This book is poorly written, boring, and self-indulgent. I have read many other books by this author without having this reaction, so I am not sure about this one. An early rejected manuscript pulled out of a drawer in the spirit of “What the heck”? Anyway, I don’t recommend it. I will probably finish reading it, though, while knitting this afternoon.

Yesterday was November 5th. That means that it was Guy Fawkes Day (Remember, remember the fifth of November, gunpowder treason and plot. I see no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot.) It was also the day that the second DNA scarf should have been finished. I still have two repeats to go. I intend to sandwich them in this afternoon, along with cleaning house, putting my gardens to bed (the Hallowe’en decoration idea worked, but it is now time to move on), errands, baking, and the Thanksgiving table runner.

“Respect the earth, live in harmony with nature, spend time with your family, be good to your neighbor, and value the dedication, skill and care of the craftsman.” This is a statement of “The Craftsman Philosophy” from this site: http://www.craftsmanperspective.com/docs/today.html  I was actually looking for something completely unrelated, but this line caught my attention because it gives such a simple and satisfying philosophy. How often do we find a really simple and satisfying philosophical statement? Especially while surfing the web?

I think this statement will inspire me today in my simple yet satisfying domestic tasks. I will also be thinking of my KC family members, who are meeting today to celebrate the life of one of the family members who left this earth this year. They will be coming down at Thanksgiving to spread the ashes of one of the others. I sometimes feel that we have had too many deaths in our family this year, but I suppose there is no perfect number and certainly we are not guaranteed a limited number. November is a good month to reflect on our mortality, beginning as it does with the feast of All Souls, and ending with bare trees and killing frosts. But this is all part of the nature with which we should live in harmony.

This is from the Knitting Revolutionary. It is a sort of manifesto on a sidebar of her blog.

“Let the Revolution begin…
*You can be any age to join the knitting revolution. It’s not just grannies any more.
*To join, just grab the nearest pointy things, and tie them to the nearest string-like substance. Wave them enthusiastically in the air, yelling passionate cries such as “och aye the noo!”
*The revolution requires that you supply your own weapons. Er, needles.”

I find this very funny. I read this manifesto every time I go to her blog. What can I say? I’m easily amused. Fortunately for me. This characteristic has allowed me to enjoy the very early stages of making the Thanksgiving table runner.

The first task is to cut 18 little triangles. When one is making a “scrappy” (that is the technical term among quilters) thing like this, it is comme il faut to cut the triangles from 18 different fabrics. You don’t have to, of course, but it is part of the fun. It is also part of the fun to find all the fabrics in your scrap bag. Going out and buying 18 different pieces of cloth is possible, but not comme il faut.

There is a satisfaction, therefore, in finding the particular 2.5 square inches of the Hawaiian shirt print that, cut into a triangle, contain only Autumn tints. In melding the wedding quilt scraps with the Hallowe’en quilt scraps. In finding that miniscule bit left over from the kitchen curtains or the going-away-to-college quilt, that will just fit.

I am lacking one triangle. There is a shirt in my husband’s closet — not a new shirt, quite an old one, which he really never wears any more… It is in just the right colors. A flame sort of fall-leaf color and sage green, with a little blue. I carefully scrutinized it, hoping to find a hole which would make it unfit to wear any more, and therefore fair game for my scissors. If you live with a quilter, you would be surprised to know how often this happens. You think she is gazing at your manly chest, as it might be, and really she is speculating on whether that shirt is ready for the scrap bag or not, because she needs just one… more…. triangle…

#1 daughter’s online community agreed on a day of political-discussion moratorium yesterday, and it seemed like a good idea. In my non-virtual conversations, though, I heard some interesting things.

NPR pointed out that we are just about half and half on the candidates, and each side felt that terrible things would happen if the other guy won. So right now half of us are feeling great relief and half of us are feeling great trepidation.

The word on my son-in-law’s Navy base was that the guys might make less money under Kerry, but were more likely to die under Bush.  All the other issues, they said, would only affect civilians. The state in question went for Kerry. I was surprised by this. I would have expected either the right-wing patriotic bit or the candidates’ military service to have been big issues, but I suppose if you are looking at imminent death, other points seem less important.

My sister in New Zealand said that news reports about the U.S. presidential race showed people fighting at the polling places. My polling place was quite jolly, with everyone laughing and talking together — not newsworthy. The image shown in New Zealand reinforced their feeling that the United States is now a place to be feared, some kind of Wild West show filled with overemotional, under-intellectual outlaws who might do anything.

I just naturally put on black yesterday morning. When I got to work, I found that my colleagues were dressed in black as well. As the day went on, through work and on to choir practice, the number of us who were dressed in mourning became something to laugh at — rueful laughs, but that is still progress. We can’t have another four years of polarization. Our relationships with the outside world are problematic enough, without our “forming a circular firing squad,” as the guy on NPR put it.

The DNA scarf is coming along. I think it is looking rather handsome and masculine. All objects have a note, as you doubtless know. They have frequencies to which they vibrate. This is what causes glass to shatter and bridges to fall down (not always, of course, just when their particular frequency is matched. And I think a baseball bat or a tugboat could do it, too). We cannot hear the songs of scarves, but I think this one would be a baritone.

Ozarque ( http://www.livejournal.com/users/ozarque/ )claims that her secret vice is reading cookbooks and cooking magazines. I allow a moment of silence while we all sneer. What kind of secret vice is that?

I am currently searching through my large collection of cookbooks and cooking magazines — which I read brazenly in full view of everyone, even on the Stairmaster at the gym — for inspiration for Thanksgiving. True, Thanksgiving is several weeks in the future. However, I have a few special challenges.

First, I have to cook healthy food, without ruining the holiday for everyone else. The guest list includes people who will be relieved to see healthy food, people who will feel pressured, upon seeing healthy food, to eat that even though they were looking forward to a feast, and people who will sigh loudly at the very sight of healthy food.

Thanksgiving has some advantages here. Turkey, cranberries, and lots of vegetables are the traditional holiday fare. It’s all the butter, cream, sugar, and cheese that we add to these things that mess it up. Oh, and the pies.

Home magazines at this time of year have lovely artistic photos of tables full of things like roasted parsnips and turnips with pureed herbs, but we all know that the boys don’t want to eat that stuff. I did find a recipe for an apple-plum crisp with a crust made of egg whites, almonds, and oats. The Poster Queen, when I asked whether she thought it would be a good pie alternative, assured me that it would not be like Thanksgiving if I served that. The solutions are clearly either to take Thanksgiving off from healthy eating, or to develop enough self-discipline to allow me to prepare the favorite dishes without eating them.

The second challenge is my responsibility to my dishes. Some of those dishes only get to come out of the china cabinet a few time a year. The silver epergne is lucky to get out of the pantry twice in a year. Can’t you just see it, yearning all year long for the moment when it gets to hold artichoke custards in tiny phyllo cups? And the punch bowl and cups see activity even less often. How can I disappoint them? Well, it is really more that I want to use all my dishes so I can feel that it is not wasteful for me to own them. I have the perfect dish for those roasted parsnips.

The third challenge is that I have new guests coming. I am very excited about this. These relatives have been very kind and hospitable to #2 daughter, and here is my chance to return that hospitality on her behalf. But I do not know these people well, and have indeed only met two of them, and that some years ago.

#1 daughter had Thanksgiving dinner with her in-laws last year and called me afterward to say it was not like Thanksgiving at all. The food, while I am sure that it was delicious, just wasn’t what she was used to. We made her a Thanksgiving dinner when she visited for Christmas, to make up for it. But without knowing what one’s guests consider the essentials of the holiday meal, it is hard to meet their expectations. I had Thanksgiving dinner with their side of the family a few decades ago, and it included macaroni and cheese, roasted potatoes, and pretty sweet potato things with concentric circles of pineapple and marshmallow which no one on my side of the family would touch. Perhaps I can add one of these things to the menu.

On the other hand, attempts to provide people with familiar foods can turn out badly, too. My in-laws used to put a jar of peanut butter on the table for me. It was some sort of symbol of American food or something — there was certainly no way for me to eat it with their delicious food, even if I had wanted to.

Hmm. Back to the cookbooks.

Have you voted? If you are in my town, you can see me at Sequoyah this morning, waiting in line for my turn. I will be the one standing there knitting a DNA scarf. I may have one end tossed jauntily over my shoulder. No rose in my teeth, though, because I am serious about this.

We are getting so many machine-generated political phone calls that we hang up if there is no immediate answer to our “Hello?” Last night, however, my husband talked to a pollster. After he explained that he would not be voting because he is not a citizen, the caller asked for his vote for Bush. He said he would think about it. When I asked him why he had said that, the kind man told me he had wanted to give the caller hope. Really, he says, he would vote for Kerry, because he is able to answer questions sensibly. And perhaps his pollsters do not urge non-citizens to vote for him… I don’t know.

There has been a very silly item going around comparing the IQs of Kerry and Bush. I tracked it down to its source — too long to go into, but very silly indeed. You can easily find the details by googling “Kerry Bush IQ”, but it is hardly worth it. I guess the joke is based on the obvious intellectual difference between the two candidates.

There are also obvious differences of integrity, position, and leadership style. So please don’t think your vote doesn’t matter. This year the candidates are very different from one another, and there could be real consequences for all of us. Whoever you intend to vote for, please vote.

Since I felt a bit under the weather yesterday, I stayed home and finished the table runner and enjoyed the rainy, spooky Hallowe’en day. I will post a proper photo of it once I get the film developed. I enjoyed that so much that I intend to start another table runner today — for Thanksgiving. I have good reasons for doing so.

First, whenever I enjoy a project, I find that ideas for doing it a little differently come to my mind, so I want to go ahead and do it again with variations. In this case, I felt like doing lovely sinuous vines for the pumpkins — but that would not have worked with my funky, primitive Jack o-Lanterns. So I am going to do another with applique, using blues and fall colors so it will look good with my Blue Willow. I have a cool idea for piecing Indian corn from my Hallowe’en table runner scraps, too.

Second, I have more people coming to Thanksgiving dinner than I had thought — excellent news — so I will need to use more space to set out the buffet, and will of course need a runner for it. That’s not much of a reason, but I’m sticking to it. And third — because there has to be a third — table runners are to quilting what scarves are to knitting: relatively quick, flexible as to size and shape, and not needing much in the way of materials. So they are a good way to try out new things.

The reason that I need these excuses — er, reasons — is that I still have 10 knitting projects to complete before Christmas. I will therefore have to complete roughly one project every five days in order to have everything finished in time. And I still have to  go to work and to the gym every day and class and rehearsals several times a week, keep house, feed people, care for my family, prepare my music, read, and otherwise conduct my life. Well, some of the knitting projects are small. Some are big, too. Hmmm. I have four more repeats to go on the second DNA scarf. Perhaps that will become a completed project in the next five days. Depending how much time I spend on the new table runner.