find anything in the freezer. Decide to make freezer labels and damn the torpedoes. Type up some large, clear labels on my trusty Mac.

3. My computer is not connected to the printer. (See, our two printers are in the computer room so my kids can use them for schoolwork with their own computers. My computer is on my craft table in the play room. Well, it used to be. But I couldn't monitor the puppy from that end of the house so my computer is currently on a little cabinet in the living room.) Technically I should be able to do this from my computer over our home network. It doesn't always work, so I use a workaround. It's simple. First, send the file to the computer attached to the printer. Wait, that one's a PC so I convert the file to a different format, then try to send it. It doesn't work.

4. Go into other room and turn on the PC. Play three hands of solitaire while it loads Windows. Go back to my computer. Hit Send. Return to PC. Try Print. Nope.

5. Turn the printer off, wait five seconds, and turn it back on. (It's fussy.) Go back to PC. Hit Print. Nope.

6. Un-install the printer from my computer. Install it again. Find and re-install the proper driver. Hit Print. Success!

7. I intended to print the labels on sturdy card stock, but the printer doesn't easily take heavy paper like that without jamming, so I've printed the labels on regular office paper which I will then attach to the card stock. Find my own private stash of card stock (there isn't any in the paper drawer labeled "card stock") and feel smug. This is going to work.

8. Now I need scissors to cut apart the labels and card-stock backing. Ha ha, the gremlin chuckles, this one is too easy. The scissors are not in the scissors drawer. Search house for scissors. We must have fifteen pairs of scissors. I can't find any of them. Sigh and get my sewing scissors which are Never To Be Used On Paper. They're a bit dull anyway because the kids co-opt them when they can't find paper scissors. Cut the labels apart. Almost done.

9. Now I'm going to tape the labels to the card stock and fake-laminate them by covering them with packing tape. You know where this is going. The tape. Junk drawer? Nope. Battery drawer? (It's possible. Don't ask.) Nope. Kitchen counter? Computer room? Any horizontal surface in the house? Nope. E-mail husband at work to ask where the tape is. He thinks he saw it in a drawer somewhere. Search again. No dice.

10. Remember that I stashed away a roll of packing tape for just this eventuality. Go to secret stash. Like the Egyptian tombs, it's been raided.

11. Go to Wal-Mart and buy more packing tape. (Side note: there are single rolls and double rolls of packing tape on the shelf. Single rolls are $5.44. Double-rolls are $5.44. Point this out to cashier, who rolls her eyes, and buy the double-roll.) Go home.

12. The puppy needs to go out. Decide (I must have a death wish) to try his new walking collar on him so we can go for a walk later, when I've finished the labels. Cannot find new walking collar. Tear out some hair. Here's some luck; I find the box for the walking-collar. It's empty.

13. But wait! Victory! I find the collar in the bathroom! Quickly gather up puppy, who is crossing his legs.

14. Run to get puppy treats to bribe puppy into his new collar. All together now: Can't Find the Puppy Treats.

15. Admit defeat. Take puppy outside sans collar. Bring puppy back in.

And now, finally, there's nothing in my way. I have the tape and the labels. I look at them. And I just can't do it. What began as a simple idea has become a mountainous task, and I just can't make it up that last little bit to the top.

Decide to watch TV. Where's the remote? We have six of them . . .

Cats are Perfect

2009-11-14T20:40:00.000-05:00

Summer Circle on flickr

When you're sleeping, do you think about how you look? If the view of you from above is as good as the one from the side? Do you personify contentedness? Are your yin and yang not only balanced but precisely described by your body? No?

Then you're not perfect, because you're not a cat.

Oh. My. God.

2009-09-02T11:44:00.002-04:00

Could he be any cuter?

thank God for the vacuum salesman

2009-07-09T20:55:00.011-04:00

photo on flickr by Darren Hester

under a Creative Commons license

I had a crying fit today, out of the blue. Life is good: the kids are happy, the weather is beautiful, the garden is growing. (Except for the echinacea and the lilies which were eaten by the deer.) Yesterday my husband had relatively minor surgery (successful), and the reaction didn't hit me till today.

I hate hospitals: the smell, the stress, the officiousness, the waiting. We showed up an hour and a half early, as instructed. We were ushered into the little room with the curtain and the hospital bed and the call button. My husband donned his hospital gown and lay down on the hospital bed. I about had a hissy (internally). When the nurse hooked up his IV line, I wanted my mom.

A procession of nurses and doctors and aides and I-don't-know-who came into the room, all asking the same two questions: Why are you here? Which leg is getting operated on? They knew we knew, and we knew they knew. It was almost comedic except that they were very serious.

When I was a kid in the hospital, I was mistakenly prepped for the wrong operation. My mother just about brought the entire building down to rubble before they listened to her and realized their mistake. Who expects two children with the exact same name to be in the hospital at the same time?

Obviously procedures have improved. Not only did every single person ask those two questions; my husband and his surgeon both had to put identifying marks on the proper knee. It was reassuring, but odd. The redundancy seemed a tad extreme.

What's more important than not operating on the wrong limb (or person)? Not getting sued. Every single employee has to be covered in the event of a mistake. You can't sue the doctor, or the nurse, or anyone who comes in contact with you.

Yes, it's important, potentially a life-and-death situation. But it reminds me of the hoops we now go through to fly. When you are not allowed to bring a banana on the plane because it constitutes more than four ounces of a gel, we call that Security Theater. You'll be safe from terrorists because they won't be able to steal your banana to make a bomb, right? It is technically possible, after all.

More likely, the powers that be are taking steps not to make you safe, but to make you think you're safe. If security guards take away a plain old banana, they obviously found any hidden guns or bombs in suitcases. Didn't they?

Although in the hospital's case, I think protecting themselves was more the point.

But none of that is my point. (Rambling must be another side-effect of stress.) After they wheeled my husband away, I sat in the waiting room for hours. This was the orthopedic wing: people were getting their joints sanded and planed through incisions almost too small to warrant a band-aid. The tension level was not high. And yet, as I sat and waited and tried not to listen to Judge Judy or Sally Jesse Raphael or whoever was on the TV, I worried.

The scenario hit all the cliches bang on the head. We waited, eavesdropping on the employee at the desk as she took phone calls. Maybe it's news about my husband (wife, grandfather, whoever). I had to fight the urge to ask her if my husband was still in surgery or in the recovery room. (She was a volunteer. I doubt they'd give her the responsibility of reporting anything that could be bad.)

We could all hear the surgeon's footsteps as he walked down the hallway to the waiting room to give the news of a person's surgery. And it was a long hallway, with a hard floor. The surgeon's tread was loud and seemed to last forever. It echoed, too.

Usually he would sit down with the relative right there in the waiting room, pulling out charts and pictures and going over follow-up care while in the background Judge Judy presided over people throwing their own hissy fits. Reactions were muted: the knee was good, or maybe not so good. It wasn't open-heart surgery. Lives were not in the balance.

But when the surgeon came to give me my news, he led me out of the waiting room, partway down the echoey hallway, and into a very small consulting room containing only two chairs, a side table, and a box of tissues. We all know that means very bad news. (They should save the surgeon some time and just tape Dr. McCoy's voice saying, "He's dead, Jim.") (Sorry, tasteless joke.) (Rambling again.)

When he pulled out the pictures of ligaments and cartilage and bones and told me about the procedure, I had to stop him. "Is my husband okay? Did he make it?" The surgeon looked at me like I was nuts.

So I went back and sat with my husband until he was pronounced fit to go, and then we got in the car and went to Subway and bought dinner for the kids. He walked into the restaurant and placed the order himself. No problem. All's well.

And then today, I sat in my lawn chair and looked at the green grass and the trees and the fluffy clouds in a perfect blue sky and I cried.

Luckily for all of us a neighbor stopped by to chat and very kindly did not mention my tear-stained face. We talked about houses and the economy while my daughter romped with his dog in the yard.

And then I made dinner, and turned away a door-to-door vacuum salesman, and sat on the couch with my kids to watch The Daily Show, and cleaned the cat box. Just an ordinary day. With a few unexplainable tears.

Holy bloody eyeballs, Batman!

2009-05-18T11:50:00.005-04:00

Daily double car-line waits mean small, easy projects get done. Also I now read more books in audio than print. (Weird: I still experience disorientation when switching from audio to print and back.)

I listened to Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book while making this bloody eyeball bag, which is from the pattern "Catch His Eye" by Leathra for the The Anticraft. (Note: The book is charming, not gruesome. I highly recommend it.)

Green and brown yarns for the iris are my approximation of hazel: inner ring of brown, middle ring of green, and thin spike-stitched outer ring of brown.

Alterations: I can’t count so the bag is bigger than planned (about 80 stitches around the outside of the iris). Extra ring in iris (see above). I was free and easy with increases throughout (see “I can’t count” above). Added an extra row of red around the top. I-cord handles, threaded a bit differently (I had the wrong number of loops).

Photo notes: I cheated and stuffed the bag with fiberfill for the photo. Without it, the sides are straighter and the iris puckers around the edge. I think I’m going to make a small padded bottom for the bag to correct the iris puckering. Laser eye surgery, if you will.

I wish my family had eyes in every color so I could make each of them a different eyeball. Ah well, the rest of my tribe have plain brown eyes. (I’m stretching it a bit to call mine hazel.)

I bet my son will want a red-irised eye anyway. And my daughter? Icy-blue like a wolf. Or so I hope, for variety’s sake.

My husband wouldn’t be caught dead with a bag of any type, so maybe I’ll make his violet. Ha.

Cut

2009-05-13T12:59:00.005-04:00

photo by Esther17 on flickr under a Creative Commons license

What a thrill ----

My thumb instead of an onion.

The top quite gone

Except for a sort of hinge

Of skin,

A flap like a hat,

Dead white.

Then that red plush.
Sylvia Plath

Well, it wasn't quite that bad; in fact, it was a coin toss whether to go to the doctor or nail it down myself with band-aids. When it kept bleeding after several hours, the doctor came up heads.

A vial of Special Glue Intended Only For Skin was applied*, a band-aid duly wrapped around it, and I was on my way. Well, after having a completely embarrassing adrenalin rush ("I feel faint") in which I was instructed to lie on the floor.

Y'know, I always thought that people who got faint at the sight of blood were just chickens. That the reaction was completely under their control. Well, it isn't.

Which isn't to say I'm not a chicken. But it most definitely was not under my control.

What I did have under my control was the decision to open a stubborn bit of plastic packaging with a dull pair of scissors held like a knife, blade-side up, my hand pressing the plastic bit down onto it. If I had seen one of my kids doing this, I would have screeched at them not to be so stupid, you're going to cut yourself like that.

Well, it was (stupid) and I did (cut myself like that). D'oh!

* Isn't it ironic that the doctor's Special Glue is, in fact, superglue? It really is great at sticking to skin, as anyone who has worked with it knows (sometimes painfully so).

How about a recipe?

2009-02-07T13:41:00.005-05:00

This is not a photo of a recipe. It's a vintage picture of my husband and son at Niagara Falls. I wanted to put a picture in this post, but the food wasn't particularly photogenic. My kid is. ;-)

Here's a recipe that my kids and I enjoyed last night (hubby is in southern Florida visiting his dad). It's based on one by smitten kitchen, blanded down a bit for my kids' taste and my cupboard's lack of ingredients.

I love the smitten kitchen site. (Until just now I've been misreading it as smitten kitten. Huh.) I made one of her salads the other day, with escarole and hazelnuts, and the whole family gobbled it down. The pickled red onion was kind of like eating firecrackers, but we liked it. (In very small quantities.) Escarole is new to me. It's a pain to prepare, and there seems to be an awful lot of waste, but it tasted pretty good. In a rare move, I followed the recipe exactly, which involved finding the escarole and hazelnuts (and the pecorino romano cheese, for that matter) in the local grocery store. Even an employee didn't know if they had hazelnuts, so I had to search for them. (Baking aisle. Not with nuts in the produce section.)

Anyway, I'm not sharing that recipe, because it's hers, she does it better, and it's only a click away. (Mom, see the underlined word "salads" above? Click on it.) What I made was a bastardized version of her roasted butternut squash and couscous recipe. I trust that it is delicious, but my pantry doesn't have preserved lemons in it, and while I do have some fresh parsley (rare for me in winter, because I hate to pay for what grows plentifully in my garden), "fresh" doesn't quite describe its condition after a week in the fridge.

Also my kids have what I'll call a midwestern sense of taste. They love bland. They love spicy-hot. But strong flavors are another thing. The Girl dislikes parsley, and the Boy only recently accepted onions into his repertoire. So I was pretty sure the original recipe wouldn't fly at my table. (Too bad. I would have loved to make it as written.)

1 3/4 cups Israeli couscous (the large kind)

a butternut squash

a large sweet onion

olive oil

salt and pepper

grapes

Set oven to 475 F (246 C). Put racks on upper and lower thirds of oven.

Peel and cut the squash into 1/4" dice (standard quilt seam allowance). That's the hardest part.

Cut the onion in the shape/size you want the pieces. I cut it in quarters, then thin slices.

Cover a baking sheet with foil, the nonstick kind if you have it. Lay out another piece of foil.

Put some olive oil in a big bowl, just a slosh. Add the squash and toss till coated. Spread the squash on the foil-covered baking sheet. Salt and pepper it.

Put the onion in the greasy bowl, adding more olive oil if necessary. Spread the onion on the foil sheet. Salt and pepper it. Fold up edges to make an envelope.*

Put squash on top rack, and tuck onion packet wherever it fits.

At this point, set a big pot of salted water on to boil. While the vegetables cook, boil the couscous until tender, about 10 minutes. Drain. Also while the vegetables are cooking, wash a handful or two of grapes and cut them in half. They've got to be really tasty grapes, not sour.

Bake vegetables until squash is soft and sweet but not mushy, about 25 minutes. Turn around the baking pan halfway through if you remember. Turn the foil packet upside down while you're at it. Remove from oven.

Taste the squash. If it's soft enough but hasn't gotten that roasted sweet flavor (it happens), drizzle a tiny bit of honey over it.

Combine the couscous, squash, onion, and grapes in a bowl. Toss to mix. Add more salt and pepper if necessary.

This makes a bland, barely sweet, comforting dish. The original is probably a lot more flavorful. Oh. I was going to squeeze some lemon juice over it, but forgot.

*I suppose you could put the onion on another sheet, but my oven isn't big enough for two baking sheets.

Bubbly

2009-02-03T16:24:00.005-05:00

photo by malfet_ on flickr

under a Creative Commons license

written by my daughter during her English class:

Dear Shine,

What would I be without you? A clear sphere, obscure and unnoticed. A fragment of nothing, unseen. But with you we are a beautiful, lustrous orb of delicate light, a shimmering rainbow, a glowing sphere of joy. We would float across the world, we would visit the world from Paris to Detroit, we would drift from the bright golden ring, leaving the laughing children far behind and floating high into the sky to pose beside the sun.

I need you, Shine, to be who I am. I am an orb full of bright blue sky, and with you we are a crystal ball of flowing dreams and glittering fantasies. It won't be me and you because "me and you" makes us.

Merry Kittehs to You

2008-12-25T18:07:00.001-05:00

love to all,

Anne

What? It's December already?

2008-12-14T10:29:00.004-05:00

For Halloween the Girl was a Sage, or Shaman. She made the mask with plaster, molding it to her face.

The Boy is a pirate, or a pirate/viking (he has a viking hat, not shown here). With identities obscured to protect the innocent, we have (from left to right) a beauty queen, football player, Bill the Prince of Insufficient Light (from Dilbert), pirate, grim reaper, Sage, Roman centurion or knight, and Oracle.

Blame Montessori education for the weird/awesome costume choices.

a wee sewing project

2008-09-15T14:15:00.002-04:00

Yesterday my daughter handed me a little blue stuffed animal with one arm off. It belongs to her American history teacher, who uses this stuffed animal instead of the usual card or key as a "get out of the classroom free" token.

The teacher knows I sew, which is why she sent the stuffed animal home with my daughter for repair.

Sewing the arm back on was the work of a moment. I couldn't help adding a little shirt to keep the wee beastie warm.

And I couldn't help injecting a wee bit of political commentary. I do hope the teacher takes it in the gentle spirit in which it was given.

Stirring the Pot

2008-09-05T21:50:00.005-04:00

Isn't there something magic about old, stained recipe cards? The worse the condition, the more they were used, I'd guess.

When my grandmother moved into a nursing home, my mom went through all her stuff, giving much of it away and keeping only the treasures. Bless her, she deemed the recipe box a treasure.

A couple visits ago, I had a good long sit at the scanner and made copies of some of the recipes. Grandma was a good, utilitarian cook, content to work from printed recipes, mostly from women's magazines and the sides of processed food boxes. I don't know how many copies she had of the same bran muffin recipe, but there were a lot. It probably made finding it in the thick box of recipes an easier task if there were ten or fifteen copies of it seeded around.

I most associate Grandma with two recipes: a fussy and time-consuming but delicious nut torte, and peanut butter cookies. The nut torte is (I assume) a family heirloom and was made only on special occasions. I think I tasted it only once, but I'll never forget the rich, dense cake and buttery frosting. Mmmm, nut torte. The peanut butter cookies were, as most peanut butter cookies are, delicious. What made them special was the addition of orange juice to the recipe. I baked them many times as a kid and grew up assuming that all peanut butter cookies had orange juice in them. Since then, however, I've never come across another. (I should probably write to Cook's Illustrated and ask if they found this odd ingredient in their research on peanut butter cookies.)

When I discovered the recipe card for the cookies, I was thrilled -- and disconcerted. I'd come to the conclusion, over the years, that the orange juice must have been Grandma's secret addition. But the recipe card was not written in her hand; it was clipped from a magazine. If you'd like to try them, have a go:

Grandpa was a Renaissance man of sorts, interested in every possible subject and probably (he was a man, after all) an authority on them all. (I say that with great fondness, just so you know.) He must have driven Grandma nuts. In Grandma's collection of recipes, I found many that he typed out. (Grandma had a beautiful flowing longhand.) I wonder if he cooked these recipes, too, or gave them to Grandma to make.

I don't remember much about Grandpa, but I'm willing to bet he cooked Fidel Castro's Black Beans. As a Socialist, how could he not? I can imagine him stirring the pot and discoursing on leftist politics with his dinner guests. Stirring the pot in different ways, now that I think about it.

I did a quick internet search for the origin of this recipe, but I haven't found it yet. Until I do, I'm going to picture Mr. Castro shaking my Grandpa's hand at a political rally and laughing at his jokes. They stand a bit apart from the crowd, smoking cigars, and Fidel gets a secretive look in his eyes. He motions Grandpa closer, then surreptitiously whispers his favorite recipe, handed down through generations of Cuban laborers.

So make some Fidel Castro Black Beans for your next supper, and talk politics (any sort you like) with your dinner guests. And Fidel, if you're reading this, thank you for the marvelous recipe. I hope you don't mind that I'm passing it on.

crafty bits

2008-08-30T22:09:00.002-04:00

These were some of the Christmas gifts I made last year. The patterns were gathered from a month-long feature of quick and clever craft tutorials on the fabulous Sew, Mama, Sew! blog.

In the top picture are a tote bag, journal cover, lavender-and-rice heat pillow, zippered pouch, and placemats. They were so much fun to make, and working with fabrics I love made the process a pleasure, even through multiple gift sets under a wee bit of time pressure.

The pins are made with shrinky-dink plastic. I love this stuff, and can't even begin to think of all the things one could do with it. I mean, who would have thought of decorative heads for pins? Not me, that's for sure.

I Love My Computer

2008-08-06T11:17:00.003-04:00

Wordle

2008-07-24T19:54:00.005-04:00

Click to embiggen. (It's worth it because it links you to a gallery of wordles.)

It proves I truly am nuts. What great poetry, though:

Cat
Repairs household,
Determinedly squishing parts.
Yell, "Sit!"

Or how about this one:

Leopard, turned dwarf,
Bespeaks tipped glauca.

And

Manual old world,
Surprisingly beautiful.

Many thanks to Bad Fortune Cookie for wordling so wonderfully, I had to try it myself.

Now this is a book.

2008-07-20T20:40:00.007-04:00

This book bespeaks passion. Why in the world would one write a book about dyeing with lichens if passionate curiosity did not drive you to do it?

I can just picture the author with a still damp handful of lichens, comparing them to some dusty old manual with completely inadequate illustrations. Is it Ochrolechia tartarea? Or perhaps Ochrolechia parella? Would it impart a royal purple hue? The book remains mute, and the library yields no further clues. "But I want to know!" she wails, then sets out determinedly with pencil, sketchbook, and the completely inadequate dusty old manual to do the research herself. After months of tramping through woodlands and rocky shores, sketchbooks filled with such treasures as "Hypogymnia physodes, underside of lobe showing the lower skin ruptured," cooking pots permanently colored odd hues of brown and purple, and reams of notes ("Cetraria glauca has been included as it will give a yellow to the wool with boiling water," and ""Found in Scotland only on trees"), she settles at the typewriter to share what she has found.

I want to be this person.

p.s. Thank you, Lysne, for lending me this book. It is absolutely amazing.

Talk About a Carbon-Based Life Form

2008-07-17T19:51:00.002-04:00

This is what happens when you burn a cow.
Fortunately, I wasn't the culprit. Also fortunately, it was cooked outside on the grill, rather than in the house -- that would have smelled awful. Although that's also why it burned -- it's easy to forget there's a pan of hamburger cooking when it's outside on the grill.

we ran out of cat food this morning; or, the glories of a vegetable garden

2008-07-11T07:34:00.014-04:00

Yes, I actually sit in this chair and revel in the abundant greenness of the vegetable garden. I also weed. Check out that corn! Pole beans are climbing in the background, squash are squishing happily at center, and potatoes are rivaling the corn for Top Dog at the right. If I were sitting in that chair, I would have, from my left to my right, dwarf morning glories, zinnias, beets, carrots, and kale growing at my feet. You can't see the last three so you'll have to take my word for it. (And I'm sort of lying about the kale. A rainstorm scattered the seeds so they're growing scattershot up to four feet away from their row.)

In other news, I bring you the Apocalypse, or We Ran Out of Cat Food This Morning. It would not be overstating the case to say the cats are outraged. I am hiding from Spock because he will bite me. (Really.) They took out a bit of their frustration in thumpitting* around the house at high speed, hissing at each other. Now they are pretending to be tired, but I know I have to get to the store before noon or I will lose a couple toes.

*to thumpit: to run about the house at high speed, over furniture and through the fireplace, knocking over the garbage can in passing. "Thumpit" is onomatopoeic, being the surprisingly loud sound little cat feet make when thundering through the house. The fog creeps in on little cat feet, my Aunt Fanny.

safe in her hands

2008-06-30T12:17:00.004-04:00

Question: Why does one have children?
Answer: Staff.

The Boy is power-washing the deck. Our house has miles and miles of deck, some of it wobbly, some of it tipped, all of it needing a good scrubbing. Several years ago, the menfolk shored up the weaker parts and fixed the loose boards. With other household repairs, however, and life being what it is, cleaning and staining the deck didn't happen.

But the Boy is now 15 and full of energy. I finally have Staff.

Question: Why does one have children?
Answer: Because they continue to astound you.

A yell from the Boy brought me running to the deck, where he stood with the dripping washer turned off. "What?" I asked. "Did it break? Did you get hurt?" (Gotta love my priorities.)

He had found a beautiful leopard moth. And when my daughter rescued it, cradling it in her hands, her gentle touch and exquisite care with the fragile moth brought one of those rare moments when the world simply stops, and we revel in its beauty.

"Get me the camera!" I yelled. "Hurry! Faster!"

When the Boy resumed power-washing, the hose sprung a leak.

Ah well, it was nice while it lasted.

Are Clotheslines Retro?

2008-06-20T12:21:00.007-04:00

photo by tobyleah on flickr under a Creative Commons license

I hope not. I think they're the Next Big Thing.

My mom used to hang out the sheets when I was little. I remember the fresh, clean scent of the fabric and its crisp hand. Why has it taken me so long to put up my own clothesline?

Years ago I took my laundry to the local and extremely crowded laundromat. One had to keep a hawk eye out for machines about to be emptied or for a folding table with an efficient folder. There were lots of dirty looks and pointy elbows at that laundromat.

This was before laundromats began having amenities like a television (although watching Jerry Springer would have made the experience worse), and wi-fi access was probably just a gleam in some engineer's eye. For that matter, so was the internet. I didn't own a Walkman. I didn't know how to sew or knit. Reading a book meant missing out on newly empty machines, which wasn't worth the time lost. I believe I graded papers to pass the time, which made the experience even more dismal.

Those details came back to me only at this writing. What I have always remembered about that laundromat is the sign on the wall extolling the virtues of electric dryers. Dryers are more hygienic -- no more dust, dirt, or (horrors) bird droppings on your clothes. No more clothing faded from the sun. And the heat of the dryer magically eliminates wrinkles, so there is no more ironing. A happy housewife in dress and heels smiled at the shiny appliance. Didn't I want to be like her?

Lord, no. Even though I smirked at the sign and lamented the lost clothesline, it sadly never occurred to me to use one. I want to go back in time and beat myself about the head and shoulders. (And hand myself a sewing needle, thread, and a bit of cloth.)

There is an art to clotheslines. A bit of experimentation, and sneaky looks at other people's clotheslines, taught me to hang shirts from the bottom and pants from the top, unzipped and with pockets pulled out to allow air to circulate inside. Towels and sheets need extra clothespins or you will find them in the perennial garden. (It took me a week to find one of my son's shirts behind the daylilies.) On sunny, breezy days I can put out two loads, but when it's still or humid, there will be damp towels and wet waistbands at the end of the day.

And how on earth does one manage the clothespins? Take a shirt. I pin one side, which twists under the weight of the rest of the shirt, and try to get a clothespin out of my mouth and onto the other edge of the shirt. Then I have to re-pin the first side, which has wrinkled under the pin. Then back to the laundry basket for more pins before wrestling with a towel. The kids have a good laugh when they see me trying to hold the towel to the line with my head while reaching for a clothespin.

Thank heaven for free patterns on the internet. Life is now a bit easier, with a retro-styled clothespin apron:
Tied in with bow:

In keeping with the ideals of conserving time and energy, I tried to make the apron entirely from materials I already had. In the end I did have to buy two dollars' worth of brown fabric at Wal-Mart (I know, I know) for the binding.

The pattern is from Lucy at My Byrd House and I love it. The only changes I made were to simplify the waistband and change fabrics at the bow-end of the ties.

Warning: Cat Butt, Possibly NSFW

2008-06-13T13:45:00.006-04:00

We start with flowers because they are beautiful to look at, unlike cat butts.

(Apologies for the lousy picture quality.) Look at how flat Summer is. She melts into the table.

She melts into the table because her legs are not properly tucked under. Summer never tucks anything under. Weren't we all specifically taught not to sit like this?

If you are scarred by the Cat Butt, take another look at the flowers. They are my Unicorn Chaser for you.

Twelve pictures describe me

2008-06-03T13:29:00.007-04:00

Twelve pictures describe me, originally uploaded by normanack.

attributions:
1. Queen Anne's Lace - Retro, 2. TV Dinner, 3. Memory Map: Farmington Hills, MI, 4. Dissocactus phylanthoides, 5. peter_weller, 6. Jasmine Tea Jelly, 7. 'So what are you doing this Australia Day ?', 8. three is not a crowd, 9. "Timemachines", 10. Prenent un Bany. Taking a Bath., 11. my private portico, 12. Miss Em leads the pack

I found this exercise on poppalina's blog and just had to give it a whirl. Enter your answers to the following questions in flickr's search box, then choose an image from the first page of results.

1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. Favorite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favorite dessert?
9. What you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. One Word to describe you.
12. Your flickr name.

Hey Mom, can you figure out my answers from the pictures? Then you try it!

You Probably Don't Want Pictures of Dirt

2008-05-31T19:40:00.005-04:00

So here's a flower on my golden chain tree.

The aforementioned dirt is the vegetable garden, which is tremendously exciting but currently not much to look at. The sorry little rags of green are the beans, squash, and tomatoes, newly transplanted from their pots. They weren't real happy about the transition and are currently sulking. To add insult to injury I planted a seed next to each plant just in case it croaks.

Four rows of corn and three of potatoes still look like plain dirt. Where's the excitement? I pre-sprouted the corn seeds and let the potatoes develop leafy little eyes before planting. (That counts as excitement to me.)

I had near zero germination on my basil seeds. Four packets, four different types of basil (and not that weird cinnamon or lemon basil, or -- heaven forbid -- purple ruffles, but good green cooking basil) and I got two measly seedlings. We had to go to four different stores and nurseries today to find sufficient basil, and a sorry lot it was, probably because of the frost earlier this week.

Despite how grumpy this all sounds, I am thrilled. It's not just that I'm nuts, although if you saw me printing out labels for each plant (Which font? That required thought. I chose Verdana because it sounds green.), cutting them out with a rotary cutter and ruler, and taping them onto the blank metal markers (with exactly six pieces of tape on each) you'd know that one of my oars is not fully in the water.

I've been trying to put my finger on what makes this garden so exciting and important to me, and it isn't the garden. It's that the whole family is working together on it. Although we all took a part in each task, my daughter and I did most of the planting, and my husband and son did the much of the grunt work on the fence.

And we all had fun with the tools. Red Green had it right:

If at first it doesn't work, force it. If it still doesn't work, switch to power tools.

You should have seen my son with the electric drill. He got to drill through metal, which made loud and horrible and terribly exciting sounds. I, in contrast, like hanging the tools on the pegboard in the garage, each in its own assigned space. My daughter and husband take a more practical approach: tools exist to get the job done. They don't care if they're excitingly sharp or noisy or otherwise of note, they just use them. Weird.

And Now, A Cat.

2008-05-23T14:51:00.003-04:00

Here is Summer, sleeping on the piano. She likes to lie down on the piano, on her feeding table, on the counter, on the floor in the middle of the hall. She has perfected the lie-down.

Note, however, that she is not lying down gracefully. She is sprawling. Summer is not a graceful cat. In fact, she is the only clumsy cat I have ever known. In the early days, I wondered why she never jumped onto any surface. After a few crashes, it became clear. It is much safer to claw one's way up to the counter or lap than to risk a spectacular fall.

I had already become accustomed to random crashing noises around the house, as Spock, her partner-in-crime, loves to push things, ever so delicately, with his paws. Lego creation? Crash! Pile of papers? Crash! Box of screws? Crash!

With Summer, the sound is the same but the reason is different. After clawing her way to the top of the bookshelf, she steps on the pile of papers and CRASH! There goes the pile. And there goes the cat.

She gets onto her feeding table in a two-step process: onto the garbage can, then onto her table. Except when the garbage can is empty, and tips over as she climbs onto it. CRASH!

Yesterday she tried to bridge the gap between her table and the counter. Literally. She had her front paws on the counter's edge and her back paws on her table. Time seemed to stop as we watched her, stretched and suspended, try to figure out what to do. Can't go forward, can't go back. CRASH!

Summer is a pushy cat. Here is my current knitting project: a cat nest. Basically a flat-bottomed bowl, the knit and felted cat nest is a favorite with most cats. I will have to make two, of course, and had planned the first for Spock. Blue and brown are nice understated and masculine colors for my logical Spock. Summer was going to get something in a bright red. Summer, however, disagrees. The first bed is for her, and I'd better be quick about finishing it.

Here is Summer, sleeping. She sleeps a lot. (After all, she has to practice her lie-down positions.) She sleeps a lot because she is up all night scratching on my son's bedroom door and meowing for him to let her in. More precisely, she wants him to get up and feed her. Summer loves her food.

Summer will eat anything. Food left on the counter is fair game. Plate scrapings in the sink are fair game. Spock's food doesn't even bear mentioning; of course it is Summer's. Jamie, the golden retriever, cleans his bowl so quickly that she doesn't have a chance at it, but freakazoid Emily likes to eat her food in several go-rounds. Now, when she leaves her bowl, Summer is there to finish it off.

I'm glad Summer is our cat. Why anyone would have given her up is beyond me.

Earthy Not Earth Day

2008-04-22T21:13:00.006-04:00

Well, it wasn't technically Earth Day, but on Sunday we made a vegetable garden.

We didn't plant seeds. We didn't buy seedlings. We took a hole in the earth and filled it with compost and dirt, with a little help from the neighbor's Bobcat.

The project began about four years ago when we chose the sunniest section of the yard for a vegetable patch. We live in mid-Michigan, which has hard-packed clay, nearly pure sand, and occasionally beautifully rich soil located seemingly at random. Our sunny patch turned out to be the first variety.

You can make pottery out of this soil. All spring it's gooshy; by summer it's rock hard. My husband painstakingly dug out a rectangle about 40 by 60 feet and two feet deep. We began to line it with rocks for drainage and about the time we contemplated adding pipes, the whole project got out of hand.

So for the next few years it was the Clay Pit, which is much more fun than a sand box because the things you build are nearly permanent. The kids would get out there with pickaxes and shovels and a hose, creating rivers and mountains and dams and whole undulating landscapes. They'd be at it for hours, returning to the house in shoes caked with inches of clay. I'd warn their friends' parents that their kids would come home really dirty but tired and happy, and they did. I highly recommend a Clay Pit in your yard if you have children.

This year, to my kids' dismay, I insisted on creating a garden. (Luckily the Clay Pit is so big that I only commandeered half of it.) We had some rock-hard clay mountains left from the original excavation and two big old compost piles to work with. It really did take a Bobcat to break apart the clay mountains, which we layered with more-or-less rotted compost in a giant brown lasagne. My husband operated the Bobcat; I loaded and unloaded the compost from the tractor's trailer; my daughter learned to drive said tractor. My son helped spread the clay, which was the most difficult job, disappearing at odd intervals to work on his own project, digging a drainage ditch and lining it with clay. He always has marched to a different drummer.

I became closely acquainted with the compost pile. We are lazy composters, taking grass clippings and weeds and waste from the perennial beds and dead leaves and, well, piling them up. That's it. We don't mix it or water it or maintain a carbon-to-nitrogen ratio. Unsurprisingly, the result is not a homogenous mixture of soft, crumbly, dark brown soil. It's more like flattened mats of leaves, pockets of dry-as-dust grass, curiously wet and slimy areas, and poofs of white powder (mildew?) that rise in clouds when I forked into the pile. Compost has many faces, all wildly intriguing but none very pretty. Crawling through the whole mottled mess were lots and lots of fat earth worms, so something must be going right inside our Compost Failure.

Next weekend we'll dig into our older compost pile that lives in the woods on the other side of the yard. The innards of this pile actually look like compost should, nice and soft and rich and loamy, kind of like a great big brownie. If the weather is good, we should be able to put a nice layer of this stuff on the new vegetable bed and rake it smooth. We may even get out the electric fence kit I got for my birthday back when we first dreamed up the garden. (The deer here are satanic.)

Oh. What will we plant? I know it sounds nutty, but a part of me doesn't want to plant anything at all. I am so pleased with the building of it, with the dirt and rotted this-and-that, the layers of earth, that I don't want to mess up its simplicity and purity. Maybe I'll just have a dirt garden.

A gratuitous flower photo. After all, it's spring. :-)

fingers crossed

2008-04-05T12:39:00.007-04:00

She reached through the bars with her soft white paw and gently batted my daughter's hand. "I am a Good Kitty," she said. "Take me home!"

We made inquiries, visited her several times, and finally brought her home. The car trip elicited the most pathetic mewing. We promised her that it was a temporary arrangement.

Summer is a lovely cat, with soft and fluffy fur, double-toed paws, and a spot on her nose that makes her look silly. She took no notice of the dogs and soon made friends with Spock, neither cowering from nor resisting his curious overtures. She knows her litter box (a Most Important Feature in a cat) and arrived pre-spayed and with a full complement of shots. She may possibly have brought some tiny insectoid friends, but a trip to the vet after the weekend will put paid to those little interlopers.

Summer is in the house, and Spring is in the yard. We have crocuses, snowdrops, robins, red-winged blackbirds, and a bluebird. A few trees are lacy with buds. And there is sun!

Today we will rake the yard and set the gardens to rights. If we find garter snake babies, we will know spring has fully arrived.

Top 10 Lost Items

2008-03-28T18:26:00.004-04:00

(click to view larger)

10. ruler
9. stitch markers
8. the right size needle
7. crochet hook
6. pattern
5. how-to book
4. pen
3. pencil
2. scissors
1. glasses!

Perhaps most important, on the other side of the chair, a clean table top waiting for my cup of tea.

Happy Spring!

2008-03-25T12:22:00.003-04:00

Male Red-winged Blackbird, originally uploaded by Greg7 and shared under

a Creative Commons license. Thanks, Greg7!

It's snowing today, and it snowed yesterday, and I'm still routinely wearing my winter coat inside the house to save on the heating bill. (I'm cheap.)

Today, however, I saw two red-winged blackbirds. The return of these lovely birds means spring to me, regardless of the ice in the forecast for this afternoon.

It's not the angle of the sun, or the lengthening days that brings this change in season. For me, it's the sunshine on these birds' wings.

Happy Easter!

2008-03-22T22:22:00.003-04:00

Happy Easter, originally uploaded by tifotter under a Creative Commons license.

I wish you renewed spirit and a joyous sense of humor at this time of rebirth.

Popovers

2008-02-29T15:27:00.005-05:00

Popovers have always been a bit of a tricky wicket for me. Sometimes they pop; sometimes they don't. Sometimes they stick to the pan so tenaciously that I'm tempted to take an axe to them. Occasionally, when I'm counting on them most, they're hard little rocks.

And sometimes, unexpectedly, they rise gloriously, and when they do, popovers are sublime.

How to achieve the perfect popover? I'm convinced it has more to do with gremlins than science. Although the concept is simple -- flour, eggs, milk, butter, and salt -- the execution has a lot of variables. Must the ingredients be at room temperature? Do you mix the batter vigorously, or treat it tenderly as if it were muffins or biscuits? Do you let the batter rest? Do you pre-heat the pan? Change the temperature mid-bake? And what sort of pan do you use: a deep popover pan, a regular muffin tin, or (as I used above) a tin sized for jumbo muffins?

Recently and with great reluctance I further increased the variables by revising the popover to conform to a low-cholesterol and low-saturated fat diet (the reasons for which are tragic but boring). So, no egg yolks and no butter. I feared total, dismal failure.

Check it out. They popped! And the taste and texture were great. Sure, they're a little less eggy, and someone with taste buds more perceptive than mine would call out the missing butter. But for me, they're divine.

Cross Your Fingers and Squint Popovers (to make them pop)

3 egg whites

1 1/4 cups half-percent milk

1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour (I have not yet tried whole-wheat, but I will.)

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon zero-trans-fat butter substitute, melted (I used Smart Balance)

Whisk together the egg whites and milk. Stir in the flour and salt, then the melted non-butter. Let the bowl sit on top the stove while the oven pre-heats to 450 degrees Fahrenheit. (If your stove is like mine, it has a warm spot, good for bread dough and popover batter.) Pour batter into a greased 6-hole jumbo muffin tin and put in oven. Immediately reduce heat to 400 degrees. Bake 25 minutes or until they're browning and smell good. Remove from pan and eat immediately with maple syrup or jam, burning your fingers and mouth but enjoying every single bite.

Mmm Mmm Good. Sort of.

2008-02-19T16:23:00.005-05:00

photo by Northern Miniatures by Amanda on flickr,

under a Creative Commons license

After reading selections from Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food and The Omnivore's Dilemma, a new fervor for mostly-vegetarian cooking has assailed me. Helped along by the surprise gift of How To Cook Everything Vegetarian from my mom (thanks, Mom!!) I've had lots of fun planning out menus and serving simple, fresh, and delicious meals.

Well, not always simple. Yesterday I made homemade tomato soup. It sounds easy, but let me tell you, any soup recipe that involves roasting and straining and food processing in addition to stove-top cooking is not a simple recipe to me. And the clean-up was daunting for a simple bowl of soup. (Note: I probably used more pans than called for because I'm a lousy cook.)

The result? It was . . . okay. Kinda like straight tomato sauce. (Additional note: I should probably not expect gourmet taste from store-brand ingredients.)

It was perfectly good soup. It tasted like tomatoes. And I'm somewhat ashamed to admit that I prefer the taste of Campbell's. To be perfectly fair, I should make the recipe again, using high-quality ingredients. But I'm not going to, at least not right now. One can, one pot, and one bowl. That's awfully hard to argue with.

Poetry in Honor of St. Brigid

2008-02-02T18:20:00.000-05:00

photo by phirleh on flickr, shared

under a Creative Commons license

There is a tradition among bloggers to post a poem in honor of St. Brigid each February 2. I love poetry, and often read it to my children. While my son groans, he has written a poem or two himself; and my daughter loves to write poetry.

Back in the day I took many poetry courses and even taught a few as a graduate student. And yet the wonderful thing about poetry is that I am no more an authority than any other person. While poetry is sometimes accused of being obscure or accessible to only a rarified few, I think it exists for everybody. It is ours, and we don't need anyone to tell us what it means. If anything defines poetry, I think it's that it speaks directly to the reader. (My old professors would probably faint.)

Being a nosy person, I had to look up St. Brigid. She was Irish, perhaps the daughter of a pagan chieftain and a Christian Pictish slave. (Accounts vary.) According to this article, "Brigid was given the same name as one of the most powerful goddesses of the pagan religion which her father Dubhthach practised; Brigid was the goddess of fire, whose manifestations were song, craftsmanship, and poetry, which the Irish considered the flame of knowledge." Which is interesting, because before I looked up St. Brigid, I had chosen this poem by Anne Bradstreet.

Here followes some verses upon the burning of our house, July 10th, 1666. Copyed out of a loose paper.

In silent night when rest I took,
For sorrow neer I did not look,
I waken'd was with thundring nois
And Piteous shreiks of dreadfull voice.
That fearfull sound of fire and fire,
Let no man know is my Desire.

I, starting up, the light did spye,
And to my God my heart did cry
To strengthen me in my Distresse
And not to leave me succourlesse.
Then coming out beheld a space,
The flame consume my dwelling place.

And, when I could no longer look,
I blest his Name that gave and took,
That layd my goods now in the dust:
Yea so it was, and so 'twas just.
It was his own: it was not mine;
ffar be it that I should repine.

He might of All justly bereft,
But yet sufficient for us left.
When by the Ruines oft I past,
My sorrowing eyes aside did cast,
And here and there the places spye
Where oft I sate, and long did lye.

Here stood that Trunk, and there that chest;
There lay that store I counted best:
My pleasant things in ashes lye,
And them behold no more shall I.
Under thy roof no guest shall sitt,
Nor at thy Table eat a bitt.

No pleasant tale shall 'ere be told,
Nor things recounted done of old.
No Candle 'ere shall shine in Thee,
Nor bridegroom's voice ere heard shall bee.
In silence ever shalt thou lye;
Adeiu, Adeiu; All's vanity.

Then streight I gin my heart to chide,
And did thy wealth on earth abide?
Didst fix thy hope on mouldring dust,
The arm of flesh didst make thy trust?
Raise up thy thoughts above the skye
That dunghill mists away may flie.

Thou hast an house on high erect
Fram'd by that mighty Architect,
With glory richly furnished,
Stands permanent tho: this bee fled.
'Its purchased, and paid for too
By him who hath enough to doe.

A Prise so vast as is unknown,
Yet, by his Gift, is made thine own.
Ther's wealth enough, I need no more;
Farewell my Pelf, farewell my Store.
The world no longer let me Love,
My hope and Treasure lyes Above.

It isn't the Christian sentiment that I find most striking about this poem -- it's the plaintive tone, and the story it tells. What did she lose in that house fire? Did she have a library of precious books? Did she lose her own poetry? Perhaps they were her store, her pleasant things. Maybe it was some jewelry brought from England, or letters from people she loved but would never see again.

I read, some time ago, about a brave soul who gave away nearly everything she had, keeping only forty things. I wonder what forty things I would keep, and what Anne Bradstreet would have kept. I wonder how close our lists would be.

It Snowed!

2008-01-02T13:15:00.000-05:00

Dogs, particularly Golden Retrievers, truly understand snow. Snow is to be gloried in, running and digging and rolling in it. Snow smells good to me; I can't even imagine how intoxicating its scent must be to a dog.

Of course here in Michigan it snows a lot. And it has to be shoveled. (Snow is a lot heavier than one might think.) But Jamie reminds me that every snowfall must be savored.

If you have snow, enjoy it. And if you don't, enjoy the pictures, and be glad you're snow-shovel free.

Peace, Love, and Harmony To All

2007-12-31T10:40:00.001-05:00

Peace Love Harmony To All, originally uploaded by gooseflesh.

I have zillions of New Year's resolutions. My favorites are the ones I made for my husband. He got two computer-generated lists to pin to the wall.

I have resolutions for my kids, too. They will Finish What They Start, Pick Up What They Put Down, and Clean Up After Themselves (mostly that last one).

For myself? There are the usuals: lose more weight, exercise more, walk the dogs daily (a bit difficult on our never-plowed, icy-when-it's-not-muddy dirt road), make lots of money, transform my rat-hole of a house into a showplace (or at least make it comfortable, clean, and well-lit), and donate about a metric ton of our possessions to Goodwill.

More serious, if not necessarily more obtainable, I'd like to reduce my family's carbon footprint. The best resource I've found is The Consumer's Guide to Effective Environmental Choices, which recommends what actions we can take to most effectively reduce our impact on the planet. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists (who wrote the book), the most important action I can take, eclipsing all others, is to drive less.

Unfortunately we have chosen a lifestyle that centers around driving: we live in the country and commute to work and school. Short of selling the house and moving to a small home in the city, we are stuck with an enormous oily footprint.

So most of my efforts are largely symbolic: eliminating petroleum products wherever else I can. I had no idea, for instance, that laundry and dish detergents are typically petroleum-based. The mountain of petroleum-derived plastic recyclables that we haul away from our house each month (in the car, of course) doesn't make me feel any better. (Why is it so difficult to find refills for those thick, heavy containers, seemingly designed for permanence rather than waste reduction?)

Meanwhile, if saving the planet (surely a worthy goal) takes up most of my efforts, I am perhaps not focusing where I might make the biggest impact: on my children. I want them to be the most thoughtful, compassionate, responsible, and useful people they can be. What concrete actions I can take towards this goal will be my real resolution. I'm not sure what actions these will be, but this year I will try to find out and do what I can.

Rats and mice. I was just going to eat fewer cookies. . . .

a little holiday music

2007-12-22T17:52:00.001-05:00

I'm shamelessly scamming this video from another site (Mason-Dixon Knitting). It's wonderful and I hope you enjoy it.

tricked!

2007-11-01T19:36:00.001-04:00

skunk, originally uploaded by aquave1vet and shared through a Creative Commons license.

Trick-or-treating went very well -- lots of friends, lots of candy, lots of fun.

But a trick awaited us at home: our dog Emily got skunked!

Thank heavens I'd stocked up on hydrogen peroxide for my safer, gentler cleaning routine -- I used a gallon of it on her, along with baking soda and dish soap, then followed it up with a wash in dog shampoo.

The peroxide/baking soda mixture works amazingly well -- Emily was essentially odor-free after just one wash. It just took me awhile to realize that the one spot of elusive scent that remained was on her snout.

Swabbing down the bathroom, then using odor-neutralizing spray throughout the house capped off the trick. We went to bed smelling not exactly like roses, but not of skunk, either. A good thing, too, as Emily sleeps on my pillow.

Please note that this cute fellow is not my skunk. I didn't get a picture myself; this one is from Aquave1vet on flickr.

Why I Can't Finish My Quilt

2007-09-28T22:23:00.001-04:00

There's a large, furry weight on my quilt, anchoring the cloth so that it won't go through my sewing machine.
This weighty thing also takes lightning-swift swipes at the thread, the needle, and my hand, which disturbs the sewing zen.
It only disappears when the long, unattached binding strip, trailing across the desk and floor, attracts its attention, and its claws.
I love my Spock-cat.

kitten problems

2007-09-22T11:24:00.001-04:00

We are not doing well with kittens.

Spock (one-year-old silver tabby) is fine (probably -- see Isis, below).

Citrus (12-week old orange tabby) was diagnosed with a previous spinal injury that left him gimpy and not reliable in the litterbox. Our vet adopted him from us and is rehabilitating him for placement in a home that can handle his special needs. (I love my vet!)

Isis, Citrus's replacement, (10-week-old tortoise shell) tested positive for feline leukemia. I didn't realize how bad this is -- basically, it's a death sentence*. And it's extremely infectious to other cats. She is currently isolated in a bathroom until we get the results from a more accurate laboratory test. If that is positive (and the vet says it almost certainly will be), we'll have to euthanize her.

The vet feels that Spock's risk of having contracted it from her is low, as he is older and more resistant, and has only spent one week with her. Nevertheless we will have to have him retested in four to six months.

So it's kind of a hard weekend, with Isis basically on death row until we get the second test results. It should come in Monday or Tuesday. In the meantime, we are trying to give her love and attention without focusing on the outcome. She deserves all the love she can get.

Think good thoughts for my daughter, please. She is taking it hard.

*I understand that one can keep a cat with feline leukemia comfortable as long as possible -- apparently 85% die within three years -- but not with other cats free of the disease. We don't think it's fair to Spock to keep her, or fair to Isis to keep her in a very confined, separate space long-term. While there is a small chance that she could overcome the infection, it is only a small chance, and would take months before we knew for sure.

ETA: On September 24, the second test came back positive, and we put Isis down. My vet was wonderful, treating Isis tenderly and crying right along with me.

what time is it?

2007-09-19T12:55:00.000-04:00

Photo by Duncan McNeil (dmcneil) on flickr.com, under a Creative Commons license.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

So am I nuts, or what?

This morning I had coffee with some very good friends in a local cafe. It's brand new, with minimal decorating. Other than furniture and a small fireplace, the most prominent piece in the room is an enormous clock, probably 2 1/2 feet across, visible from every seat and table (not the clock above -- that one is in Scotland).

I've been there four times. Every time, the clock has shown the wrong time. It's not just a little off -- it's way off, not even close to the hour or minute.

The first time, I figured the place was new, with many details not yet worked out (want cream or milk in your self-serve coffee? You have to ask for it. The cashier hands you a gallon jug.).

By the fourth time, I was amused and a little irritated. I'm enjoying a coffee, staring at an enormous clock face which tells me it is 4:24 in the afternoon. Huh. I thought it was more like 9 in the morning. Silly me.

It's not important, just disconcerting. So today I timidly asked the cashier if she could maybe set the clock to the proper time.

She looked at me like I was nuts. "It's decorative," she said. "It doesn't need to be set."

I hemmed a bit and commented that it was running, so would it be too difficult to just set it to the right time? "I don't have the authority to do that," she replied.

Um, perhaps the manager could set it? "He doesn't have that authority. Only Corporate does."

I must have looked astonished, because she got defensive. "Look," she said, "we figure everyone has a watch or a cell phone. No one needs to look at the clock for the time."

I was speechless.

But am I nuts?

(p.s. You still have to ask for the gallon jug to put white in your coffee.)

kitty video

2007-09-08T13:52:00.000-04:00

Nothing extraordinary here, just our cats being cute.

Citrus, the little orange kitten, has some congenital problems that make it difficult for him to walk,* so it warms my heart to see him having fun.

*The vet assures me he's not in pain, and he can walk, albeit a bit unsteadily.

Thrifty

2007-09-07T19:13:00.001-04:00

My mother-in-law passed on last year. She was a woman of remarkable generosity and talent. As the wife of a Navy officer, she moved her family across the country -- and an ocean -- many times with efficiency and grace. And she was thrifty: she could squeeze a dime till it screamed, let alone squeaked.

One of her talents was sewing, from cushions to tailored suits. And by going through her sewing supplies, I'm awed once again by her thriftiness. Several spools had different threads on them, just dabs of each. I'm guessing that she wound leftover bobbin thread onto empty spools to save for the next time she needed that color.

She saved every snap and fastener, even if its mate were gone. Perhaps she saved them for mending, or just from habit.
And there were jars upon boxes of buttons, sorted by color and sometimes type: I wonder what she used the purple buttons for. Clearly most of the buttons were used, cut from old clothing. Somebody must have worn a lot of shirts with little white buttons!

I'm sorting through the threads, buttons, notions, needles, and fabrics, choosing some to keep and some to pass on to others. (If anyone needs grey buttons, I think I have several pounds of them.) While I don't keep my thread ends, I am going to put one of the multi-colored spools on my sewing table to remind me of my mother-in-law, her talents, and her thrift.

Fear the Kitten

2007-08-25T19:32:00.000-04:00

Today we received two new family members. My daughter has longed for a cat for years now, since our last cat died of lymphoma. So we planned, and read up on cats, and finally made a trip to the shelter.
Meet Spock.

Nothing to fear in Spock. According to my son, this cat commanded us with his eyes to take him home. He purred and rubbed against our fingers through the cage bars and told us he would be a very pleasant companion.
And so he has proven to be, in the space of an afternoon. He made his name known on the car ride home, perhaps a record for our fastest-named pet. And after a brief adjustment period in an unused hallway, Spock made peace with the dogs and found his bathroom, his food dish, the couch, and our hearts.
This one-year-old kitten also had the grace to arrive neutered and with his rabies inoculation. What a thoughtful fellow!

Fear and trembling, however, may now ensue:

She looks harmless enough, this darling eight-week-old tabby kitten with a big purr, rabbit-soft fur, and the cutest little paws. You can't tell from this picture just how small she is: this is one tiny little kitten. The "awww" factor is high here. She grabbed my daughter's heart as soon as we walked into the shelter.
Citrus, as she is now named, told our dogs quite firmly and loudly that They Are Not Welcome In Her Presence. I have never heard a growl this loud from any cat. She also has a fearsome hiss and lightning-strike paws. While the dogs have learned not to approach her, just the sight of them arouses a constant low humming growl in her tiny little body.
Luckily she likes us just fine. We are making allowances, as she is so young and so small. It must be quite frightening to enter a household with animals many times larger than herself.
In the meantime, however, Fear the Kitten. She can roar.

Grandmother's Granny Squares

2007-08-07T13:37:00.001-04:00

When my father-in-law moved to a smaller place recently, he gave us a lifetime's worth of treasures. Months later, we are still fitting them into our house. Wait till I show you the delicate crocheted lace! There is also a garage full of tools, but they're for my husband's blog, if he ever starts one (heh).

My daughter and I were going through one of the boxes a few weeks ago and pulled out this colorful crocheted throw. As my husband's grandmother was an accomplished needlewoman, we believe it to be her work.

At first glance (and whiff), I wondered if it was worth restoring. There were at least fifteen holes, some of them quite large, and it was dirty with age and smelled very strongly of mothballs. But daughter was entranced (and so was I) so restoration ensued.

First came several trips through the washing machine. This removed the dirt, but not the smell. I put it outside in the sun for a day. What a miraculous transformation! The odor dissipated, leaving a mild yarny aroma that isn't unpleasant at all.

Next I attempted to crochet replacement squares. After three or four, I came up with a recipe that, while not exactly the same, looks nearly identical and is the same size.
(Note: the three on the right are original centers that I salvaged. I just had to add the black border.)

The next part terrified me: cutting out the damaged segments. Nine squares needed removal; in the end, I cut into two more by mistake, so that brought the total to eleven (this doesn't include small holes that I'll simply darn).
In theory, this should have been easy: find the joining thread and cut it. But over the years, the yarn had become fuzzy and matted. It was difficult to distinguish the yarn used for joining from the yarn of the blocks. And of course, all that yarn is black. I only cut into surrounding blocks twice, which isn't too bad, though I did say a few choice words. ("I didn't say that," I told my children. "No, you didn't," they agreed.)

I have asked myself if it's really worth putting all this time into repairing an obviously worn-out blanket. It does have sentimental value, but it really is extremely worn. (There are many, many more holes. If I were going to do a proper job, I'd remove much more of the black yarn and re-crochet it. As it is, I'm going to take black yarn and just darn the heck out of it.) But yesterday, my daughter came over and sat down by the blanket, spread out on the floor while I looked for holes. She pointed out differences in the yarn between squares, and even in the same square. We thought about who might have made those replacements, and when. We counted the blocks made out of a single variegated yarn, versus those done in two or three colors. We picked our favorite colors and styles. My daughter likes the orange ones because they look like flickering flames. I'm partial to the three-color ones done in shade gradations.

So much thought and work went into this blanket over the years, by more than one pair of hands. I love the story it tells, and the questions it raises. And I hope it will last one more generation.

hang in there . . .

2007-07-19T10:55:00.001-04:00

while the world reads Harry Potter. I just got my copy today but am saving it for vacation up north. We leave Monday morning -- I hope to be reading on the beach by mid afternoon.

perfect summer day

2007-07-10T22:28:00.000-04:00

But first, a joke:

Guns don't kill people. People kill BANG oops.

(You kind of have to say it out loud.) It's from one of my favorite TV shows, This Hour Has 22 Minutes on Canadian television.

Today was gorgeous: sunny and hot, but with a nice occasional breeze. I planned to spend a good bit of time power washing the deck, but machines don't like me and it quit. (Bad switch. We've already replaced it once. You have to mail order a replacement. Don't get me started.)

So the kids and I swam in the pool, and played with the dogs, and I put new syrup in the hummingbird feeders, and it was just just a bit too hot to work in the gardens, and I really wanted to sew. So I took the sewing machine and ironing board outside.

It was wonderful. The birds weren't at all discomfited and kept up a steady presence at the feeders. I was surprised that even a very gentle breeze made surprisingly loud background music for my sewing. It was peaceful and simply wonderful.

The kids saw me having so much fun that they came out of the air-conditioning to join me. They made their own dinners (peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, canned ravioli, and hummus on crackers) and brought them out. We sat and ate and again I wondered why we don't do this more often.

Tomorrow is supposed to be thunderstormy, so we'll probably be inside. I'm so glad we had today.

horse camp

2007-06-28T11:22:00.000-04:00

My daughter is at horse camp this week and we are both loving it. She rides and grooms and sweeps and cleans tack and does lots of other horsey things. The kids also swim, use paddle boats, drive golf carts, fish, and make crafts. One rainy day they listened to a tribal story told by a young man of Native American heritage who works at the stable.

My daughter's assigned horse is a sleek chestnut quarter horse who is 16.3 hands high. Very high. I'm used to butty little quarter horses, not tall lovelies like this one. He seems to be a good sort, gentle and with reasonably good brakes and moderate acceleration.

The staff is amused at my constant picture-taking ("She's still taking pictures of the horses!") but very tolerant. And there is so much to photograph: barn swallows in their nests, baby bunnies, miniature horses, shetland ponies, ducks, chickens, hatching eggs, a llama, and of course horses.

Here's a tiny little pony:
And some chickens:
How about some baby bunnies?
And another gratuitous horse picture:
I have been told that my daughter is a natural rider and should have private lessons. While I am impressed with her early skills, I view this more as a sales tactic, soon to be followed by "your daughter really needs a horse -- I have the perfect one for her." Yup, right. Not gonna happen.

One of my husband's co-workers urged him to buy a horse: she has horses she got for free (rescues and retirees) and claims she spends only $600 per year on each one for food, boarding, shoeing, and routine shots. My husband still remembers the $15 bird I bought that racked up $700 in vet bills (bird intensive care is expensive) and isn't buying her argument, or a horse. I must have become an adult when I wasn't paying attention, because against every fiber of my being, I agree with him. (Sob.)

I found the llama very amusing. I can see why a llama played the starring role in The Emperor's New Groove: this animal has attitude to spare. Check it out:

This is the first picture I took during camp, and it is my favorite: the counselors bringing the horses in from the field for the campers' first lessons.
N.B. Camp was last week -- I couldn't figure out how to upload a video until just now. And how could I deprive you of a grainy video of a llama chewing? C'mon now. That's art.

N.B.B. Next post: art camp.

flowers for you and seven random things

2007-06-02T12:24:00.000-04:00

These flowers are for you, whether you read my blog regularly or are here on a momentary visit. I welcome all three of you! (or maybe four if net traffic is heavy!) The flowers are especially for those who have no garden of their own.

Peonies are perfect garden plants. Their blooms are enormous and showy, implying arcane knowledge and diligent care on the part of their brilliant gardener. The truth is that they have few pests or diseases, are extraordinarily long-lived, and need no maintenance. What could be better?

My friend Lysne has tagged me with a meme, my first: seven random things about myself. Well,
1. My one true talent is spelling. I can spell virtually any word. This amazes my children, who are geniuses in many areas, but can't spell their way out of a paper bag.

2. I notice little things, while the big ones breeze right on by. A tiny little bloom, a shaft of sunlight, a clever turn of phrase -- these capture my full attention while the enormous weed, coming thunderstorm, or main thesis might escape me entirely.

3. My house exists in my imagination far more strongly than it does in reality. I see my living room with its blue walls, taupe-colored furniture, bamboo flooring, intriguing art and objets d'art, and enormous coffee table for books and tea and feet. Others see the builder's white walls, mashed-down carpeting, ratty mismatched furniture, garage-sale bull's horns as the only decoration, and tiny little apartment-sized coffee table that really can't support more than one book and a small foot. Someday vision and reality will match.

4. I'm pretty good with gardens, but any vegetal matter in my house is a dead plant walking. Usually several months without water do them in. The few plants I've watered have usually drowned as thanks for my efforts.

5. In grade school, middle and high school, and even college I was one of the smartest students, earning awards and accolades and a disgustingly high grade point average. In graduate school, I was suddenly the dumb one. Even my closest friends called me the dumb one. I didn't mind it from them, but my self-esteem took a real beating during those years.

6. I'm fascinated by vampire lore, and read any vampire novels I can get my paws on. (There's a lot of dreck out there.) I want more than almost anything to write my own.

7. Number One on my lifelong want list has always been and continues to be a horse. I'm an awful rider -- I really want a horse as a pet and a friend.

Hey Harriet, what are seven random things about you?

May's flowers

2007-05-10T21:08:00.000-04:00

The day begins with walking through wet grass
In a slow progress, to visit the whole garden,
And all is undecided as I pass,
For here I must be thief and also warden:
What must I leave? What can I bear to plunder?
What fragile freshness, what amazing throat
Has opened in the night, what single wonder
That will be sounded like a single note,
When these light wandering thoughts deploy
Before the grave deeds of decisive joy?
"A Flower-Arranging Summer," May Sarton

I always hesitate to cut flowers in my garden, but I am always glad when I do. No matter how much time I spend outside, it seems I am indoors longer, so flowers on the kitchen counter are there to please my eye for far more time than they would have done outdoors.

Or perhaps, as the single live representative of nature in the house, the flowers seem larger, more important, more intense in every detail next to dishes rather than trees.

My Proustian madeleines are apple blossoms with their petals white-blushing-to-pink and their delicate sweet scent. Gnarled old apple trees, left uncut on an untended lot in the middle of the suburb, bent close to my bedroom window in my childhood house. We rarely opened windows in that house because of my brother's allergies, but on fine spring days after the long Michigan winters, my mother would open my bedroom windows to let in the fresh air, and I would stand on my bed and peer out at the apple trees.

The previous owners of my current house were wise gardeners, siting the most fragrant plants closest to the windows. Lilacs bloom outside my kitchen window; honeysuckle vines engulf the deck outside my bedroom door. And in the small space between the house and garage blooms a delicate ornamental crabapple buzzing loudly with fuzzy bumblebees, with my head stuck right among them. I inhale the precious scent and remember all that is fresh and young and innocent and simply happy.

I did cut daffodils this year, not because of their abundance but because of their scarcity. Oddly, many of mine did not come up or bloomed poorly. At their height, a late storm bent their heads to the ground. Rather than see the flowers sprawl, I cut them short and brought them indoors for small vases next to my sink, sewing machine, and bed (three of the four places I spend most of my time -- the laundry area seems too sterile for flowers).

When I am able to be outdoors, I work in the garden. Weeding in spring is always amazing. There are so many weeds, so healthy and big, bigger every minute. It is an odd joy to pull them, to feel their vigor, yet to have no guilt in ending their lives. (Well, not really ending them, for they always re-sprout.) Weeding in spring is indeed a "grave deed of decisive joy."

"Transplant dominoes" is my favorite gardening activity. This garden needs daisies. So I dig out a few clumps of daylilies to make room, then march across the yard to the daisies and shovel up good clumps of them. Back to the daylily holes I go, and pat the daisies in. Now, where to put the daylilies? A march round the yard is in order; there is a good place. But that place currently holds another plant, which has to move out. I must tramp a path as convoluted as the kids in "Family Circus," trailing their dotted lines behind them as they traverse their yard.

Here are some hostas that I took from the side of the driveway: the Deer Buffet, for the antlered rats munch nearly every plant there to the ground. They please me nestled against the rock. Theirs was an unusual case: I did not need to move any plants out to fit them in, and I didn't put anything in the holes they left along the drive. The deer have food enough.

creativity

2007-04-17T21:30:00.000-04:00

(note: photo edited 25 January 2008 to remove copyrighted material used without permission)

It is such a joy to work in a clean space. After a massive de-cluttering and de-stashing, my craft room lets me breathe. Sometimes it takes drastic action to re-invigorate one's creativity: I packaged up three quarters of my fabric stash to give away. That process was agonizing. Each piece reminded me of its original purpose, whether for a particular quilt or because it cried out to me with its color and design. But it was too much wealth, requiring endless organizing, and became a burden. I couldn't face the bins and boxes of fabrics calling out to me, rooting me in the past when my tastes have changed. With the stash and the mess gone, this room's quiet is somehow quieter than the rest of the house.

The drawers and magazine bins are from Ikea, which has finally opened a store only two hours' drive away. Following the dictum that life is too short to hoard one's treasures, I cut into some of my remaining favorite fabrics to cover the drawers and bins. The chocolate and pink ones on the left are by Denyse Schmidt, who puts colors and simple shapes together in a way that is completely refreshing. The animals on the right are by Beebe Moss, Ami Simms' mother, who has inspired a whole movement to raise money from quilts to research Alzheimer's disease. And the bins in the middle have the coolest paint-by-number birds and flowers, half finished. (My husband had to study them to see if the numbers on the unpainted portion were consistent; he thinks they are.)

The glass vase is for those little thread clippings and fabric scraps that would otherwise inevitably end up on the floor. I found it at a garage sale, I think. I love its curving flower petal shape and gently weathered surface.

The quilt is a top I put together in a fit of inspiration a summer or two ago at my parents' lake house. My mom very generously took me to her lovely local quilt shop and let me pick fabrics to make a quilt. I loved the old-fashioned florals in the shop that day and added regimented squares of navy blue to smarten them up. I was reminded of the garden design advice of the English gardener Penelope Hobhouse: Structure! Flower gardens need structure! Put in some statues and shaped shrubs so that the soft billows of flowers have something to organize them.

That summer I only completed the top, and it has languished amid other unfinished quilts until now. It was the first project I chose to work on in my fresh new start of crafting. So far it has close spirally quilting across the center, and leaves and straight lines in the white borders. Next, the navy half squares at the edges need their second halves appliqued on (I decided not to machine-piece them into the border fabric), then the binding applied. It's very exciting to me to see the different facets of quiltmaking come together to make an object greater than the sum of its parts (or so I hope).

There seems to be a lesson here: from strict structure comes creativity. And I'd wrap up this post with that bit of wisdom, only I'm not sure it's true. For everything, eventually, ends in chaos (the rest of my house is a huge reminder of this principle), whether it's a craft room or a house or endless paperwork at the office, and I don't want my life's purpose to be fighting chaos, battling the inevitable. That sounds like drudgery. The fight isn't, after all, with knights in armor and bright slashing swords (no blood in my fantasy, please). In my reality, it's more likely scrub brushes and dishes and laundry that never end, like the pails of water in Mickey Mouse's Sorcerer's Apprentice. And when the battle invades my crafting space, inspiration withers.

I had intended the floral quilt with its regimented squares to be the destination of my musing: the free form of creativity bounded by a structured form. But I think, instead, it's the paint-by-number fabric design. Here is the promise of an orderly progression of art: begin with the outlines, then label the colors and fill them in. When all the blank spaces have their prescribed color, the artwork is done. No mess. No wandering, or wondering. It's structured from beginning to end.

But what makes this particular design so wonderful is that it is forever unfinished. The blank spaces, marked only with their obscure numbers (is 17 orange? maybe -- but maybe not) are what draw the eye, jarring against the colorful completed portions. The promise of a destination is there, the direction is given -- or is it? Maybe it's not the process, nor the completion. Maybe it's that moment when we think we can see both, when we're almost, but not quite, sure we have the path.

Wildlife Recovery

2007-03-12T13:25:00.000-04:00

(note: edited to correct name)
Last weekend we saw a raptor presentation of the Wildlife Recovery Association. This is Joe Rogers with an eagle unable to return to the wild. (Joe is fully licensed -- y'all know we unlicensed masses can't keep even a single feather from an endangered bird, right?) Those are some really serious talons.

While the eagle was the showstopper because of his size and striking appearance, I was most taken with the owls. We saw a variety of species and learned their calls, habitat, and food preferences. (I didn't take photos, except one of the eagle, because I was busy watching the birds! Sorry about that.)

Joe had several little tricks to demonstrate aspects of the birds. With the great horned owl, he very carefully poked a pencil through its neck feathers from front to back. It looked like the bird had been stabbed right through its neck -- but as he explained, the neck is actually very small, and all that bulk is feathers. "Bet you didn't know an owl makes a great pencil holder!" he joked.

Joe held one of the hawks fairly close to an audience member, and it stared the person right in the eyes. "They do that right before they attack," he said. After a pause, he added, "And basically all the time."

Perhaps the most impressive part of the demonstration was when he gently bounced a hawk on his arm to and fro, up and down. The bird's body moved with his arm, but its head remained absolutely still. It was eerie, and beautiful. This, he explained, is how a raptor can focus on its prey while sitting in a wind-blown tree -- something I'd never even thought about.

On a different note (literally), I heard the call of sandhill cranes this morning -- the first of the spring. Driving home this morning, I saw three of them in a field. Spring must be coming after all.

counting beans, or playing with my food

2007-02-24T16:20:00.000-05:00

I'm knitting mittens, and it's driving me nuts.

The first pair of mittens went well enough. I found a pattern I loved and fumbled my way through, producing a perfectly serviceable pair that I adore, errors and all, and wear every day.

I got more adventurous on the second pair, changing yarns (and therefore gauge) and size, as I was knitting these for my daughter. I chose a different pattern and, true to my nature, instantly made changes. (Can't do anything simple around here, nosiree bob.) This mitten, like the first, has an opening for fingers. It also had a new thumb gusset -- knitterly excitement!

The first mitten went pretty well. I only had to rip it back, oh, six or seven times, and that was for size issues. What really tripped me up was that thumb gusset: specifically, how to make it for the left hand. The pattern states,

Knit second mitten, being sure to reverse instructions to place flap on palm side of mitten.

(I didn't make the flap. I was following the pattern for the rest of the mitten. Well, actually, I changed the top, too, but that doesn't matter here.)

I just couldn't get that thumb gusset to end up on the left side of the mitten. What does it mean to reverse instructions? I counted stitches backwards and forwards, knit and ripped and knit and ripped.

What I needed was a visual aid. Legos? Playmobil flowers? I couldn't find enough similar pieces. No, I wanted something else:

Lima beans. Each line of beans represents stitches on a circular needle. (I'm using two circular needles instead of double-points.) They're joined into a circle, although I left the beans in straight lines. The arrows in the picture above point to stitch markers surrounding one knit stitch: the beginning of the (hopefully left-handed) gusset.

Now I've increased by making one stitch on the inside of each stitch marker.

Here is the final gusset round, having increased four times to make nine gusset stitches.

Now I've put the gusset stitches on a holder. I cast on three stitches to cover the gap, marked by arrows in the picture above.

Take the stitch markers off and hey presto, a side-seam thumb! It can be left- or right-handed!

Looking back at the original pattern, I see that the designer already knew that:

Knit second mitten, being sure to reverse instructions to place flap on palm side of mitten.

One reverses the instructions for the flap, not the thumb. D'oh.

I had tried the first mitten on so many times that it naturally formed around my right thumb. Because the first pair I knit had left- and right-oriented thumbs, I figured these did, too.

The pattern's author recommends Ann Budd's The Knitter's Handy Book of Patterns, so I surfed on over to Amazon and checked it out. I love that "search inside the book!" feature. Side-seam thumbs explained, just like in the pattern. I am such an idiot. And I'm buying that book.

It takes beans labeled with Sharpie pens to make me understand simple instructions. Please, when you meet me, speak very slowly and use short words. Visual aids will help. You'd better bring some beans.

Bad Joke and Fun Book

2007-02-19T11:17:00.000-05:00

photo found on flickr, taken by Ron Richardson

What's the difference between a bad skydiver and a bad golfer?

A bad golfer goes, WHACK, "Damn!"

A bad skydiver goes, "Damn!" WHACK.

Is your Monday a little brighter now? (heh heh)

This is one of many bad (but very fun) jokes in Designed to Dieby Chloe Green. I just found this mystery series and am liking it very much. The protagonist is a fashion stylist, which provides a fascinating glimpse into the world of fashion with its delicious clothes, high price tags, and intriguing people. I wish Green would pack even more fashion detail into these books -- it's one of the best parts.

Also fun is the flirtation among characters, which provides sexual heat without explicit detail. After some of Laurell K. Hamilton's latest, this is a refreshing change. Not that I'm against sexual detail in books. (Mom, don't read this!) If it's hot, bring it on. But sometimes it's good just to have a hint.

The mystery aspect is fairly unbelievable, and I wished for more development of some of the characters, but I'd still recommend this book as a fun read, or even better, a fun listen. C. J. Critt does the audiobook, and she's absolutely perfect for it. Mom, see if you can get this for your trip. (I knew you were still reading!)

mittens for me

2007-02-15T15:51:00.000-05:00

I so rarely knit for myself that I take real pleasure in the process. No deadline, no "will he or she like it?", and the fitting model is always right there.

These are Peekaboo Mittens from the February 2007 magknits. Several people on flickr have knit them already, so I wonder if they're going to be the next super-popular pattern like fetching fingerless mitts.

These are big mittens with a slit in the palm so you can slide your fingers out to handle keys, doorknobs, or the steering wheel of your car. They're big so they can fit over slim gloves if it's cold enough to layer (and it is, yes indeedy it is!).

I made mine with a strand of Jamieson Shetland, a nice old-fashioned bristly wool, and a strand of Baby Alpaca, for softness and warmth, held together. Because it knit to a much chunkier gauge than the pattern yarn, I adjusted the number of stitches down to 28 and did single ribbing around the slit (double ribbing, even on smaller needles, didn't contract with this yarn combination). I wanted a thick mitten, so I stuck with the size 7 needles, but wouldn't recommend that unless you don't mind tight knitting.

Every time I wear these mittens I am absurdly pleased. The color, the texture, and the fact that they are mine make me very happy.

MSU Youth Swine Show

2007-02-03T09:13:00.000-05:00

Desperate to get out of the house, I forced the family to attend a Youth Swine Show. Yes, we went to look at pigs. (There's not a lot to do in rural Michigan in the winter. It's damn cold. The local roads are too icy to go walking. And I'm allergic to malls.)

Most of the pigs were sleeping. And they were so cute! (I must admit I had an ulterior motive -- to find a local source of organic pork -- but these pigs were way too adorable to eat.)

The youth were just as sweet. There appears to be a dress code for youth swine handlers. Just as Irish dancing contestants all wear those curly wigs, these kids wore jeans (usually brand new, dark, and so stiff they may have been starched), button-down shirts (often plaid), and braids on the girls.

The Rabbit and Cavy show was going on simultaneously. We oohed and aahed over the most adorable fluffy bunnies, though we were most impressed by the giant ones. (I had to ask: are the really big ones grown for meat? No, an exhibitor answered, they're actually mostly bone.)

This little piggy was asleep with his tongue sticking out. I ask you, how cute is that?

I urge you to attend the Youth Swine Show nearest you. You won't regret it.

web toy

2007-01-26T21:31:00.000-05:00

Here's a fun little web toy to play with. Make your own little person!

try, try again

2007-01-17T12:50:00.000-05:00

This headband is identical to the first one I made except for the edging (and lining color -- but it's the same brand and weight of yarn). This time I crocheted the lining and outer fabric together. It makes a neater finish, and I like the look of the crochet -- it reminds me of fancy piped frosting on a birthday cake.

But. It makes a much tighter fit. If I make this style again, I'll have to find a stretchier crochet stitch.

Ironically enough, it's too icy outside to put these headbands to use walking the dogs. Guess I'll have to make another headband!

Doing Things the Hard Way

2007-01-16T09:21:00.000-05:00

Problem: cold ears when walking the dogs. Solution: knitted headband. Simple, right?

First, choose a pattern. None in the books I own. The ones I find online are too complicated (short rows, lace). Have to make up a pattern.

Since I want something simple, I decide on a simple stockinette headband with a lining. I don't know how to doubleknit, so I'll have to attach a lining. But how?

Elizabeth Zimmerman to the rescue. I use her instructions for creating a knitted hem, since that's essentially what a lining is.

So: measure head, establish gauge, subtract 2 inches for negative ease, cast on 60 stitches of the bulky yarn. Knit 18 rows. Bind off.

Following Zimmerman, knit into back loop of cast-on edge with my lining yarn, knit a round, decrease periodically to cut number of stitches by 10 percent, knit about half the lining and realize I don't know how to attach the lining to the top edge. Stop.

Turn headband over, knit a second "hem" the same way except attach it to the bound-off edge. Knit the other half of the lining.

Now, kitchener-stitch the two hems together in the middle. That's one heck of a long length to graft, and I don't think I'll ever forget how to do the kitchener stitch.

What works: the headband is stretchy and comfortable. The edges are reasonably neat.

What doesn't: The top and bottom edges aren't identical, probably because my long-tail cast-on doesn't exactly match the standard bind-off. (What does? The cable cast-on?)

There's also a messy little area joining the beginning and end of the kitchener graft, since I was working in a circle. I'm not sure how to do that.

Finally, I've never been happy with the way I join a piece of circular knitting, both at cast-on and bind-off. There's always a visible jog.

I might try it again, this time creating a completely separate lining and using crochet to attach it to the headband at the top and bottom edges.

Or maybe I'll use a provisional cast-on and, instead of binding off, just continue knitting the lining with a different color, then kitchener-stitch it to the live stitches.

Or learn how to double-knit.

I always dressed dorky

2007-01-10T11:43:00.001-05:00

Here's the proof.

Of course my adorable brother is looking like Christopher Robin while I have a drunk man on my shirt.

Things Unseen

2006-12-31T18:06:00.000-05:00

On our annual trip down south for Christmas, we passed a sign I had not seen before: the Big Muskie Bucket. Now that is an attraction that begs to be seen. What in the world is a Big Muskie Bucket? Of course my husband knew (he's annoying that way). There's a website for it, and since they sell pictures, I'd better not post one here. You can go check it out, if you're so inclined.

We did see runaway truck ramps, but no runaway trucks.

And we saw a dancing cow (pausing for breath in this picture).

We went through my favorite tunnel. I just love the typeface on its sign.

This was a working trip, as we were helping my father-in-law to clean out his house prior to selling it. We didn't have a chance to visit the islands and beaches, as we usually do. But we had fun nonetheless. Sis-in-law and I stormed the closets and bureaus, finding all sorts of treasures amidst the everyday detritus. Just wait till I show you the delicate crocheted doilies and tatted pillowcases. There was a cache of hand-pieced quilt blocks, with diamond patches no bigger than a minute. The sewing desk held nearly antique (yet still perfectly good) notions like ric-racs and elastics as well as pounds and pounds of buttons. And would you believe a knitting machine? And an old, working Sterling typewriter? I had told myself I wouldn't claim anything for myself. I lied.

Finally, what could be more fun than food from Willie's Wee Nee Wagon? Now, I've never been a fan of Southern names. Peggy Sue, Pamela Lee, Piggly Wiggly . . . please. Spare me. But Willie's Wee Nee Wagon? Come on, you gotta love it.

Hubby brought home the Wee Nee weinies for lunch to spare us preparing a meal and washing up after a particularly strenuous day of cleaning out closets. Of course, with my cholesterol, I wasn't able to eat the food, nor did I even look at it (see? I'm maintaining the theme. Things unseen. Get it?), but I did smell it, and it was wondrous. Hotdogs with sauerkraut, hotdogs with chili, and greasy, crispy handcut french fries. Oh, for the days when I could eat such food with abandon.

It was a good trip. Maybe the next time we drive down that way, we'll actually stop to see the Big Muskie Bucket.

circle of dolls

2006-12-20T18:19:00.000-05:00

More Commune Dolls (the pattern was drafted from a doll made long ago in a commune) commissioned (!) for Christmas gifts by friends of mine.

Today was the Second Annual Christmas Cookie Bake with two friends of mine. It was the first time this holiday season that I was able to relax and have fun. They're that sort of friends -- pure gold.

Christmas has caught me flat-footed once again. Despite crafting for this purpose all year, I somehow managed to leave several projects unfinished, and mailing things out didn't happen until today. (I did not ask for expensive, faster shipping options. People can wait.)

I spread out my purchases over the year as well, buying things as inspiration struck, to avoid last-minute bill pile-ups and the inevitable "I can't think of a thing to buy" that seems to strike my addled brain this time of year.

But those were things for extended family. What to get for my children? They're too old for toys, and too young for more adult interests (clothes, make-up, etc.) which makes gifting difficult. Books, of course. . . but what else? Just sign me up for Mother of the Year, leaving my children giftless.

Let Us Now Praise Neil Gaiman

2006-12-04T09:08:00.000-05:00

(with apologies to James Agee and Walker Evans)

I just finished Neil Gaiman's Coraline. What an odd little book. Gaiman wrote one of my favorite books, American Gods, and I just discovered his children's literature. While my first thought was that this man should not be writing for children, upon reflection I think that his horrifying stories are as necessary as fairy tales used to be, before they got all sanitized and pretty.

Just this morning, the kids and I were listening to Jonathan Stroud's second Bartimaeus book, The Golem's Eye, on the way to school. One of the characters is watching a play and thinks,

Show us a little of what we fear . . . only take away its teeth. . . . Make the demons frighten us, then let us watch them die.

That's rather what fairy tales do for our children, isn't it? They provide a way to confront our deepest, animal fears and deal with them rather than pushing them back into our psyches, ignored and ready to fester out when we are least prepared.

Back to Coraline. The little girl walks through a closed-off door into an alternate reality, one in which her parents give her the attention and presents she craves, but are creepy and have sewn-on black buttons on their faces in place of eyes. Which life she chooses, and how she fights for it, make up the story.

The story is terrific, and what keeps the chill factor under control is the quiet, stubborn strength of the heroine. If this unassuming little girl can hold herself together in the face of such terrors, so can the reader. My 11-year-old daughter read it before I did, and while she didn't proclaim it her favorite book (it would have had to have dragons in it for that), she did talk about it and wasn't frightened senseless.

As good as the story is the writing. I don't know how to describe Gaiman's craftmanship. It's a spare text, finely honed. His sense of timing, the rhthym of his sentences, his use of just the right words is, well, poetic.

The blurbs on the back cover are by Diana Wynne Jones (who compares it to Alice in Wonderland), Terry Pratchett (one of my favorite authors), and Lemony Snickett, who goes off on his own amusing riff:

This book tells a fascinating and disturbing story that frightened me nearly to death. Unless you want to find yourself hiding under your bed, with your thumb in your mouth, trembling with fear and making terrible noises, I suggest that you step very slowly away from this book and go find another source of amusement, such as investigating an unsolved crime or making a small animal out of yarn.

(Too bad I don't like the "Series of Unfortunate Events" books. I love his writing here.)

Pratchett notes,

This book will send a shiver down your spine, out through your shoes, and into a taxi to the airport. It has the delicate horror of the finest fairy tales, and it is a masterpiece. And you will never think about buttons in quite the same way again.

And the illustrations by Dave McKean are fantastically creepy. I hope Gaiman doesn't mind if I reproduce one here (I'm fairly certain he's not one of the 3 or 4 regular readers of this blog):

The pen-and-ink drawings are spare but detailed and evoke the text's atmosphere perfectly.

I can't wait to read more.

Tarot Card Meme

2006-12-01T09:05:00.001-05:00

You are The Lovers

Motive, power, and action, arising from Inspiration and Impulse.

The Lovers represents intuition and inspiration. Very often a choice needs to be made.

Originally, this card was called just LOVE. And that's actually more apt than "Lovers." Love follows in this sequence of growth and maturity. And, coming after the Emperor, who is about control, it is a radical change in perspective. LOVE is a force that makes you choose and decide for reasons you often can't understand; it makes you surrender control to a higher power. And that is what this card is all about. Finding something or someone who is so much a part of yourself, so perfectly attuned to you and you to them, that you cannot, dare not resist. This card indicates that the you have or will come across a person, career, challenge or thing that you will fall in love with. You will know instinctively that you must have this, even if it means diverging from your chosen path. No matter the difficulties, without it you will never be complete.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

Craft Show

2006-11-21T12:15:00.000-05:00

Last weekend I participated in a craft show. It was with friends, and friends of friends, in one of their houses.

There were chocolate toffees made with Callebaut; beaded jewelry and bookmarks; clothing sewn from vintage and reproduction fabrics; knitted and crocheted clothing and purses; jams, jellies, and salsas; silk floral arrangements; cold-process soaps, balms, and herbal wraps; framed photographs; felted purses made from recycled sweaters; and my rag dolls.

It was a really interesting experience. It was enlightening seeing what appealed to people, although in the end I could reach no coherent conclusions. Big-ticket items, for example, were very poor sellers, except for the recycled-sweater purses, which sold like hotcakes at $65. A handknit sweater, on the other hand, wouldn't leave the rack at $45.

Likewise inconsistent were items with obvious eye appeal. The floral arrangements were, at least to me, the most obviously visually appealing items on display, and they sold very well. Yet some of the prettiest among them were unsold at the end of the day (and not the highest priced, either).

One crafter noted that the lowest-priced items always sell well. I didn't find this to be overwhelmingly the case. The soaps and balms, for instance, sold steadily over the course of the day, but I would have expected far more customers to buy a bar or two. The candies seemed to sell well, but I didn't see a lot of movement on the lower-priced jams and jellies.

My dolls were nearly universally ignored by grown-ups and loved by children. Seeing kids' eyes light up when they saw the dolls made my day. That was my audience, and I had a solid score. One child in particular, probably just shy of two, was a picture. Her eyes went wide and her jaw dropped when she saw the dolls. She made a beeline for one of them and hugged it closely, a look of bliss on her face. She then set it on the couch and leaned her face on it, settling into its comfort. She played with several of the dolls, hugging each one, but never let go of the first one. I didn't notice when she and her mother left, emptyhanded, in a bustle of customers, but I was heartbroken. I would happily have given that child the doll as she loved it so.

I did sell some dolls, not many. At the end of the day the crafters purchased and traded amongst ourselves, and I was happy to barter dolls for some of their goodies that I could not have afforded to buy. I also gave dolls to the two children of the house and to the child of one of the crafters. This little girl had a very successful day selling her beaded bracelets -- I think she was the most successful crafter there in terms of items sold.

Moneywise, I came out almost even, probably a tad in the red. But I had fun and got to spend time with some friends. I learned that I loved my little dolls and felt funny selling them. What made me happiest was giving them away.

Not What You Think

2006-11-16T21:55:00.000-05:00

So . . . what do you think?

Going All Medieval

2006-10-30T22:42:00.000-05:00

At middle school, my sixth-grade daughter took an exploratory class in medieval history. This fit in nicely with the book they're reading in language arts, Crispin: The Cross of Leadby Avi, which is set in the Middle Ages. (I used to live in Avi's attic. How weird is that?)

In class, the students worked in small groups to research different aspects of medieval life. Madaleine's group studied food. They made a nice poster detailing typical meals for nobles and peasants and set up a table with food models -- a plastic loaf of bread, crumpled purple paper grapes, a rubber chicken. All very well and good. But Madaleine decided, on her own, to find a recipe for and make a read medieval dish. What she chose was candied horseradish from a fourteenth century treatise on candymaking, Libre de Totes Maneres de Confits, translated from the Catalan by Vincent Cuenca and available on the Medieval Cookery website.

What a taste sensation! Candied horseradish is to modern candy what lapsang souchong is to tea: smoky. It doesn't have the sinus-clearing bite of fresh horseradish, but the heat remains in a taste reminiscent of campfires. (I can just imagine the castle cook looking at yet another knobby horseradish root and thinking, "What the hell am I going to make with it this time?" and then yelling at the scullery maid who knocked it into the vat of honey. "You got chocolate in my peanut butter!" "No, you got peanut butter in my chocolate!" Wait, wrong century.)

Tonight my daughter finished an extra credit project, making a board game out of Crispin. It was so much fun to watch her work. And here it is. Wanna play?

Slide Show Application

2006-10-27T11:18:00.000-04:00

Get Your Own! | View Slideshow

Another ultra-cool free doodad, slide shows. Lots of styles, loads of fun. This one hooked right up to my flickr account. And best of all, it's free. I wonder how these people make their money?

Hope you enjoy my critter pics.

Gordy the Horse

2006-10-21T08:38:00.000-04:00

You wouldn't know it by my life the last, oh, 25 years, but my dream is to own a horse. I was a horse-crazy teenager and never lost the love. As a kid, I couldn't coerce my parents into buying me a horse (though I certainly tried), and as an adult, I don't have the financial resources. And somehow, I've lost focus. The minutiae of everyday life has swamped the more important stuff that life is made of. The dreams.

Last week, however, my friend Amy took me horseback riding at a local dude ranch and I was able to touch my fingertips to the dream again. My steed was Gordy, a mud-speckled chestnut (it had been raining for days) with a surprisingly pleasing personality for a dude-ranch horse. He had good brakes, a responsive accelerator and reasonably good steering. The Hallowe'en decorations didn't spook him, and when told to do something displeasing (take the path away from the barn, for example), he did so with minimal (but audible) grumbling. We got along just fine.

It was a grey, cool day, perfect for a ride through woods and along soybean fields. We saw several deer almost within touching distance, hens and their chicks scratching in the leaf litter of the woods, and quite a few chopped-up corpses. (The decorations were decidedly gruesome.)

The barn was occupied by a herd of very small ponies who milled around like feral cats. When we arrived, they had breached the tack room door and were busy scattering the contents of a garbage can, nosing around for edibles.

Other critters included a workmanlike cattle dog named Roper and a teacup poodle/Yorkshire terrier cross who resembled nothing more closely than a long-haired guinea pig. He rode around in his mistress' jacket, as one hoof put wrong would have squashed him like a bug.

Thanks, Amy, for reminding me that there is more to life than cooking and cleaning and supervising homework. I needed to touch my dream again.

Blue Skies of October

2006-10-08T15:01:00.000-04:00

Last year, my local quilt store ran a monthly class making Joined at the Hip's Button-Up wall hangings. Button-Ups are 22" x 40" quilts that attach to a slightly larger quilted base with buttons and button loops. They're designed to let you switch wall hangings easily so you can put up new ones monthly, seasonally, or whenever you wish.

Although their primitive style isn't my favorite, I thought they'd be perfect for my grandmother, who can always use something to brighten her room at the nursing home.
I'm a fiddler, though, and can't leave a pattern alone. Nearly every month I've changed the pattern in some fashion, sometimes abandoning it altogether.

Their October is a Hallowe'en picture of a black cat and a pumpkin. It was nice, but I wanted fall leaves, so I fired up Electric Quilt and banged out a pattern.

Part of the fun (and an economic necessity) was working entirely from my stash. I particularly like the Japanese fan fabric:

and a fall leaf fabric that was fun to use in building a leaf block (a meta-leaf?):
Now I'm working on a November wall hanging. It's not going nearly as well, but we'll see if I can salvage it after a stupid miscalculation. (moral: always, always make a test block before cutting components for all the blocks. One never cuts the pieces too large.)

Museum Worthy

2006-10-01T10:41:00.000-04:00

My 11-year-old daughter loves to play with Photoshop. Here she took a little candy plane that my brother got at Osh Kosh, put it against a blue sky backdrop, and added little contrails. I don't have her skills, but it was fun uploading her picture to museumr, a fun little flickr toy which puts your photos in a museum setting. Wheee!

The Smell

2006-09-28T18:50:00.000-04:00

You know the smell. You catch a whiff of something . . . something not quite right. But you're on your way to another room, so you walk by and forget the smell. Later, you notice it again, and it is familiar but unsettling. "Can you smell that?" you ask your family. They sniff around, and some of them can smell it, and some of them can't. The family project evaporates in indecision.

A few days (or weeks) later, you walk by and there, there is the smell. It is more noticeable now, more disagreeable. It cannot be ignored. The phone rings, you're expecting a call; you forget the smell.

On a sunny, breezy day you open all the windows and air out the house. More days pass.

Later, puttering around the sewing room, you move a forgotten box and EEEEEEEwwwwwuuurgh, you find the source of the smell. Poor wee mousie. He is not so cute now.

Cleaning the sewing room becomes an all-day project. You find small caches of sunflower seeds, a few kibbles of dog food carefully hoarded behind a stack of books. And then, horrors, your special length of black sparkly fabric is enshrouded in fluff. Black sparkly fluff. It has become a glamorous mouse nest.

More horrors appear. By the end of the day there is a body count of three. They were all tiny babies -- sad for them, but lucky for you, because the body mass was small and the mess and smell, therefore, minimal. You recall the day your little cattle dog caught a mouse in the house. It was probably the mama.

But good has been done. The fabric stash has been sorted: this stack to wash and give away, that stack to wash and keep. Bits of uncompleted projects have been reunited, labeled, and packaged securely in tight-lidded boxes. Forgotten books are reviewed and remembered as sources of inspiration and delight. Childish art, now several years old, is rediscovered and treasured.

And you vow never to ignore that smell again.

p.s. Mom, I found the Civil War quilt blocks.

Unfortunate Cookies

2006-09-25T10:57:00.000-04:00

I have heard of people making fortune cookies. I even seem to recall recipes for them, ones that never got off the ground in my kitchen because they called for "orange water." Eh?

But yesterday I found a simple recipe for fortune cookies in an old (May 2006) copy of Cooking Light magazine. I like fortune cookies. And these have no fat! No cholesterol! Only four ingredients! And no orange water! So I whipped up the batter and overlooked my misgivings.

First off, the batter tasted bad. With only bread flour (bread flour? tiny alarm bells in my brain began ringing.), sugar, egg whites, and vanilla, there's not much there to taste. It reminded me of the cardboard boxes that sweetened kids' cereal comes in. (Not that I've ever eaten the box, but I can imagine.)

While the batter rested in the fridge (and the brand new Pyrex measuring cup it was in exploded, necessitating a complete fridge clean-up and a quick check of the Pyrex website, which is neither here nor there), I had lots of fun looking up fortunes and fortune cookies on the web. Wikipedia, as usual, had the best information, which you can read here if you're interested. (Yes, I did make a second batch of batter.)

Making the cookies was a nightmare. (The Pyrex explosion should have been a warning to me.) Here's how:

Draw 3-inch circles on baking parchment (and can anybody find a protractor in this house? Seems like I buy one every year from the kids' list of required school supplies, but they never use them and the sneaky devices scuttle away on their pointy little legs to hide with all my good pens and scissors.)

Measure all your cups and glasses to find one with a 3-inch rim. Draw the circles. Then tape the parchment to the baking sheets.

What? Tape? In the oven? Are they nuts? No way am I cleaning baked-on glue from my cookware. Let the darned paper curl whatever way it wants. (And it does.)

Now measure a teaspoon of batter (that's a tiny little dab) and spread to cover the now alarmingly large 3-inch circles. It doesn't work. It won't spread that far. Try to hold the parchment steady while you do this. The parchment is now alive, and wiggles and crunches in its efforts to wave free.

Add more batter. Have a clue in your little head that the recipe author knows what she's talking about when she tells you to only bake three cookies at a time, and only cover three of the circles.

Figure out that adding more batter was the wrong thing to do when the cookies take 9 minutes to bake instead of 5.

Scrape the cookies off the parchment, which has developed a powerful attraction to them, lay a fortune on each one, fold in half without breaking, then fold again over the edge of a bowl. The author mentions that you might have to hold the cookies in shape for a few moments while they set. Now these cookies, which were set enough to crack upon leaving the oven, now do not want to hold a crease. Hold the cookies for about half a minute before giving up.

(Spread, bake, scrape, fold) endlessly in this ridiculous baking project that you intended to do with your daughter, but you spared her the agony and let her play computer games instead.

Go down to the basement for a Chinese rice-grain plate and discover one dead mouse and one live one. Scream. When the family does not notice, scream repeatedly until they thunder down the stairs (it takes quite a few screams).

Place the few cookies that managed to fold more-or-less properly on said rice plate and take a picture for the blog.

Present cookies to family. Have them peer suspiciously at the pale blobs, take one nibble, and declare the cookies inedible.

Write family out of will.

I will not surrender to cookie misfortune. Obviously the planets were not aligned or something. Although I may wait some time before making another attempt. I don't want my house to explode.

Cooking the Books

2006-09-18T09:04:00.000-04:00

I want to be Julie Powell, who cooked her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year, blogged about it, and then wrote a book about her transformative experience. Unfortunately, my cholesterol levels are too high to attempt anything like traditional French cooking. And my admittedly conservative tastes (in food only, mind you) would rule out whole chapters on sweetbreads, shellfish, and anything with really icky ingredients.

Perhaps The America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook? A behemoth captured in a 3-ring binder, this tome is clearly intended to supplant the old standard Betty Crocker in the kitchen (although I've always been a Joy of Cooking follower myself). I love this book. Christopher Kimball and his minions are the ultimate food geeks, and their fanatic recipe testing practically guarantees wonderful results. Of course, with more than 1,200 recipes, it would take me at least four years of dedicated cooking to make my way through the whole book. And the cholesterol? These people focus on taste, not butter limits. There would probably be a whole lot of nights where my family would enjoy all their tasty recipes while I broke out a can of beans to go with my plate of brown rice.

Diana Shaw's Almost Vegetarian might be a good bet. It has some chicken and fish and, while nowhere near vegan, utilizes fresh vegetables and other plant foods while stressing health and good taste. It has about 150 recipes. Doable. Very doable. But this isn't a tome, a classic, a milestone of cookbooks the way the others are. As good as it probably is (and Diana Shaw is a well-known and respected cook and writer), Almost Vegetarian doesn't have the oomph of the others.

Then again, I don't have the oomph of Julie Powell. What a woman. She managed to track down odd and sometimes out-of-date ingredients (bought a marrow bone recently, anyone?), follow lengthy and difficult instructions (boning a duck), and eat stuff I wouldn't even be able to contemplate (brains, lobster). Every day. For a year.

She cooked through a terrible job, September 11th, and the massive East Coast power outage (she lives in New York City). Not only did she eat this stuff every night, but she served it to friends and intimidating people.

In the end, what she did wasn't really about cooking a whole book, but more about transforming her life, finding meaning and joy in a time of personal and national torment. This is what awes me about Julie Powell. I wonder if the irritation Julia Child apparently showed over Julie's efforts was simply a misunderstanding of what she was really doing, or if Julia unconsciously recognized a force perhaps greater than her own in this somewhat bad-tempered New York secretary.

I'm probably not going to find Julie's courage or focus in the kitchen. A little bit of joy, though, would be good.

Trashy Traditions

2006-09-11T21:23:00.000-04:00

It's my husband's birthday today -- he's one of those unfortunate souls who shares his day with a national tragedy. It does tend to drive home how lucky we are to be alive.

We celebrate in the traditional way, with cake and candles. Sort of. Not being organized folk, we never have matches when we need them. What we do have is a blowtorch. It has become our custom to light birthday cake candles with the blowtorch, in a sort of Red Green nod to home handiness.

And our lack of orderliness means that we're unexpectedly out of candles. Lucky I've been cleaning the basement, so I know where the Halloween candles are. Birthday tradition saved, and enhanced.

The cake upholds another trashy tradition, that of the store-bought box mix served straight out of the baking pan. I draw the line at canned frosting, however. It's gotta be homemade.

Middle School Madness

2006-09-08T20:00:00.000-04:00

Index card wallet made from old jeans pockets and velcro -- my take on the school supply requirement for a box to hold note cards

Back to school and I'm up til the wee hours preparing every night. I'm not a student or a teacher. It ain't right.

Tonight I'm going to weigh my daughter's backpack. She can't lift it to her back; it would tip her over if she succeeded. She literally drags it into school. (We've ordered a wheeled backpack from L. L. Bean.) That a sixth-grader's school supplies should nearly outweigh her ain't right.

My son's math book has been trimmed and rebound for economy. This seems a sound practice: rather than trash the book, trim off the dirty edges and replace the scuffed cover. Its pages are extra-heavy for a long lifespan. Seems right. But the trimming process removed all the page numbers. Finding the assignment is difficult. Being sure he's on the right page is, well, nearly impossible. And how much did it cost to send the book to the cutter and rebinder? Did it travel far to get there? How much gas was used? After all, with those thick, glossy pages, the book weighs a ton (just ask my son -- or weigh his backpack). Would it be a better ecological as well as economic choice to print it more often on thinner pages and skip the rehab? I'm guessing yes. It ain't right.

Don't even ask about school lunch. The most popular choice at this middle school is the french fries with cheese sauce. Ooh, fried food with fatty cheese. Second choice? Candy and a pop. Yummy! All together, now: It ain't right.

Before I whine myself into an impenetrable cesspool of bitterness, I'd better think about what *is* right.

Gym classes are run with an emphasis on personal fitness. While team sports (with the dreaded team-picking and bench-warming) still form a large part of the curriculum, the kids also have fitness goals that include distance and timed running, sit-ups, and push-ups. I'm thrilled.

The teachers are young, energetic, and enthusiastic. Many are less than twice the age of their students. They're fresh from school themselves, with all sorts of teaching techniques they're eager to try on their students. I'm loving it.

And my kids come home smiling. They chose against the candy and pop for lunch. They've had some exercise. Their teachers have given them skills to practice and ideas to ponder. It's right.

Ambrosia

2006-09-03T21:44:00.000-04:00

In ancient mythology, Ambrosia (Greek αμβροσία) is sometimes the food, sometimes the drink, of the gods. The word has generally been derived from Greek a- ("not") and mbrotos ("mortal"); hence the food or drink of the immortals . . . . The classical scholar Arthur Woollgar Verrall, however, denied that there is any clear example in which the word ambrosios necessarily means immortal, and preferred to explain it as "fragrant," a sense which is always suitable. If so, the word may be derived from the Semitic MBR ("amber", which when burned is resinously fragrant; compare "ambergris") to which Eastern nations attribute miraculous properties. In Europe, honey-colored amber, sometimes far from its natural source, was already a grave gift in Neolithic times and was still worn in the 7th century CE as a talisman by druidic Frisians, though St. Eligius warned "No woman should presume to hang amber from her neck." [I think I'm going to make a practice of wearing amber from now on -- Anne.] W. H. Roscher thinks that both nectar and ambrosia were kinds of honey, in which case their power of conferring immortality would be due to the supposed healing and cleansing power of honey, which is in fact aseptic, and because fermented honey (mead) preceded wine as an entheogen in the Aegean world: the Great Goddess of Crete on some Minoan seals had a bee face: compare Merope and Melissa. See also Ichor. . . .

Derivatively, the word Ambrosia (neuter plural) was given to certain festivals in honour of Dionysus, probably because of the predominance of feasting in connection with them.

from wikipedia

In summer, we feast on pesto. Basil is our fragrant food, so potent that I suppose it must have aseptic properties (and the garlic certainly does). Although we don't yet have a vegetable plot in our yard, we planted lots and lots of basil in pots on the deck. There is more than enough to make pesto on Saturdays and Sundays simply by pruning the plants. Pesto has the taste of summer to me. What could be more summery than masses of green leaves? And what better binder than Greek olive oil? Food of the gods, I dub thee pesto.

What puts me in mind of things Greek is the most marvelous book, The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan. This is his first book for young adults. Part American Gods and part Harry Potter, The Lightning Thief follows the uneasy growth of a teen troubled with ADHD, dyslexia, and social problems, which stem from his mixed parentage: part human, part god. My 10-year-old daughter and 13-year-old son both devoured it as voraciously as I did, and it is somewhat rare for our tastes to agree to such an extent. This book is (groan with me here) pure ambrosia.

You Want Some of This? 'Cause I'm Not Sharing It.

2006-08-28T19:13:00.000-04:00

The chipmunks at the lake house are getting bolder all the time. My mom took a picture of this fine fellow who decided to join her reading group on the front porch.

Of course when Emily, my fearless cattle-dog mouser comes to visit, the chipmunks will prove a bit scarcer.

The Only Vacation I Ever Get Is Virtual

2006-08-25T12:36:00.000-04:00

Thank you, Owen, for this bit of fun. Thank you, Rum and Monkey, for publishing it on your blog. Thank you, Astrid, for including it on yours; and on yours, Poppalina, which is where I found it and which is always full of wacky fun and artistic inspiration.

Which Extremity of the World Are You?
From the towering colossi at Rum and Monkey.

Blog Zen and the Art of Home Maintenance

2006-08-23T10:01:00.000-04:00

It is far more amusing than it should be to make subtle variations in the design of this blog. Unfortunately, Blogger has temporarily taken away the ability to make changes in the xhtml code, so (after finally learning a bit of coding) I can't make some of the changes I'd like. We'll all just have to live with it. While my legions of fans (all one or two of you) may neither notice nor care, blog decorating is cheaper and easier than home decorating, so I'm disappointed.

Daughter M's room is the current focus. She chose the colors, and we painted the walls a soft medium blue with pale yellow trim. We remade her closet into a bed nook, painted soft green (no doors, of course) and are building a wardrobe into a corner of the room. A shelf will line the room a foot or so below the ceiling to hold a freize of stuffed animals (she has gobs of them). Photos as the work gets done.

We celebrated her birthday this week with a trip to Ikea. What a store! Lucky it's an hour away, or I would shop there far more than would be prudent. I love their simple styling, large selection, and low prices. "The Swedish K*Mart" is an apt description. I found the quality on some of the pieces a bit iffy, but most of it seemed sturdy and a good bargain. I can't wait to go again.

Dividing the Daylilies

2006-08-20T13:31:00.000-04:00

I've been invited to a friend's house to share our perennials. Instead of waiting till the last minute like I usually do, I've begun to dig the perennials several days in advance. This is so unlike me that I don't recognize myself in the mirror.

My gardens seem to specialize in red daylilies. I've got enormous clumps of them, all subtle variations on the theme of Red with a Yellow Throat. Out they go! Last spring I got rid of the dreaded Stella D'Oros (far too reminiscent of school-bus yellow), and with the reds gone, I can indulge my taste for clear yellows, peaches, and pastels.

It's not that I don't like red flowers. I do. Red cannas are glorious. I've got lots of crocosmia 'Lucifer' scattered about, and they're staying. Red tulips? The ultimate. But my red daylilies are trying a bit too hard to be red; it doesn't sit well on them. I remember a quote from somewhere: "There are a million different colors of daylilies, and all of them are orange." Underneath the red of these ones is a strong orange gene pushing hard to get out. It makes for an edgy plant, and I don't need edgy in my garden.

My favorite daylily (well, right now it's my favorite, because it's about the only one blooming) is 'August Orange.' I got it from Bob Stewart's Arrowhead Alpines in Fowlerville. You have got to read this guy's catalog. Here are just two entries:

Heuchera 'Plum Pudding'
Purple foliage, my muse hates plum pudding, altogether too cute, I just want to gag, how can I write a description about plum pudding; no, we will have no Dickens–Christmas Carol sickly sweet prose here.

Heuchera 'Yeti'
The Abominable Heuchera, this nearly ate Sir Edmund Hillary in the western Himalaya in 1958, no wait I’m confused that was a crappy Heuchera we bought out of tissue culture that looked nothing like the photo. Hmm, that’s not quite right either this yeti is a good looking white flowered plant with nicely marbled leaves, it will enchant your garden causing fox tracks in the snow to magically sublime into yeti tracks and creating no end of panic when the local tv station runs the tape.

He is some kind of whacko, and I wish we could be best friends. Arrowhead carries rock garden and difficult-to-find plants as well as (against his will, I think) more marketable varieties. Many of them are very tricky to grow, which he freely admits. To use his parlance, I've croaked a bunch of them.

But 'August Orange' is sublime: a bright orange-yellow like a candle flame. It blooms profusely throughout August and September, continuing through October and with a few scattered blooms (sans foliage) right into late November. The plant looks like hell by then, to be sure, but I won't argue against anything that blooms so late in arctic Michigan.

I also dug up a big mass of irises. Their corms (I think they're corms, not rhizomes or tubers) were so layered and tangled amongst themselves that I had to work at them with a garden fork and hose for quite some time before I could tease them apart. This is such satisfying work to me. I can't wait to go back out and replant some of them back into their refreshed bed.

Up North

2006-08-13T16:10:00.000-04:00

There's a lot of talk about "up north."
It's the place everyone seems to want to go
to escape the pressures and frantic pace of everyday life.
But where is "up north"?
For "up north" is not so much a location as it is a state of mind.
So, how do you know when you've arrived "up north"?
When you feel the cares of the world begin to slip away . . .
When you find yourself breathing a little deeper
because the air seems purer somehow . . .
When you notice that the sky is bluer, the pines are taller
and the people smile a lot more . . .
It's then that you know you're up north!

--Suzanne Kindler

My mom has a watercolor of pines and a lake in her house on the shores of Lake Huron. On it is this poem in calligraphy that swirls like mist through the trees. It is a rather ordinary poem, without particularly poetic language or subtle meaning. And Up North is a common, ordinary concept, familiar to anyone in the midwestern United States. Lower Michiganders go Up North, either to the thumb, or higher up the mitten, or even across the bridge to the Upper Peninsula. Minnesotans have their Up North lake country, New Englanders have the Maine coast and woods, Massachusetts has the Cape. I suppose northern California is an escape to those who live in the more populated south. Are the Rocky Mountains another kind of Up North to the people in the western plains states?

My Up North is a stretch of woods on the shore of Lake Huron. The coastline forms a cove about 5 miles long. For a good long stretch, maybe a mile and a half, it's fairly rare to see more than a handful of people on even the brightest summer day.

The lake is a huge presence. Its waves crash or whisper ceaselessly, forming a silvery aural backdrop to daily life. Is that why the regular chores of cooking and cleaning seem so trivial here? At home, the household chores are a grind. The dirty laundry piles up faster than I can run it through the washer and dryer. I can't sort the fresh clothes into their closets and drawers before the laundry heap towers by the machines again. And the kitchen is never clean. Before breakfast, the late-night snacks must be cleaned up. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert, plus constant snacking by the kids ensures a neverending state of sticky counters and a sinkful of dishes. Cleaning the floor is a horrendous task that hangs over my head, for it, too, seems to attract a steady buildup of dirt and debris. It is too much. My home demands my life as sacrifice if it is to remain even marginally clean and uncluttered and with food on the table at appropriate times.

But up north, a sandy floor is quickly swept, and mom and I can whip up meals, and clean up after them, without planning our day around them. These things are trivial, mere interruptions in long days full of beachwalking, kayaking, gardening, reading, sewing, painting, and just plain living.

And the kids aren't glued to computers and video games for hours and hours, as they are at home. Granted, they do get a video fix. Here at Grandma and Grandpa's, they watch cartoons on TV when they need a break from the sun or for half an hour before a meal. But most of their time is spent playing in the sand and water.

I love up north. I hope you have one, too.

Calling Into Question

2006-08-08T21:35:00.000-04:00

A post on Wendy's blog today brought back my previous life as a grad student of literature. She commented on students' overuse of the pretentious phrase, "as it were," in their speech. Back in my day, the phrase of choice was "call into question." "Doesn't Foucault's use of the prison icon paradigmatically call into question the predominant theory of Baudrillard's metasequoical randomness?" one would ask, parenthetically of course. No arguing with that. (Extra points for bringing Baudrillard into the nonsense.) Theory was the hot approach -- the right theory, of course. Deconstructionism was in the past. Post- deconstructionism (anything is better if you toss "post" in front of it) was better, if not exactly up to the minute. The meaning of literature (and, of course, "meaning" itself was called into question) was only worth talking about if it was a political discourse on the inequity of the blah, blah, blah -- I usually dropped off about here.

It's not as if I weren't interested in studying inequalities in literature. I was as critical of the white-male-dominated canon as anyone else and have a distinctly feminist viewpoint when approaching any literary piece (and by literary, I mean anything written). I'm probably more left-leaning, politically, than anyone I know, and my circle includes a whole host of left-of-democratic granola-crunchers. I am the proud owner of Birkenstock sandals. (Well, knock-off Birkenstocks. I'm cheap.)

But what I'm getting at here (yes, Virginia, there is a point) is that these well-meaning students were, in the end, poseurs. It didn't take any deep thought to call something into question. Zefrank noted just a few days ago that you can put down any argument with, "Well, it's more complicated than that." It makes you sound knowledgeable without actually adding anything to the discussion. Calling something into question achieves the same end.

And when a nationally-known and controversial speaker came to campus, these students boycotted her. They urged their students not to attend, and sat outside the lecture hall, encouraging people to go away. When I questioned their own political correctness in refusing to listen to another point of view, furthermore telling other people not to listen to it, they looked at me like I had two heads. I didn't get it. Simply listening to her was falling under the influence of the dominant paradigm. We couldn't be trusted to critically examine her arguments.

I remember an amusing incident one slow day down in the bowels of the grad students' basement offices. There was an old sports magazine lying around with a picture of a college-age woman in a bikini. My friends and I, tired of grading papers, were flipping through the magazine. "Huh," I said. "She has really big boobs." (And she really did. Either she had one heck of a plastic surgeon, or she was substantially endowed.) One of the sharky grad students came in just then, examined the picture, and chuckled. "We examine things on such different levels," he said. "What I see is how she is being forced to agree with the dominant paradigm of female sexuality." Oh, really? That was your first thought?

I left grad school, though not because of that incident. I got married, then pregnant with our first child, thus submitting to the ultimate expression of the dominant paradigm of my female sexuality.

Reflections

2006-08-07T23:10:00.000-04:00

Reflections
Originally uploaded by lab.m0nkey.

I don't know if it's the colors, the reflections, the smoothness of the glass, the texture of the cement, or the contrast of sharp and soft focus, but this picture has real appeal.

August Is the Cruelest Month

2006-08-04T12:36:00.000-04:00

April has certainly got cruel down pat. Here in Michigan, after we've suffered through months of cold and gloom and slush and frozen noses, we expect a little something in March. A single tiny snowdrop flower, for instance, or a warm ray of sun. But no. March is not spring here. Now May is definitely spring, with snow fairly rare (but not unheard of). So April, in between, must have some spring, right? Oh, no. April can be so cold and dark, so full of icy black slush and indoor recess, that one gives up hope altogether.

August, however, wins the prize. She puts on the sunniest, most glorious face. The lake is warm, the days long and hot and lazy, the garden bursting with lilies and dahlias and late daylilies coming on strong.

Under this perfect summer show, however, is a knife, probing at one's guts. An unexpectedly cool night. A dingy feather poking through a goldfinch's shiny yellow plumage. And worst of all, Traitor Trees. You know the ones. Maples with a startling orange branch blazing among the green. "Sorry, darlings," they laugh, "fall is here!"

It is that combination of summer perfection and the sting of something autumn that twists the knife. I'll take the unrelenting heat that drives others nuts. Go away, prematurely-turning finches. Be patriots to summer, trees, and refuse to don any of fall's colors. Just let me enjoy this last blast of summer.

Truthiness

2006-08-02T14:24:00.000-04:00

The great thing about taking pictures of individual flowers is that doing so edits out the weeds. I have weeds. Lots of weeds. I also have lots of excuses: biting ants live here, making weeding painful. It's too hot to weed. I have too many things to do, too many other weeds to pull. This area is awaiting a double-digging and re-edging by DH, so why weed it now?

The truth is that my yard and garden is filled with weeds, and is likely to remain so. Someday I hope to have a handle on everything that needs doing, but until then, I think I'll develop a partiality towards weeds.

Don't Felt the Dog

2006-08-01T10:57:00.000-04:00

Y'know, checking gauge just might be important after all. This is supposed to be a small bag for carrying a paperback, keys, and a wallet. What I have here is a bag big enough to stuff half a Golden Retriever in. Finished measurements are 13" x 9 1/2" x 3 1/2", down from 16" x 11" x 4" before felting.

Other than the size issue, I'm happy with the bag. It calls for stuffed I-cord handles and a tab closure held by buttons on both sides. I'm sure I'd lose that tab, so I'm thinking about other ways to fasten it. A lining is definitely called for, as the top edge flared a lot in the washer. I pinned that sucker down like crazy while it blocked, but it'll need help to keep its shape. A nonstretchy lining should do it, as the felted fabric is quite sturdy otherwise. Making a lining will also give me the opportunity to add lots of little pockets for the cell phone, notepad, and pencils.

As happy as I am with the bag, I may end up giving it to my mom and making a smaller one, a true paperback rider instead of Golden Retriever tote.

paperback rider

2006-07-30T21:52:00.000-04:00

paperback rider
Originally uploaded by normanack.

From a pattern in Knitter's Magazine, summer 2006. It calls for a self-striping yarn, which I don't have. I do have lots of Brown Sheep Lamb's Pride worsted, so that's what I used.I followed the pattern except for adding three rows of single crochet around the top for stability. This is the bag before felting. It measures 16" x 11" x 4".

Emily and the lake

2006-07-29T20:44:00.000-04:00

Emily and the lake
Originally uploaded by normanack.

The dog who fears water decides it isn't so bad after all.

Bite

2006-07-29T15:36:00.000-04:00

DSC06188
Originally uploaded by Lee and Robbin.

My cousin caught a lizard and is, I think, keeping it as a pet. He's the kind of guy (my cousin, not the lizard) who doesn't mind being bitten. Look how gently he's holding this little animal. What a guy, huh?

Wish We Were There

2006-07-22T07:50:00.000-04:00

DSC04029
Originally uploaded by Jozef Andrzej Bossowski.

From a re-enacted battle captured in Jozef Andrzej Bossowski's photostream on flickr. I love computers. I love flickr. I love Jozef Andrzej Bossowski.

A Bit of Russian

2006-07-20T10:55:00.000-04:00

You'd never know that I took four years of Russian language classes at university by the way I speak or read it now. I was never good enough to read a book or converse easily, but I could negotiate menus and signs and make myself understood on basic topics.

No more. But even lacking the most rudimentary Russian skills, I could enjoy this movie poster for The Matrix. Fun stuff!
(via Inner Bitch)

Knitting Fads, in a Good Way

2006-07-18T21:39:00.000-04:00

Funny how, of the crafts I've tried, knitting is the one where we find fads sweeping across knittingdom. It can be a pattern, like the French market bag above, or the Clapotis shawl, both from knitty.com. Or how about Jaywalker socks, developed on a knitting blog and published in magknits.com? The Birch shawl also seemed to be on everyone's needles awhile ago. Some knitting books take on a life of their own: look at Mason Dixon Knitting. MDK is like a bag of potato chips -- you can't make just one project from that book. It has a thriving knit-a-long, and I'm betting that the makers of inexpensive cotton yarn are feeling an upsurge in sales.

I've been involved in quilting longer than knitting, and sure, I saw some fads there, too. Stack 'n Whack comes to mind. And crochet? I don't know the crochet world well enough, although Debbie Stoller's Stitch 'n Bitch: The Happy Hooker seems to have made a splash. It did have her previous books to give it a push (Stitch 'n Bitch, Stitch 'n Bitch Nation).

Are knitters more fad-conscious? Do they form a tighter community, simply more aware of what others are knitting? Or is the whole fad concept just my skewed perception?

On a different level, and without any market analysis to back me up, I'd claim that quilting was (and remains) a big craft phenomenon, growing throughout the 90s and continuing in the 00s. Knitting seems to have taken a bit of the excitement from quilting, and I hear that crochet is poised to take over in turn. But I haven't seen that happen. At my local stores, I see lots more knitting books than crochet. And the magazine market? Tons of quilt titles. A good handful of knits. And only a couple on crochet, and their projects often strike me as poorly thought out.

I'm glad that craft in general has found a renewed popularity. The process of making something both beautiful and useful (broad definitions on both those words) is so deeply satisfying, particularly when the object embodies a bit of our souls. I don't mean originality, exactly, although that's a part of any craft or art. The repetition of what so many others before us have done, the history of the action, also holds meaning. Your grandmother may have crocheted, or maybe Dad's old quilt is hiding in the closet. (Ooh! I should post a picture of my husband's childhood quilt. It rocks.) I love this aspect of craft.

Lake

2006-07-15T11:21:00.000-04:00

Sand, water, a little bit of wind. These things keep the kids busy all day. My children are relative computer sophisticates, working with photoshop and powerpoint like seasoned pros. World of Warcraft (it's Jason Fox's fault, I swear) glues them to the screen for hours until I pry their hands from the keyboards with a crowbar. But sand, water, and wind win over all.

How About a Craft?

2006-07-09T21:37:00.000-04:00

The urge to create is strong, almost as strong as the urge to eat. I don't have a lot of self-knowledge, but know that I am happiest when creating something with my hands. It started with quilting, then expanded to knitting and recently to crocheting.

There's just something about fiber that appeals to me. It is tactile. While one can touch a painting, that's not what the painting is all about. (Surely there are painters who are all about the touch, but I don't know them.)

Quilting has an obvious visual element, yet remains very tactile in the making. I love running chains of fabric patches through the sewing machine, then blocks, then rows, then sections of the quilt. Maneuvering a large quilt through the sewing machine is nothing if not tactile .

Yet the visual element is huge, much more central to quilting than to knitting or crocheting. I love that about quilts. It reminds me of my favorite part of gardening: taking pictures of the plants that have bloomed for me. The picture makes the garden permanent, taking away the sorrow of time passing and flowers dying.

(My mom has a rather fatalistic attitude about the garden: when the daylilies bloom, summer is basically shot, and goldenrods are the nails in summer's coffin. I try not to view the succession of bloom this way, but don't you think it's scary that my very favorite time of year is just before the crocuses bloom? Then all the flowers are yet ahead of me. Pathetic, I know.)

Oh. The quilt. This is my favorite of the quilts I've made. I designed it for a sunny baby named Molly, whose mother loves brightly colored flowers. To me, this quilt sparkles with the little triangles of flower fabrics splintering off the main blocks. It matches the sparkle of little Molly's spirit and intellect.

Fun Stuff for Friday

2006-07-07T07:57:00.000-04:00

Klaus Kinski
Actor Klaus Kinski had this to say about director Werner Herzog:

Herzog is a miserable, hateful, malevolent, avaricious, money-hungry, nasty, sadistic, treacherous, cowardly creep...he should be thrown alive to the crocodiles! An anaconda should strangle him slowly! A poisonous spider should sting him and paralyze his lungs! The most venomous serpent should bite him and make his brain explode! No panther claws should rip open his throat--that would be much too good for him! Huge red ants should piss into his lying eyes and gobble up his balls and his guts! He should catch the plague! Syphilis! Yellow fever! Leprosy! It's no use; the more I wish him the most gruesome deaths, the more he haunts me.

from a David Jennings web page, David Herzog Quotes
via futuregirl's craft blog