Brigid Poetry Festival, 2012

To honor the Goddess Brigid, patron of poets, healers, and midwives, I offer the lyrics to a song by Aimee Mann, "Jacob Marley's Chain" -

Well, today a friend told me this sorry tale
As he stood there trembling and turning pale
He said each day's harder to get on the scale
Sort of like Jacob Marley's chain

But it's not like life's such a vale of tears
It's just full of thoughts that act as souvenirs
For those tiny blunders made in yesteryear
That comprise Jacob Marley's chain

Well, I had a little metaphor to state my case
It encompassed the condition of the human race
But to my dismay, it left without a trace
Except for the sound of Jacob Marley's chain

Now there is no story left to tell
So I think I'd rather just go on to hell
Where there's a snowball's chance that the personnel
Might help to carry Jacob Marley's chain

Help to carry Jacob Marley's chain...

It might seem to be a strange choice, but I think it's a wonderful look at circumstance, and the possibility of escaping what might otherwise seem hopeless. In other words, healing.


You can listen to Aimee singing it here.

a month of letters - a challenge

I love letters. I love paper, fountain pens, friends, ink, language, rubber stamps, stickers, and stamps. What's not to love? You get to make so many choices - color, texture, subjects - and you get to share them. Win-win!


Mary Robinette Kowal, puppeteer and author, has created a challenge for February: A Month of Letters. It's easy: each day, send someone a letter, or a card, or a postcard. A real one, with a stamp. Even the post office thinks this is a great idea - check out its blog !


Who can you write to? Make new friends on the forum she has set up, join PostCrossing, send a postcard to a sick child, look up old classmates, re-connect with family and friends, write fan mail to your favorite author... just have fun with it!

• In the month of February, mail at least one item through the post every day it runs. Write a postcard, a letter, send a picture, or a cutting from a newspaper, or a fabric swatch.
• Write back to everyone who writes to you. This can count as one of your mailed items.

You can also join the Facebook page and tweet about the challenge (#LetterMo).

I fell behind in my correspondence last month because of ... stuff ... so if anyone is waiting for a letter from me, check your mailbox.

Wordless Wednesday

you're it!

Kim tagged me. She also said that I'm not allowed to say "consider yourself tagged if you're reading this," but I'm a disobedient soul. So, consider yourself tagged.

1. Who is your favorite Disney villain? The crocodile in Peter Pan. (When you hear me humming "Never Smile at a Crocodile," you know I'm bored out of my mind.)
2. What one fear do you wish you could overcome? I'm very, very, very much afraid of confrontations, which has led to being very, very, very much taken-for-granted. 

3. What's your dessert at your last meal? Spicy, heavily-likkered-up fruitcake. 
4. If you had the chance now, would you date your high school crush? No.
5. If cost were no object, where would you build your dream home? Monterey, California, overlooking the sea.
6. Any sound can wake you up in the morning --- what is it? A recording of Gabriel Faure's "Sicilienne" from Pelléas et Mélisande. (Listen here...)
7. What is your dream pet? Marlo, the cat I lost in 1992. 
8. You can commit any crime and get away with it.  What would it be? Unilaterally appealing Citizens United. Corporations are not people.
9. Who is your favorite hero of fiction? Jo March. I know it's a cliche, but there it is.
10. You have your own knitting store.  What is it called? I don't feel clever today, but I would want to use Emily Dickinson's poem, "Autumn - overlooked my knitting" as a theme, somehow.

Autumn — overlooked my Knitting –
Dyes — said He — have I –
Could disparage a Flamingo –
Show Me them — said I –

Cochineal — I chose — for deeming
It resemble Thee –
And the little Border — Dusker –
For resembling Me –

11. Eleven questions, or an even dozen? Ten, one for each finger.

geekery, and close, but not quite there

My latest fit of geekery, first. I bought a new e-reader, the Barnes & Noble simple touch Nook. I love it. The e-ink is amazingly clear, especially when I change the font (oh, love!) to get rid of pesky serifs. All of the books on my old Sony transferred over perfectly. And, I get to read anything I like for an hour at the BN cafe, free! (I  started the new biography of Catherine the Great. I may have to acquire it. BN knows what it's doing with free samples - stirring up book lust in yet another format.)


What do I love about e-readers? Everything. What do I do with them that others might think was rather geekish? I transcend time. Totally. Like this -- reading "A Midsummer Night's Dream" on the e-reader while listening to the play, which I've downloaded to my iPod Nano, while taking notes on the play... with a fountain pen, in a Moleskine notebook. 

As for "not quite there," let me show you a little bit of knitting. The yarn is not quite that colorway: it's called Bordeaux, and it's an alpaca mix from Moose Manor Hand Paints. The pattern is a lacy cowl. It does not quite make it - the stitch pattern obscures the colorway, which obscures the stitch pattern. As I was about to bind it off last night, I realized... nope.  It's been frogged, and re-born as a cowl with some eyelets, but more solid areas than not. Much better. I'll show you when it's done.  


Coming soon: my total obsession with A Discovery of Witches, which was the first book I bought for the Nook. In the meantime, you can read what Penny wrote about it. 

very pink indeed

I present a sock, Vanilla strawberry, #1 of a pair in Petunia Pig Pink. It's part of a series of socks I have been knitting, which I'm calling Vanilla whatever on Ravelry. Suddenly, I want to do nothing but knit socks. 

I knitted these in less than 5 weeks, a personal record. They are called, of course, Vanilla blueberry.


What's the pattern, you ask? Oh, just something I whipped up, called 56 stitches (or fewer, if the yarn is thicker) on size zero needles with a ribbed cuff and eye-of-partridge heel. In other words, vanilla socks.

Before I settled on vanilla, though, I knit these, which by no stretch can be called vanilla anything.  Blame Penny. She gave me a truly garish colorful skein of yarn a couple of years ago. It didn't suit monochromatic Penny and she couldn't figure out why she'd bought it. I thought I'd make a cowl, but then I realized that it would give me nightmares to have something so ... colorful ... so close to my face, and besides, I'm pretty monochromatic myself. Ergo, socks. These. Yikes.



Anyway. I went to Rhinebeck last month and had a truly excellent time. One whole day was spent in a spindle class with Abby Franquemont. After years of correspondence, on-line and on-paper, Anna and I finally met by taking the class together. She brought along a Navajo spindle that had been confounding her. Within 1/2 hour, Anna was making amazing, fine singles when I wasn't interrupting her with hugs.


Sunday, I shopped (oy) and met up with the Tsarina, whose Glomerata sock on Knitty is but a taste of the re-launch of the Tsock empire. Betty of Moose Manor Hand Paints was there with her gorgeous, saturated Delphinium, as well as her other amazing colorways. Marcy was selling and demonstrating her support spindles. So many people, so much talent, so many colors... Rhinebeck was like being inside a whirling kaleidoscope that smelled like sheep. Fortunately, I like the smell of sheep.


And Sandi Wiseheart was in my dream... and I can prove it. Click over, scroll down, and you'll see a picture of me with Rachel and Jennifer.  Yes, a picture. Truly a rarity...


To be continued...

In honor of "talk like a pirate" day, I present ....

Roger McGuinn singing "Jolly Roger." We saw him in concert, for the third time, Saturday night, and (as always) he really enjoyed singing about the day he became a scurvy buccaneer! Since today is Talk Like a Pirate Day, I decided to share the joy --

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (or, mmmmmmmmm.... pie!)

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Flavia, the 11-year-old narrator of this delicious book, speaks as if she were the offspring of Nancy Mitford, Morticia Addams, and Edward Gorey. She is an expert chemist, with poisons her specialty, and she lives in a so-British-that-you-forget-your-own-nationality town... oh, it's too delightful. Don't miss this one!




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Busy as a ------>

I've been busy, small-scale.
















This is an absolute sweetie - a custom-made spindle by Ed at Tilt-a-Whorl, with some pollen-yellow BFL. The spindle weighs 10 grams, comes in at a whopping 6 1/2 inches, and spins so fast I have to draft double-speed. 


Not that all of my projects are teeny right now, only this one. Oh, and the one on a teeny Turkish spindle. And a sock on size zero needles.


For this sock, I decided to teach myself Magic Loop knitting for socks, since Nearly Everyone loves the technique. It took me 10 minutes to learn, and 15 minutes to realize that I'm not Nearly Everyone. I loathe it. All that yanking! Back to two-circs for me, with DPNs for the heel flap and gusset. However, one of my goals for this knitting year had been "Learn Magic Loop." Cross that one off! Now to learn how to Navajo ply on a spindle...

Pay it forward = a family value

I have been alternating between seething and trembling because of the Republicans and Tea Party people who are calling Social Security a "Ponzi scheme" (or the equivalent), and because the people who shouted "Yeah!" when Wolf Blitzer asked Ron Paul, "Congressman, are you saying that society should just let him die?" were not rebuked by any of the candidates on that stage. 


Whatever happened to the concept of Pay It Forward? 
For that matter, whatever happened to the concept of caring for society's  elders? 
Isn't that a family value?


Noam Chomsky has an answer that makes me sad, but seems true. Don't you hate it when that happens?

• Social Security is based on a principle. It’s based on the principle that you care about other people. You care whether the widow across town, a disabled widow, is going to be able to have food to eat. And that’s a notion you have to drive out of people’s heads. The idea of solidarity, sympathy, mutual support, that’s doctrinally dangerous. The preferred doctrines are just care about yourself, don’t care about anyone else. That’s a very good way to trap and control people. And the very idea that we’re in it together, that we care about each other, that we have responsibility for one another, that’s sort of frightening to those who want a society which is dominated by power, authority, wealth, in which people are passive and obedient.

How I Killed Pluto

How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming by Mike Brown
My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Mike Brown is a fluent storyteller and a scrupulous scientist, whose insistence on a high standard of proof led to him nearly losing the credit for one of his discoveries. Who would think such skulduggery exists in the community of astronomers?




As a boy, Brown discovered his passion for planets when he noticed two moving, night after night, through the constellation Orion. "It's always hard not to feel that in some ways, for me at least, maybe the early astrologers were right: Perhaps my fate actually was determined by the position of the planets at the moment of my birth."


As he recounts the discovery of Pluto, and his own role in the wildly unpopular decision to decertify it as a planet, he describes his exploration of the cosmic ocean, wherein asteroids are "schools of minnows swimming among a pod of whales. Planets were the whales of the solar system." When the Kuiper Belt was discovered, he says, "Pluto and the Kuiper Belt were simply a previously overlooked collection of sardines swimming in a faraway sea."


The boy's interest in celestial motion grew into the man's quest to discover new objects in the relatively-unexplored area beyond Pluto. His tools ranged from an archive of photos from older telescopes that had imaged wide swaths of sky to the newest digital technology in telescopes and data manipulation.  The wider images were more likely to include artifacts from the process of creating glass plates, while the precision of digital imagery was offset by the relatively small expanse of sky that could fit in one image.


His first discovery, named Quaoar, was "a big icy nail in the coffin of Pluto as a planet." Only slightly smaller than Pluto, the chunk of icy methane was bound to be the first of many objects that would be larger than Pluto. Along the course of his discoveries he found Sedna (named for an Inuit goddess of the sea), Haumea (Hawaiian goddess of childbirth), Xena (with her satellite, Gabrielle!), and many other intriguing objects that began to fill in some of the creation story of the solar system.


He also found the aforementioned skulduggery: an Italian astronomer, who cyber-stalked his use of telescopes while he was tracking Xena, and tried to claim credit for the discovery, earning Keith Olbermann's dreaded soubriquet, "Worst Person in the World." The committee in charge of the naming conventions for new objects in the solar system were not always happy with the names he chose.  (Personally, I wish that some of his working names could have been kept. It would have been delightful to know that an object named Easterbunny hopped through the heavens.)


What is a planet? Must it be spherical? A certain size? A stint of teaching geology gave Brown a glimpse into the problems that exist in other disciplines. What is a continent? A big, coherent piece of land? How big? (In fact, he learned, some Europeans do not consider Australia a continent, Argentina teaches that North and South America are one continent, and New Zealand is on its own continental plate...)


Ultimately, Pluto, "everyone's favorite runt planet," was reclassified (along with newcomers Xena and Ceres) as a "dwarf planet." Brown calls the new rules "a slew of unscientific clutter," but agrees with the decision that continues to make Pluto lovers unhappy.


One day in 2004, he took time out from staring at large computer screens and looking for new and distant objects to look at a smaller screen: a sonogram of his daughter. "Hey," he said, "It looks like the Venera lander pictures of the surface of Venus." "You're insane," replied his wife.


"That night," he writes, "as the clock struck twelve, my five-year bet [with a colleague] came to an end. I lost the bet, but I didn't feel so bad. Instead of seeing the end of the solar system, I saw that everything was just beginning."


I loved every page of this book and recommend it to anyone who has ever looked at the night sky.


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Frogging, tinking, and who knows what else

I just turned sixty. A child of the sixties turning sixty isn't a big story, unless - it's your own story. How was my birthday, you ask? Well, let's see. I managed to screw up one knitting project, then I managed to screw up another knitting project, then I went to Spinning Guild and spun some lovely soft green stuff on my new Sworl by Jesh. 




That part was a Win. But I had to leave Guild early because it was hot and stuffy in the barn, and because the scent of soaps or something was causing my lungs to implode. I got home and discovered that our house had been invaded by ants....

Today is lovely, however. I have decided that the half-baked attempts at fixing one of the knitting disasters Would Not Do. So I've taken over the kitchen table and frogged ten rows (over 300 stitches each).  (Frogging = rip it, rip it.) Now I'm tinking one row. (Tinking  = one stitch at a time.) The stitch count will be right, and I'll do what I should have done, what I really ought to know I should do by now: I'm going to own my knitting.

Owning my knitting = knowing what works for me, and what utterly doesn't. In this case, a certain way of making two stitches into one just is not in my hands. So this time, when I start the edging, I will use another way. It won't be a Centered Double Decrease, but it'll work, and it will be pretty.


Tinking can be tedious, especially when it's 300 stitches. But - look at that yarn! It's a KnitPicks colourway called Gingerbread House. Can you see the gumdrops scattered amongst the gingerbread? Cherry, grape, lemon, orange, lime... each colour pure and sweet and satisfying. Tinking gives me the opportunity to appreciate the colors, the texture, and the fact that I'm no longer fearful about making mistakes when I knit.

Here's another picture of the gumdrops. The pattern I'm using is called Ruffle My Feathers - a tailored shawlette with just a bit of fancy at the edge. I'm going to love this when it starts to get cooler and I'm wrapped in wool and alpaca, with just a hint of fancy.


At sixty, it's time that I owned my life. That means frogging and tinking, making decisions based on my actual self, reading and expressing and creating and loving and using my energies in the life I have now toward the goals I set now. Regrets... yes, I have regrets. I regret having given up the viola when I was 16. But - I live 5 miles from a store that sells and rents fine stringed instruments. I can pick up a viola and see if my hands still want to play it, if I choose. I have one promising novel in the works (in a drawer). I can take it out of the drawer and devote an hour each day to it, if I choose. 


Last time I wrote, I was in the throes of the Tour de Fleece. This is what I spun on the pansies Lollipop spindle. It's just enough for a bookmark or two.





This is the Thai spice, 200 yards of DK gorgeousness. It may become cabled wristwarmers, or a hat. We'll see. I'm very happy with it.







One more thing. The Tsarina of Tsocks has designed a monster created the most astonishing pair of tsocks ever. Hint: five people knit it at a time, and it gets steeked. A lot. (Steek = taking a scissor to your knitting on purpose.) Go look at Fronkenshteek and prepare to laugh...

The Damsel Monique goes to her first ball

Progress in the Tour de Fleece: winding the first two plying balls. Here's one. 





















When I went to Toys 'R' Us to buy the pink rubber balls to ply with, the teen-aged boy who tried to help me had no idea what a "pink rubber ball" was. It took him longer to find them in the store than it took me to wind them into plying balls.


I feel old.

slugs and snails and love-darts

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, which I reviewed here, inspired me to learn more about the tiny creatures. Now that we are going to be building a home in the woods, I hope that I'll find some snails out there, buzz-sawing their way through the forest floor... 

The Secret World of Slugs and Snails: Life in the Very Slow Lane by David George Gordon

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Now I know...

--what a wild snail eating sounds like: "... a cross between a bastard file and a chainsaw - like something out of Evil Dead II."

-- Some snails have elaborate mating rituals that involve kissing.

-- Speculation about Cupid's arrows in Greek mythology being inspired by the "love darts" that snails shoot into each other if they go the male/female route instead of using their hermaphroditic prowess.

-- that Darwin observed another scientist's experiment in which a sickly snail and its healthy partner were placed in an ill-provided garden. The healthy snail crawled away, over a wall, into a better garden. 24 hours later, it "returned and apparently communicated the result of its successful exploration, for both then started along the same track and disappeared over the wall."

-- That David George Gordon is one of the best nature writers ever.

Did you read The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating? Read this next. Really.

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sunshine, a lollipop, and pansies...

... all in one picture...  


A slight detour from the Thai Spice. This is a Gourmet Lollipop spindle, hand-painted with pansies, a mere .5 oz., and matching fluffy stuff to spin. Collecting lovely, light spindles has become an obsession. The spindles themselves make me happy.

A Jane Austen Education.

A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter by William Deresiewicz
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Take one intellectual graduate student, force him to read  Emma, add one professor whose technique is styled as "stripping the paint off our brains," and mix in some Austen plot synopses. What do you get? In this case, you get a quasi-memoir-cum-appreciation of Jane Austen's major novels that (I believe) would make Austen wince and Oprah applaud.

Bleah.


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Tour de fleece 2011

For this year's tour, I am spinning for Team Russian Underpants and Team Suck Less. My goal: to spin 2 ounces of a combination fiber (Polworth, Falkland, Jacob, Shetland, and Wensleydale) in a colorway called Thai Spice Market into DK weight, and to like it enough to give it away without being embarassed.


The spindle is a Greensleeves Damsel Monique. She spins long and true, a Blessed Damozel indeed.






The fiber is from All for Love of Yarn. 



Visit me on Ravelry and wish me luck!

a perfect combination

Maddy Prior and "Dives and Lazarus." Enjoy!

it followed me home, ma, can I keep it?

A book jumped into my tote bag in Borders the other day. There's no other way to explain how I almost walked out of the store without paying for it.

Yes, I'd grabbed it from its table, yes, I'd perused it and written it down as a "must read" in my Moleskine, yes, it's purple, and yes, anything that elaborates on "a year of magical reading" has to be a good thing. 


I found it in my tote bag after I went back to the cafe to find it; I'm a good cafe citizen, and always put my books away. Clearly, this book needed a home...mine. It certainly won't be lonely there.


An interview on the author's blog, Nina Sankovich's  Read All Day, includes this advice:

There is no need to read from The Western Canon. Find what you like to read, sit down and indulge yourself, and the rewards will come.

Yes! 

Today, by the way, is Bloomsday. Have you read Ulysses? I haven't. In fact, I don't even want to. Once upon a time, I thought I had to read certain books in order to be truly literate. I'm no longer under that delusion. 

So what am I reading now? All of the Sookie Stackhouse novels. I'm absolutely glutting on them, and enjoying every moment. (One kept me company at a medical appointment the other day, and I appreciated being in Charlaine Harris's hot Louisiana instead of that waiting room. It was so cold in that waiting room ... by the end of three hours, I was wrapped in 4 blankets and still shivering, but I also was in Louisiana. That is the magic of reading!

everything emptying into white

Did you knit in public today? I did, while sitting in the friendly
cafe at Barnes & Noble, listening to Glazunov through headphones
attached to my lime-green Nano. I completed nearly two repeats of
Falling Water between the beginning of spring and the Baccanalian end
of autumn-- appropriate for the grape-harvest purples-and-green
colourway. This pattern + this colorway = knitting intoxication.

**longer boats are coming**

I shall be sorry to give up this scarf, but I have to, since I'm
knitting it as a sample for Moose Manor Handpaints. The pattern has
given me the confidence to tackle a more intricate lace. It includes
yarn-overs before, after, and between purls and knits, left- and
right-facing decreases, and other little maneuvers that always had
intimidated me.

Actually, that's one of the reasons I chose it: to stretch a little as
a knitter. My retirement has been all about elasticity. Some of the
new maneuvers are tiny, like learning to spin on a tiny Kuchulu
Jenkins spindle. Other stretches are long, like getting myself out of
the house to meet with friends old and new.

**everything emptying into white**

The latest stretch is huge: my husband and I have purchased a slice of
land high on a hillside, so high you barely can see the main road
below. The land is thick with trees, much of them protected. They may
not be cut down. Not that we want to - we will only clear enough for
the house that my husband and the architect designed, and a small area
for ourselves. If all goes well, the house will be ready next spring.

Yes, this is a big stretch, more so for me than for my husband,
because I never, ever imagined leaving our tiny house, never mind
building another. He is the visionary, and I have been - I'm not sure
what I've been, but I shall lace up my sneakers and keep up. It's a
good thing.

Another good thing: the book What Should I Do With My Life by Po
Bronson. My friend Rachel lent me her copy and said it would change
how I think. She was right. Unlike self-help books, this is a peek
into the lives of people who have made changes that succeeded or
failed, or failed to make changes, and therefore stalled. These are
real people, and I see myself in them all. (Like everyone, I contain
multitudes. I also live one-half mile from Walt Whitman's birthplace.
Handy, that.). Thank you, Rachel.

**on the road to find out**

Today's soundtrack has been "Tea for the Tillerman" by Cat Stevens. It
may not be a roadmap, but one could do worse than dreaming of a house
built from barley rice with a protective red-legged chicken.