I Didn’t Plan To Do It This Time

Okay, the snow zombies are coming. Sometime. Honestly. But the friend who wanted to help me do something “fun” with their little photo shoot just got slammed hard at work. And since he, like many people, is just hoping his company can remain a company rather than a name on the economic casualty list, I’ll not be bothering him about them right now.

Understandable, I hope. Dude has a bit more to worry about than making the SZs look fetching, you know?

So today we’re going to move to another favorite theme of mine: corruption of youth. Yes, it happened again. But it wasn’t me who started it this time, honest! And the where, I’ll admit, came at a time and a place when I least expected it to happen.

Thing 3 had a Court of Honor for Boy Scouts.

(And, note to anyone out there who is thinking, “Those guys discriminate against homosexuals!!” Yes, they do. And do my kids know I don’t agree with that policy? Hell, yeah. One of my oldest friends is gay, and I’ll go head to head with anyone, Scout people included, over whether he is doing something “wrong”. Because he’s not. IMHO, I don’t really think God gives a flip about who you love—He cares about how you love. So there, BSA is, to me, totally wrong.

But I’m not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater, folks. Lots of institutions, like schools, churches, or oh, say, my own government, have policies and philosophies with which I strongly disagree. But that hasn’t stopped me believing in a higher power or seeing that my kids are educated. Nor has it made me move out of my country, though if we would have elected another Republican, I would have considered it most seriously. For me, Scouts has been a way to spend one-on-one time with each of my Things—and that’s kind of tricky when one gets past the Dr. Seuss-imposed limit of two—and a way for us to be able to camp as a family when the ex had issues with that and I was trying to keep familial peace. Stupid in retrospect—trying to keep the familial peace, I mean—but it seemed a good idea at the time.

And, more importantly, this Troop has accepted Thing 3’s Asperger’s Syndrome without a blink; instead of being on the outside, Thing 3 is very much in; as in as a kid with Asperger’s lets himself get, anyway. So Scouts? It’s a big deal. He succeeding there, and he loves it. We’re staying.

Ahem. I will now step off the soapbox.)

Anyway, I was knitting while the talks were going on (shocking, I know) and while they were setting up for Court of Honor. Currently, I’m double knitting a scarf for Thing 4 to go along with his mittens and hat. I fully expect to have to make new mittens for next winter, but that’s not a big deal as the scarf will keep until then (it will have to, seeing as his mother didn’t get round to starting it until right before spring hit). Anyway, I was knitting and purling away and kind of people watching, when I noticed a little girl. She had stopped at our table a couple of times before the meal, and I thought perhaps she found Thing 4 kinda cute. (They’re near the same age.) But now here she was, after the meal, near the wall, watching our little family unit. Thing 4 had moved to see the video they had shown more clearly, but she was still staring at the empty seat next to me in which Thing 4 had sat.

I finally cottoned on to the fact that she wasn’t boy gazing, but yarn gazing. She was staring at the bright red and dark blue piles of yarn with a look I supposed I would see on my own face if yarn stores had mirrors hung over their bins of baby alpaca.

I smiled at her.

She smiled back, took a step forward, almost said something, then retreated to the wall again.

I knit and purled. I glanced back. She was still there. She did her little step forward, step back. And then?

“I knit too,” she blurted out.

“Cool! You wanna come help me with this?”

She most definitely did. She shyly informed me, when I asked, that she made dishcloths and blankets. She was fascinated with the scarf and with me knitting two different colors at once. I plopped the needles into her hands and showed her how it worked.

She had never purled before, and had most definitely never double-knitted, but she totally loved it. She wanted to know why I was using both hands to create the stitches. I explained how I had to keep each color on its own side so I didn’t knit the sides together, so each hand had to help. I showed her how you could pull the two sides apart, and what the right side of the fabric (for now hidden inside the scarf—I double-knit inside out) looked like. She couldn’t get over the smoothness of stockinette stitch. I explained that if she knitted one row on straight knitting, then purled back, she would get fabric that looked like that.

She continued on down my row, checking to make sure she was wrapping the yarn the correct way with the purl. She had only ever thrown yarn (er, no, I still can’t remember which that is) but she took to throwing with her right to purl and slipping with her left to knit as she alternated stitches like a pro. She accidentally slipped a stitch here or there when the yarn didn’t catch right, but I showed her how to fix that.

The absolute best, totally coolest thing about this surprise knit moment, though? When the candle was lit and lights turned down and when I went up with Thing 3 to stand with him as they ask parents to do, that chica just flipped on my Knit Lites and kept right on stitching.

(Imagine this picture in the dark. Darn flash ruins everything. But thanks, Thing 2, for thinking to take it!)

You rock, G. Hope I see you at the next meeting. Bring your sticks, okay?

Random Snow Day Moments

I absolutely could not believe it when I read my email from work this morning.

Classes are cancelled and offices are closed today (Monday, March 2nd).

I was further perplexed when I looked out the window and saw that my driveway was not a solid mass of snow, as it had been following the two previous big storms--neither of which had closed the campus.

Still, I didn't argue. Instead, I stayed curled up in my jammies, decadently reading Erin Hart's mystery Lake of Sorrows (good book) and contemplating whether or not I could wait almost a year for the newest William Kent Krueger, Red Knife, comes out in paperback.

I finally stretched and then pushed myself out of bed. (No, I'm not going to tell you how late it was, so don't bother asking.)

My eyes fell on the snow zombies. I had said in my last post that I was feeling more like picking up the needles and hook again. That had been only partially true, I'd discovered. Though I'd notched things down to quiet sadness, I found focus was still a bit fuzzled and I was maybe not quite as optimistically optimistic as I had optimistically projected.

The problem with reading, knitting, crocheting, writing (or working) is that while I absorb myself in the one task, my mind wonders into other territory. I call it thinking on simultaneous levels; others have referred to it is analytically freaky. There's probably some truth to both descriptions. (I mean, you're talking about a person who could listen to a never-read-it book on audio tape and keep up with the story line--I actually cried at a sad bit, okay?--while writing example business letters and not missing a beat nor falling behind on number of letter produced compared with the other example letter writers, none of whom were listening to audio books. My boss pointed out that most people can't truly listen and pay attention to one thing and write something else. I didn't know that. Heck, I listen to people tell me things and talk back to them while typing emails to other people about other things at the same time. I thought everyone did stuff like that, but evidently I'm a bit weird.)

Anyway, acting is the one place where I have to use all levels at once. There is simply too much happening onstage, too much to react to and timing to watch, etc. etc. It's the only time and place where I think in only one moment, the here and now. Well, maybe not the only one, but any others I can think of are rather personal and so not bloggable, you know?

(Tell me there are other level-thinking people out there who tend to think past/present/future simultaneously, okay? It'll make me feel better.)

Sunday's rehearsal was one of the best first run-throughs of which I have ever been a part. Terrifically fun cast members, stellar director. For a few hours, all of me was completely collected in one moment of synergy, with no offshoots into territory that really needs to go to ground anyway. It left me calm and centered and clearly focused. And that focus was still with me when I woke up this morning.

So, when I saw those snow zombies? Well...

Dudes. They're done.

They're having their wee pictures taken in the lightbox tomorrow, and then are being sent off to a pal in Chicago for some special treatment before being posted. Neglected Blogs promised something cool, remember? And hey, that's a whole whack of late Christmas and ALL my Hanukkah gifts gone in one go.

Getting that done made going out and tackling the driveway with the Things seem like a walk in the park. Thing Two went after the snow slump by the garage that had fallen from the roof the last thaw, and then froze itself to my driveway before I got home from work. (I'm seriously starting to loathe sloped metal roofs.) Thing Three valiantly trudged out to take on the snowplow hill at the top of the drive. Thing Four just went little-kid nuts with a mini-shovel and packed down more snow then he moved. And yeah, I got the entire rest of the driveway.

It was great. We had a snow dumping fight. (It's the best when the snow is too powdery for snowballs--just scoop and dump, preferably on someone shorter for full impact.) We discovered a good inch of ice at the top of the drive, hidden beneath the few inches of snow, which sort of pointed to why classes were canceled for snow I could have easily driven over. We were visited by a lovely yellow lab who played with us, then led the Things to the back yard, where he was almost buried in snow as he ran about with them. (Sometimes driveway shoveling just doesn't matter in the grand scheme, you know?) When everyone returned to the front yard to tell me of their adventures (like I hadn't heard and watched and laughed already), yellow dog came along. I christened him Sam, and the Things agreed. He looked very Sam-like.

Eventually, the Popsicles named Thing Three and Thing Four took their much-reddened cheeks inside to warm up. (I'm still pondering how it is that none of the Things got any of my light Mexican-Lakota coloring, which led to barely reddened nose on my part, and instead dived firmly into the pale Irish-Swedish side of our gene pool, which led to complete Rudolph noses and apple cheeks on their parts. I've been accused of adopting them all, and I'm beginning to wonder if that might be true; though who the hell would hallucinate labor? Four times?) Thing Two and I were left with Sam.

"Mom..."

"No, we can't have him in the house; we're renting and it's not allowed. Why don't you walk him down the road and see if he lives at one of the neighbors?"

"You're doing that answering before I ask the question thing again."

I waved that away--I'm a mom; it's what we do--and watched as she and Sam trudged down our road, where they found Sam's owner. Thing Two wilted. She had already had visions of Sam tucked up on blankie in a corner of her room, maybe playing with her yarn while she knitted, just like Muffy the Yarnslayer (scroll down to the last paragraph for the low-down on Muffy).

But what's more, Sam wilted. Though his owner was obviously a very kind man and very good to his pet, Sam did not want to go back into the yard with the other two dogs. He wanted to stay and play with his New Girl. It was touching, and bittersweet. The guy talked to Sam (who's other name is apparently Gus), he cajoled and wheedled and finally had to put an arm around Sam's neck and lead him away, tossing a, "Thanks for bringing him home, deah," over his shoulder to my daughter. She stood in the middle of the road and watched them go, not moving.

I went and met up with her, and arm around her, walked back home with her.


So it was a day of quiet accomplishment. Reading. Knitting. Chores turned Thing-Memories-Made time. Er, lines NOT practiced for show like I promised director I would so I would know whether or not I needed a one-one-one line run through (sorry, Sir Director, but I'll have time tomorrow). Blog posted (almost).

Four out of five is not bad, all in all.

Oh, and one other thing. A February thing. It seems only fitting that in the month of the Blogversary, I discovered that I was actually listed in a Blogs I Read list on a new blog called Stringin' Crazy! She does Tunisian crochet (which I want to do as well as her) and her embroidery, from what I saw, is freakin' to die for. I only wish mine were that good (yeah, I do that sometimes too--even people who craft both ways have occasional dalliances outside the yarn). And her Wednesday Musings made me laugh. I don't know, maybe I'm listed on other blog rolls out there, but that is the first I've ever seen and I was darned chuffed about it.

Snow days. They stand out, don't they?

The Blogversary

The wee little blog celebrated its one year birthday this month, and I have shown that by…

Um. Well. I haven’t shown it in any way, actually.

This has been an oddly not-much-knitting-or-crocheting month for me. There have been job worries; although my acceptance of an 11-month contract instead of a 12 was presented as “completely voluntary” it doesn’t take a genius to know which way the wind blows, especially when you're standing in gale force economic winds. So, I accepted and have until June to figure out how to make up the money I’ll be losing. There have been Things who saw fit to share the sickness love, taking their turns one week after another will new variations on each illness, instead of getting all done in one go (marathon few days of no sleep for mom is actually preferable to drawing it out over six weeks, let me tell you). And there have been things to think about and get through.

You know how it is. Sometimes life demands so much attention that you can arse up even single chains and stockinette stitch when you attempt them. When that happens to me, I find that it's best if I simply set the crochet hook or needles down.

It’s kind of lonely doing that. Most times, when things are off-kilter, there's nothing like shaping a granny square or knitting down a row to bring me back to myself. When I hit that land of thinking without thinking, working with my hands grounds me. This month, though, my focus has been too scattered. I've looked down at the yarn in my hands and realized I was making froggable moments, again and again and again. And wasn't even irritating when I did it. That's when I decided to just set things aside.

But, me being an incurable optimist (read totally naive idiot), I can't help but bounce back before I should; really, I know it's fashionable to languish more in these moments, but I'm sort of hopeless at it. I'll still have some worries and sadness with me, but it will be of the quiet sort that moves gently along with me and still lets me enjoy what I can.

We had a huge storm and beautiful amounts of snow. I'm getting out and meeting new people. I still have a job next year, unlike so many people who have been laid off. I was cast in two one-act plays and both are parts which will challenge me to try new things. Thing Four came and snuggled with me last Saturday morning, almost falling asleep against me, the way he did when he was a baby.

All these things have nothing to do with money or other worries, and all are great gifts. They are bringing things back into focus for me. They are making my hands feel like it's time to pick things up again.

As the month draws to a close, then, we here at Neglected Blogs are making a change. It’s going to be big. It’s going to be shocking.

Yes, it’s the uber how-late-can-you-get-the-feckin’-Christmas-&-Hanukkah-stuff-done extravaganza.

The snow zombies are about to return.

Stay tuned.

Third Time's The Charm

All hail the most merciful and beneficent Crochet Goddess, who granted me the impossible.

(And that's good, because the toxic smell of big, plastic knitting needles doing a slow melt takes awhile to get out of one's home.)

Meet Terry Derosier, the lady I blogged about last week. (Well, last week in the Land Of My Time. More like yesterday in terms of when the actual blog got posted.)

She was there. I had my camera. She didn't slam her window closed when the crazed, gerbil-chasing lady (yes, Virginia, they can fit between the bars) asked her for a photo for the blog. In fact, she let me take two.

One of her with the large size bag she makes

And one of her with the smaller size.

(She also had a smaller white with black accents bag, which I totally loved. And which, I just noticed, you can see a bit of in this picture.)

I think one of the things that charms me the most about Terry's bags, aside from the actual creations themselves, is that she takes all that is wrong with our throw-away culture and turns it into something wonderfully reusable and way more attractive than those bags were in their original states.

She's doing what everyone on the planet should have been doing all along, making something that will last, rather than pass.

I would have loved to talk to her about this aspect of it, and to discover what had prompted her to make these bags. This time, alas, there was another driver heading up behind us, so we didn't get to talk as long as the night of much snow just after Thanksgiving. And even then, we had talked about the technical aspects, the different bags she people gave her rather than throwing them out, and how she got the colored patterns. (The Thanksgiving bags were one color with subtle variegations of the accent color throughout.)

I know that she was ready to talk about these things again with us, until the other car appeared, and I doubt she remembered us from before, as 1) she sees so many people and 2) last time we were driving the paint-chipped, bravely struggling bread van and this time we were in the swank, made-in-this-millennium baby van I now drive.

But Terry? I remember our last conversation. It was great.

And you know what? Next time, I'm gonna ask where you sell those...

The Goddess of Crochet Hates Me

Way back around Thanksgiving, Thing One had been up for a visit. We had a great time and reluctantly drove him back down to school when the break was up, holding our breath while we did, because it had started to snow heavily.



On our return trip, we discovered a toll booth attendant who crochets her own shopping bags out of recycled plastic bags. We stopped to pay and ended up ogling her work, as she had two bags in progress, one tan and red, and the other white with blue and red accents. The pattern she said, was one that she created, “from here.” (Insert tapping of head.)



People might think that bags made from grocery store bags would be ugly and frumpy, but they weren’t. The coiled bottoms recalled my Great-Aunt Mary’s rag rugs, and the sides resembled a woven straw summer beach bag. They were unique, original things and easily as pretty as beach bags for which you plonk down cash.



We couldn’t talk long, alas. There was no line at the toll booth, but the weather had definitely gotten worse (our 40 minute drive from that point took us two hours) so we rolled on. And immediately after I hit the interstate, I realized that I had my camera in my car and I hadn’t asked her if I could take a picture of her work.



Over the past month and a half or so, I have had countless occasions, both Thing and non-Thing related, to pass through that toll booth. No sign of the lady or her work.



Until last night. We rolled up and there she was again, this time with a creamy white concoction on her hook.



Finally! It had happened! She was there! She was imminently bloggable!



And I had just given up keeping a camera in the car the week before.



I wonder if the Crochet Goddess wants me to sacrifice some knitting needles to her for return of my catching crocheters in the wild on film luck? Hmmm, there are those huge plastic needles the ex got me….

Why I Did Not Knit Today

1. Dishes

2. Sick Things

3. (Are you ready for this?)

Six.

There were six in the cage. When we returned home there were none in the cage and a rather suspicious plastic portal cover on its side, the victim of a chew out.

(Their mother was the ringleader--how Old World can you get? "The Family" is out and wreaking havoc.)

And Thing Two's bedroom door was OPEN.

We retrieved two in Thing Two's room, one in the living room, and one (of course) in the yarn-based bedroom. (What is it about gerbils and my room??? I'd already suffered one solo baby gerbil escape over Christmas break while the Things were gone to their dad's. Little Master Adventure Gerbil had headed straight for my room, where he curled up under a pillow and slept while I tore the rest of the house apart looking for him. Gah.)

Later...

Just returned from a bathroom capture. One gerbil under the washer, which steadfastly refused to move like the obliging dryer. I had to haul the not-feeling-well Thing One out of his burrow to lever the darn thing up for us. I've now got lint on the legs and bottom of my sweats. But we got the little twit.

Still Later...

The last escapee was definitely cagier than the rest. (Okay, so there is an inherent contradiction in word choice there, but at the mo I really don't give a flip.) It remained on the lam for a good hour and an half after everyone else had been delivered to their plastic prison.

It had not counted on Thing Two with her head cold/virus, though. Seriously, that girl could rival the heralding trumpets of the Second Coming in sheer volume. She perchanced to blow her nose whilst walking through the kitchen. There was a terrified squeak, and out ran the last juvenile delinquent from behind the refrigerator. It took one look up at her, the creator of the cacophony, and promptly turned tail and ran back behind the damn refrigerator.

Thank goodness my kids have enough plastic weaponry leftover from Halloween to arm a small mob of sugar-crazed four year olds. The sword fit under the frig and with judicious waving of it, convinced the miniature fugitive that ducking under the frig itself was not wise. The scythe's handle fit under the stove (the secondary point of evacuation). Thing Two waited at the exit behind the frig and I stationed myself at the space between the stove and the frig. Thing Four, with great enthusiasm, kept the weapons moving.

Stupid rodent figured out just how far in I could reach, though, and calmly sat right beyond that point. But he hadn't counted on human wits, you know? I chivvied a broom back behind him and swept his little butt out into the cold light of...well, light bulbs, okay? It was evening, after all.

Wits though I had, I may have neglected to think things quite through. There is a bit of difficulty, after all, in capturing a rodent on the run when you've two hands on a broom. And so the chase was on. We got him out from behind the baseboard heater in the kitchen and he promptly legged it to the safety of the Christmas tree. (No, I've not yet gotten it down. Thanks so much for pointing that out.)

Then it was a mad dash for the safety of under the sofa. By the time we had tossed the sleeping, sick Thing One off its cushions and upended it, the little criminal made its final dash. To MY room.

I repeat, what is it about my room???

So, back in we went. Baskets of yarn were lifted, and my rovings (nestled in a open box with my drop spindle) were carefully checked through, because if little dude were snacking on my rovings, then his butt would be out in the snow.

(I don't care how cute he looks with over-large, not-yet-grown-into ears.)

After I was VERY certain there was NO rodent in that corner, we turned our attention to the land of under the dresser.

And that's when the (insert word not appropriate for all audience members) jumped me from behind.

His trajectory suggests that he came, indeed, from the corner just checked, and that he came on with an, "It's either them or me, see?" mentality. Personally, I think he wanted the deep purple and royal blue rovings for a nest and would stop at nothing to gain them.

I, of course, was too busy battling for my life to actually capture him, and Thing Two was laughing so hard that I still don't see how she scooped him up. Traitorous girl. She's so on dishes-washing duty for the rest of her natural-born life.

But though she gave the miscreant gerbil a stern baby-talk talking to, I think I was right to be suspicious of him and his murderous tendencies.

Remember the victimized plastic portal cover? Well, Thing Two reinserted the cover and masking taped it in, secure in the knowledge that none of the grown-up gerbils had been able to foil that strategy. What she hadn't counted on was this same little deviant capitalizing on a rough edge to chew a hole THROUGH the portal, one just big enough to wriggle out of.

She's lucky not to have woken up with a pillow-wielding rodent on her chest, ready to smother Trumpet Girl in her sleep. Seriously.

Tomorrow we are going to try to find a pet store closer than an hour away and Girlie is spending some of her hard-earned Christmas money (hmm hmm) on a METAL cage.

Let's hope they can't squeeze out between the bars.

Once More Into The Breach

There’s really not much left to say about traveling across half the continental United States. I mean, this is the sixth trip in roughly 14 months (and four were over the exact same route—sigh).



I packed a bag with stuff that would need to go in the new car (snow scraper, winter boots, emergency travel kit made by Thing Three, sleeping bag in case I skidded off-road, as who wants to be too cold to craft while waiting for rescue; like that) and with "just in case I get to them" crochet and knit projects. (I didn't. I never do, but they're a weird sort of comfort. If the bus had been caught out on the road in a once-in-a-century blizzard, I definitely would have had plenty to do.)

I generally get in a car, but in this case, being car-less, I got on a bus, and until I got to Boston, I enjoyed lots of space, quiet, and good scenery.

From Boston to NYC to Cleveland to Chicago, I end up with lots of people and no space and the weird sort of bus-bonding that only happens with people who either got on at your stop or, at the most, one stop after you. It’s like your suddenly comrades in arms or something. (Comrades in bus just doesn’t sound right, sorry.) It’s the whole shared experience thing, and it’s probably helpful in keeping people from experiencing Post Traumatic Bus Overcrowding Syndrome. Seriously. I’m sure there’s literature on that syndrome somewhere…

My seatmate from Boston on was girl who’d gotten on at the same stop as me. She was worried about starting college and whether or not she could really do it.

She was also a kid who was known for reading every book in her school’s library in a single year. You read correctly. The. Entire. Library. (Yet she said she had not done well in high school.) We talked Shakespeare and Eliot and popular writers for more hours than our fellow travelers probably cared to hear.

Lea? You’re gonna do well, kid. Trust me. You’ve got what it takes.

Fun, fun conversations, but not much room for crocheting, let alone knitting articles of apparel in the round for snow zombies.

By the time I dumped off the bus at my more rural destination, I was pretty much dead on my feet. Sleeping on crowded buses is possible, but not productive in terms of actual rest. Friends picked me up and in-between rudely falling asleep off and on whilst they drove the last bit to my folks’ place, I did manage to knit the felted nest ornament by Marie Mayhew.



(Felting was done upon return home and now all I need to do is needle felt the eggs. I’m nervous about that, as I am not the most graceful of humans and have visions of puncturing my finger so many times with the VERY SHARP NEEDLE--the amount of cautionary notes with the needle felting kit is terrifying--that said finger just falls right off. I’ll give you update photos of the egg attempts from the emergency room, shall I?)

Then it was off to a return trip back to my place, solo, in my new baby.

I discovered several things on that trip. One, that driving a vehicle with headlights that actually illuminate the roadway makes for far less scary evening driving; two, that I now know the Iowa to Maine route so well that I barely glanced at the map; and three, that I will spend hours with the cell phone on speaker, boring various friends out of their wits while I am driving through Ohio, because for some reason Ohio always makes me want to take a nap. Ohio is a very lulling, soothing place. Maybe it's all the vowels?

I also discovered: the joy of a car that doesn’t lurch like its been hit by a train when going down the road, that those key fobs with automatic door lock/unlock thingies are very cool, that CD players that I don’t have to plug in don’t skip, and that it takes going through every toll booth but the very last one in Maine to train me to stop reaching for the handle to roll down the window when it comes time to pay. (We won’t discuss just how many toll booths that was, okay? Thanks much.) That whole push the button thing just threw me. Got me some odd looks from toll booth attendants too.

So, not much knitting accomplished and no crocheting at all :(, but I now have a car that was actually made in the early part of this decade, rather than in the last millennium. Oh, and get this. It has all its paint.

Life is good. Chaotic and convoluted and frequently edging beyond what even I find interesting, but good. :)