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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emily and the lake
Originally uploaded by normanack.

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

Bite

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

Independence Day

declaration_of_independence
Originally uploaded by
Keven OShaughnessy.

Yesterday I had the privilege of celebrating Independence Day with an extraordinary group of people. The retired Episcopalian minister (and former bishop) down the street invited some neighbors over along with a handful of friends from his church. Among the gathering were a beekeeper, a retired nurse, an accountant, a web site operator, a Canadian (I know, not an occupation, but I forget what he did for a living) and a stay-at-home mother (me). I struggled to keep up with the conversation, which ranged, naturally, over political issues and the state of our union, as well as its history.
We read the Declaration of Independence and mused over George Washington's character. Immigration was a central topic, and since the entire group had a strong left-leaning bias, the talk was not of halting, but of understanding it. Clearly, the United States promises a better living for the poor who come here illegally, and whose wages sent home (speaking of Mexico here) comprise a major part of their country's economy. Physically stopping them from entering the U.S. is likely impossible, and anyway, it doesn't address the issue of why they come. We agreed that spending our war money on helping Mexico solve its problems might be a better use of our resources, but how we, as individuals, could help brought a silence over the table.
It wasn't until long after the fireworks were over and I lay sleepless in bed that I realized that the answer was, quite literally, at that table. The beekeeper spends his winters on the Arizona-Mexico border picking up litter left by the stream of illegal immigrants. (It's not a small task: the culture of poverty these people live in has little regard for proper trash disposal. Literally tons of it is strewn across the landscape, and it is difficult work to remove it.) The web site run by one of the dinner guests is a clearing house for political action. The retired minister himself worked for years as a mediator, helping local people to solve stubborn disputes too expensive to pursue in court for those involved. The accountant works for an organization that resolves difficult Medicaid coverage cases too expensive for hospitals to pursue themselves.
These people left me humbled. What am I doing to address the problems Americans have with each other and with their world neighbors?
What are you doing?